Kenneth Eugene Smith (July 4, 1965 to January 25, 2024) was executed using nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama, USA. This is the first time in the world that this particular method of execution has been used. [2]
Smith was convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Sennett on March 18, 1988, in Colbert County, Alabama. Elizabeth's husband, Charles Sennett Sr., recruited Billy Gray Williams to murder his wife. Williams in turn recruited Smith and John Forrest Parker to assist in the murders. Smith and Parker committed the murder, stabbing Elizabeth Sennett to death in her Colbert County home. A week after Elizabeth's murder, Charles Sennett Sr. took his own life after learning he was a murder suspect. Billy Gray Williams was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and died in prison in November 2020. Smith and John Forrest Parker were both sentenced to death. Parker was executed by lethal injection in June 2010. [3]In November 2022, Smith was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection, but the execution was put on hold because the execution team was unable to connect Smith to an intravenous line within the available time before the death sentence issued by the Alabama Supreme Court expired. As part of a settlement agreement between the state and Smith, the state agreed not to subject Smith to lethal injection, the standard primary method of execution in Alabama, but to use another novel execution method, nitrogen hypoxia. [4] After failing to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Smith was eventually executed by nitrogen hypoxia on January 25, 2024, becoming the first person to be executed in this way.
