‘Astonishingly cruel’: Alabama seeks to test execution method on death row ‘guinea pig’

Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen

Alabama's lethal injection chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, on 7 October 2002. Photograph: Dave Martin/AP

Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution, having endured an aborted lethal injection last November during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture.

Nine months later Smith has been singled out for another undesirable distinction. If the state of Alabama has its way, he will become the test dummy for an execution method that has never before been used in judicial killings and which veterinarians consider unacceptable as a form of euthanasia for animals — death by nitrogen gas.