Alabama’s use of nitrogen gas for an execution could gain traction among other states and change how the death penalty is carried out, much like lethal injection did more than 40 years ago. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith, a 58-year-old convicted of a 1988 murder-for-hire, occurred as planned and his office is ready to help other states if they want to begin nitrogen executions. “Alabama has done it, and now so can you," he said, the Associated Press reports. Some officials in other states hope to analyze how the process worked in Alabama and whether to replicate it. Oklahoma and Mississippi already have laws authorizing the use of nitrogen gas for executions, and some other states, including Nebraska, have introduced measures this year to add it as an option.
“Our intentions are if this works and it’s humane and we can, absolutely we’ll want to use it,” said Steven Harpe, director of Oklahoma’s prison system. After being fitted with a face mask that forced him to breathe pure nitrogen and deprived him of oxygen, Smith shook and writhed for at least two minutes in Thursday's execution in Alabama before his breathing stopped and he was declared dead. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm described the shaking as involuntary movements. “That was all expected ... in the side effects that we’ve seen or researched on nitrogen hypoxia,” Hamm said. The U.S. has a long history of developing execution methods that were widely adopted, starting with electrocution in the early 1900s to replace hangings, followed by the gas chamber and lethal injection, which was developed by an Oklahoma doctor in the 1970s. Nitrogen gas could be the next method to gain popularity, said Prof. Austin Sarat of Amherst College, who has written about botched executions and the death penalty. Twenty-nine states have abolished the death penalty or paused executions, and there were just 24 executions in five states in 2023.