Surely humanism

In the United States, they tried a new type of death - gaseous nitrogen. Disputes about whether the highest measure of punishment should take place in the country in general, flashed with renewed vigor

In the United States, the prisoner was first executed by introducing into his slight nitrogen. Alabama authorities claim that this is the most “humane” type of execution. However, the death of 58-year-old Kenneth Yujin Smith, who committed a crime-a contract murder 36 years ago-caused both the protests in the state itself and the discussion throughout America, where many politicians (including President Joe Biden), public and church organizations want to introduce a federal ban on the death penalty.

Gas -shaped nitrogen is a new type of execution in America after since 1982 began to use deadly injections, which, in turn, replaced electric stools. Witnesses of the execution held on Thursday, January 25, note that Smith, who was given nitrogen through the mask, was shook in convulsions for several minutes and was conscious of at least two minutes. Death was recorded 22 minutes after gas supply.

Answering the question about the shaking and convulsions of Smith on the gurney, the commissioner of the correctional institutions of Alabama John K. Hamm, who watched the execution, said that these were involuntary movements and the type of breathing that occurs with a lack of oxygen. As noted in the official report, the man lost consciousness in “seconds” and died in “seconds”. “All this was expected and consisted in the side effects that we observed or investigated with nitrogen hypoxia,” Hamm said. The commissar noted that gaseous nitrogen was supplied to the mask for about 15 minutes. The state protocol provided for the supply of gas for at least 15 minutes or "five minutes after the flat line of the electrocardiogram, depending on what is longer." Alabama Prosecutor General Steve Marshall said after the execution that gaseous nitrogen proved that he was an “effective and humane method of execution”.

However, the priest Smith Jeff Hood said that in reality the execution “does not correspond” to the statement of the General Prosecutor General and the report in court documents, that Smith would lose consciousness in seconds and then die a few minutes later.

“We did not see someone to lose consciousness in 30 seconds. What we saw was the minutes of how someone fought for his life, ”said Hood, who was present on execution. “I stood there and cried, seeing someone suffocated,” the priest added.

Before his death, Smith met with family members and his spiritual mentor. At 10 in the morning, he last ate a steak on a bone, pancakes, toasts and eggs, smeared with steak sauce. Lawyers expressed concern that he could suffocate from his own vomiting when gas -shaped nitrogen is leaking, and the authorities made procedural changes at the last minute, the last meal took place more than eight hours before the execution. Smith was attached to the gurney - the very one where he was within a few hours during a deadly injection in 2022. In his last word, Smith expressed disagreement with execution:

“Tonight, Alabama makes humanity take a step back. ... I am leaving with love, peace and light. "

He depicted his heart for family members who witnessed the procedure.

In 1989, Smith was one of the three men convicted of the murder of 45-year-old Elizabeth Dorlin Sennette. The victim’s husband, the church pastor Charles Saint-Sr. from the Kolbert district, Alabama, hired a man to kill his wife, who, in turn, recruited Smith and John Forrest Parker (he was executed in 2010). The pastor organized the murder partially in order to receive the insurance policy that he issued for his wife. He promised men for $ 1,000 for the murder.

In March 1988, Sennette, the mother of two children, died of 10 stab wounds inflicted by Smith and Parker. According to court documents, the pastor committed suicide when the investigation began to consider him a suspect.

Smith's initial sentence was canceled, but in 1996 he was again convicted. Although 11 out of 12 jury recommended saying him to a life imprisonment, Judge Pride Tompkins canceled their decision and sentenced Smith to death. In 2017, Alabama adopted a law that no longer allows the judge to cancel the jury on the death penalty. In her statement, the Governor of Alabama Republican Kay Ivy said that the lawmakers decided not to give the law to retroactive force in order to fulfill the already sentenced sentences.

The prisoner, who was 22 years old at the time of the crime, filed an appeal three times, which the judicial authorities invariably rejected (the last time January 24 - the day before the verdict, it was rejected by the US Supreme Court). He could be executed in 2022. Then Smith could not be killed with a fatal injection.

He himself called the procedure “many hours of torture” when he was pricked with needles several times and placed, as he said, “in the position of inverted crucifix”. The procedure was stopped when the period allotted by the regulations for making a sentence execute expired.

The problem often arises because the rules of medical ethics forbid doctors and other medical workers to help with execution. Injections are usually made by inexperienced prison workers, says Dr. Joel Zivot, associate professor of the Department of Anesthesiology of the Medical School of Emory and an expert for the participation of doctors in deadly injections.

This time Smith chose nitrogen himself, but at the same time desperately tried to stop the execution. His lawyers filed a petition to the Supreme Court, emphasizing that Alabama made him subject to the experimental method of execution, which violated constitutional norms, namely the eighth amendment to the Constitution - a ban on “cruel and unusual” punishments. The opinions of the judges of the Supreme Court habitually dispersed along the “Conservative -Liberals” line: 6-3, the appeal was rejected. Judge Sonya Sotomayor, who was in the minority, wrote:

“Unable to kill Smith on the first attempt, Alabama chose him as her“ experimental pig ”to check the execution method that has never been used before. The world is watching. "

Sotomayor wrote that Alabama enveloped the protocol of execution with a secret, releasing only a strongly edited version. Most of the judges of the Supreme Judicial Council of America have not made any statements.

