The convicted killer, 58, had a gas mask placed over his nose and mouth before a stream of 100 percent nitrogen gas suffocated him, which was left on for 15 minutes to ensure he was dead. Smith was officially pronounced dead at 8:25 local time, following a 22-minute ordeal where he appeared to remain conscious for several minutes. He shook violently and pulled on the restraints on the gurney, continuing to breathe the nitrogen gas heavily until he succumbed and passed out. In his final words, delivered through the gas mask on his face, Smith said: ‘Tonight Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards… I’m leaving with love, peace and light.’
He was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher’s wife in 1988. Smith’s pastor John Ewell told DailyMail.com before his execution that the killer was ‘really struggling’ with the reality of his imminent death, and officials said he ate only a small part of his final meal of steak, hash browns and eggs.
Welp, that clinches it… I’m drivin to Alabama to get my tires inflated!
Meanwhile I’ll wait for FDR In Hell to comment on Smith’s imminent arrival…
What took them so long? Keeping him on death row for the past 36 years is not swift justice.
I have just two words. Firing squad.
@geoff the aardvark:
Too many lawyers wanting a piece of that stinkin’ pie.
If Shakespeare had gotten his way, Smith would have lasted about a week.
How is smothering him in Nitrogen somehow better than garroting him?
Or a quick drop and broken neck?
Or being shot to death by firing squad?
Or electrocution?
If it had been Georgia they could have just had Stacy “Tank” Abrams sit on his chest.
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
Tim – I guess they just want a nice, new, fluffy, comfy, soothing, nice-sounding method… to call it.
The normal atmosphere is approx 80% Nitrogen & 20% Oxygen (etc).
Sooooo….Not so much the addition of more Nitrogen, it’s the removal of the remaining necessary Oxygen.
Tim-FJB
Better than having The Tank sit on his face.
(talk about a cruel & unusual punishment!)
chain convicted a**hole to 4×8 plywood, victim family can then use 7.62/9/12.7 or .338/.40 for unlimited target practice
A couple of things here just from a physcal point of view, setting aside the fact that this guy was a confessed and apparently not very good, confessed contract murderer that they want us to feel sorry for, despite the fact I seriously doubt his VICTIM’S death was as quick and painless as everyone wanted HIS to be;
One, this guy wasn’t a WILLING participant. He probably held his breath and fought it. Not sure how the nitrogen was administered, but the stupidest way possible would have been if there was no flow until it was turned on, because he’d KNOW that was the death gas. He should have had a mask on with air (NOT pure oxygen, it enlivens the blood and makes everything more active) flowing for some time before the execution, with a silent switch to nitrogen at some point unheralded by observers or executioners so he didn’t know when to try to hold his breath to avoid the death gas as long as possible. If the flow was continuous for some time BEFORE the execution and he had no cues, visual or audible, about when it started, he wouldn’t know when it started as nitrogen doesn’t have an odor.
Two, freshly dead people aren’t NEARLY as peaceful as Hollywood makes them out to be. Movements, sometimes large movements, happen as the nerves and skeletal muscles die much slower than the brain and heart does, with the lovely visual spectacle of the myoclonic jerk. This is a body response to hypoxia that isn’t very comforting to look at, and doesn’t have a great prognosis even if the victim is revived. These are not predictable, deliberate, or organized movements, they will be very spasmodic and can be large muscles. There’s also a phenomenon known as cadaveric spasms where some muscles become instantly rigid upon death and don’t wait the normal course for rigor mortis to set in. This is usually associated with violent deaths but doesn’t have to be. This wasn’t a violent death in the usual sense, but it was certainly a RESISTED death, and so may have triggered a similar response.
Three, we only have this retarded graphic to show us in no detail what they actually used for this, but if you could hear guy talking THROUGH his mask it’s a pretty safe bet it wasn’t a nonrebreather with a reservoir bag, which probably would have been most appropriate for this purpose. Meant for high concentration delivery of pure oxygen with flapper valves for ejection of exhaled gases, this would allow for concentrations of whatever gas you chose to eliminate but still allow for the quick exit of the last of the “good” air, which is somewhat important because your exhaled breath DOES contain usable oxygen, so much so it’s the proven principle around which rescue breathing revolves. No, you couldn’t exist very LONG on your own exhaled breath, but you’d get a little more, and in this particular paradigm a little more is to be avoided to the greatest extent possible, hence the flapper valves to let it out.
At the end of the day, however, there’s no “nice” way to kill people, regardless of what euthanasia fans and baby murderers may tell you. Your body was designed to fight death to the extreme, even your gut bacteria lives long after you do trying to scavenge a bit more time from your pooled intestinal contents (producing postmortem farts), so yes, there ARE going to be visual physiological responses to asphyxiation, many of them involuntary even in WILLING participants and so you can expect someone who is NOT willing to put up even MORE of a fight and create MORE of a visual spectacle.