Mike Sennett, the son of the victim, after the execution said that Smith "was imprisoned almost twice as long than I knew my mother."

“None of what happened here today will return the mother. This is some kind of bitter-sweet day. We are not going to jump around, screaming "Hurray!" And all that. ... In conclusion, I will say that tonight Elizabeth Dorlin Sennett achieved justice. ”

The disputes around the use of nitrogen and the death penalty flared up in the United States with renewed vigor. Nitrogen began to be considered as an alternative to fatal injections after the 27 states in which the death penalty operates (the last in time abandoned the highest measures of Colorado in 2020 and Virginia in 2021) came across the problem of acquiring deadly drugs. According to New York Times, a few years ago, the director of the correctional institutions of Oklahoma announced that the state would begin to use gaseous nitrogen, complaining that he had spent his time in the “crazy hunting” for fatal injection drugs, which included the need to communicate with “wretched people” and call the “hunifiers of the Indian subcontinent”.

The problem of lack of injections forced the states of prison authorities to consider the possibility of returning to such “old” methods as execution and hanging, electric chair and gas chamber recognized by medical experts and lawyers cruel and often painful for the sentenced ones.

In 2021, the legislative body of South Carolina authorized the execution on an electric chair or execution, but then adopted a law hiding from public publicity pharmaceutical companies and officials participating in the executions, which facilitated the receipt of the necessary drugs for injections.

Since 2015, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and then Alabama became the first three states that allowed the use of nitrogen hypoxia during executions. “Hypoxia” is a medical term denoting a state of oxygen failure in the body. Nitrogen, colorless gas without smell, is about 78% of the air inhaled by a person. But with the method of nitrogen hypoxia, a person inhales only nitrogen. Many experts compare this process with putting on a plastic bag onto the head, although in this situation a person inhales carbon dioxide, not nitrogen. Oklahoma and Mississippi indicated nitrogen as a spare method if fatal injections are recognized as unconstitutional or if the drugs used in them are not available. Alabama offered prisoners sentenced to death, the choice between nitrogen hypoxia and deadly injection. Another state, Nebraska, is considering a bill allowing the use of nitrogen hypoxia. According to The Lincoln Journal Star, the last time the prisoner in 2018 was executed there, mortal injections expired, and the state does not have the opportunity to execute 11 people in the suicide cell.

The number of executions in the United States decreased from 98 in 1999 to 11 in 2021. This is a decrease, the media noted, caused by many reasons:

• restrictions on execution of persons with mental disorders, persons under the age of 18 years,

• increasing awareness of unlawful sentences and racial differences,

• As well as restrictions on pharmaceutical companies on the use of their products as a drug for deadly injection.

Deborah is day, the professor of the law faculty of the University of Fordham notes that the electric chair replaced the gallows as a more “humane remedy”. However, the first victim in 1890 twitched in a chair half a minute after she was recognized as dead. The US Supreme Court in 2018 established a standard according to which the selected execution method cannot “add” the sentenced “terror, pain or shame”. Gas -shaped nitrogen was used for euthanasia - suicides with the help of a doctor, but before Smith’s execution he was never tested in a cell chamber.

The UN Human Rights Office called on Alabama to stop the execution, saying that this could be equated with torture and is a violation of human rights contracts with which the United States agreed. But what about the Alabame of the UN?

As the issues of legalization of immigrants, the availability of abortions and personal firearms, the death penalty is “litmus paper”, separating republicans and democrats, conservatives and liberals, and if you take a map of the country - two coasts and “deep states”. However, many Republicans believe that the highest measure should be canceled. Public opinion polls conducted by Gallup show that support for the death penalty-just above 50%-this is the lowest indicator since the early 1970s. Previously, there were 80% of Americans for the executions.

Half a century ago, the US Armed Forces decided in the Furman against Georgia, forbidding execution as a measure “excessive, arbitrary and marked with racial differences”. It seemed that the United States would follow the path of Britain and Canada, but four years later the Supreme Court canceled this decision and the death penalty was given to the discretion of state legislators. In twenty -seven states, the death penalty remains, but over the past five years, executions were carried out only at fourteen. About a third out of 2500 sentenced to death in the country are in California and other states, where the official moratorium on execution is operating. President Biden advocates the abolition of the death penalty, but this issue does not pedal too much.

Under President Trump, for the first time in history, the federal government executed more people in 2020 than all the states combined.

Trump not only authorized a series of executions as previous elections approached, but signed three more death sentences after he lost Joe Biden. While politicians and experts argue, in the state of Alabama, prison guards distributed a new state protocol on execution to prisoners in single suits of suicide bombers. One hundred and sixty men and five women expect nitrogen poisoning.