It’s a whole nother conversation about letting the STATE execute people, especially as we head into another election. But, having made up your mind to kill people, a bullet or a rope with a short drop remain the quickest and most positive way to force someone’s exit from this world, so why mess with success…
Death by N2 suffocation is frightening because you have no idea that you are dying, industries that use LN2 have safeguards in place to prevent it from displacing all the O2 in any enclosed area.
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight FRIDAY, 26 JANUARY 2024, 10:07 AT 10:07 AM
Tim-FJB
“Better than having The Tank sit on his face.
(talk about a cruel & unusual punishment!)”
…death by “pressing” was a thing, usually to try to get someone to confess to something like witchcraft, but it was so painful that any confession was pretty unreliable, even if they were able to confess something with their thorax smashed. A board was placed on a tied down person and more and more weight placed on it, faster or slower depending on the level of torment desired, until your rib cage collapsed. Simple, brutal effective.
https://youtu.be/ypW8d6JD0YQ?si=GMFoMBl_bMiVAzAt
…but I’m guessing that Stacy would just flop that thang down on your face all at once, the smell alone would probably knock you out. You could end up inside her and asphyxiate, or if a butt cheek is placed wrong it could crush your skull.
TONS of fun, as they say…
36 years to final justice? Sad.
I have a much simpler and effective suggestion if any State officials are reading this – carbon monoxide. A sealed chamber and a tank of CO would put them night-night easily and gently. Just tell them they will be executed within a range of hours and slowly fill the chamber. They won’t fight or even know anything is off as they drift off into eternal sleep. Heck, they’d even be nice and pink at the end.
Why hasn’t anyone considered this?
Just tryin’ to help…..
Did they drop him on the floor after he froze solid?
I would classify suffocating as cruel.
There are much quicker ways. A guillotine would be more merciful.
The big freak about state killing is the deliberate act conducted in a clinical manner rather than the method.
The opposition to state killing is almost entirely virtue signaling with the tiniest non reasoned base buried under all the words. The natural human aversion to killing one’s own kind is a powerful and necessary sense most of us possess.
The last public hanging in the US was carried out, if I have my facts straight, in 1936.
To assuage the opposition to state killing based on how the individual being killed feels about it, how about a nice heavy dose of narcotic then the nitrogen? Go sleepy bye and just continue down the road.
The reality is the killing, not how the killed feels along the way. To get the most bang for the buck in performing a state killing the prompt public execution of people convicted of capital crimes would seem most appropriate.
There is a deterrent effect on people when evident punishment for crime is presented. See the results in large cities when -minor- crime is no longer punished, it is a real phenomenon. In capital punishment the individual is permanently deterred, if others witness and or know of that punishment many will reconsider similar criminal acts, reducing the amount of state killing necessary, and more importantly reducing the number of victims of capital level crimes.
Regardless of the sympathetic press, he did Not struggle, with surprise, fear and pain, as his preacher’s wife victim, as she was repeatedly stabbed with a knife.
I wonder what the no death penalty advocate press would have said if they were witnesses to the Murder of Elizabeth Sennett, 45, as she struggled against her attacker while being stabbed 10 times?
Smith got off easy as he passed to hell.
No mercy for murderers, who should meet their demise commensurate to the pain and suffering of their victim.
No matter what it took the end result was worth it!
Firing squad. “Let’s do it.” Gary Gilmore.
How are people “euthanized” during assisted suicide? I’ve never seen any tear-filled, breathless reports by the media about that, so use that method.
I haven’t any sympathy for the murderer who made his innocent victim suffer all for a bit of money.
If you have not struggled for each breath, you have no idea how being suffocated is terrifying.
The comments about being put to sleep prior to whatever method is used to keep them from ever waking up again is the most humane method.
I know the desire to see the evil bastards suffer, but they will suffer once they are dead more than you could imagine.
The comment about how long he was on death row reminds me of a story I heard Paul Harvey tell probably thirty years ago. It went something like this:
“You know how you often hear of convicted murderers sitting on death row for eighteen years before their execution? Well, the State of Texas put someone to death last last after eighteen months.
“His victims were attorneys.”
Why haven’t they considered carbon monoxide? Because it would work. Perhaps find out who the person was who suggested nitrogen. Could they perhaps be against the death penalty and wanted to use something that would cause the criminal to struggle and fight, thereby strengthening the “cruel and unusual punishment” cries???
Did you hear about the Killer Chick given probation for murder. 100 hours of community service or some such. About an hour for every stab inflicted. No kidding. The Judge said she was under the influence of MARYHUANA and not responsible for her actions.
Sounds like the Judge is a closet cannabis hater and is really after re-criminalization.
PS: Cannabis has been here forever. Used forever too.
It was Big Oil and the discovery of Plastic Rope for MORE MONEY over free plant from God, Hemp. Circa 1930. Millions of Acres of Hemp have been farmed since before Babylonians.
Cannabis Haters are Paranoid Fucktards. Period.
Anything execution beyond hanging or firing squad, is just experimentation.
Next up “Zyklon-B”. When that proves too distasteful to watch, it will be on to to the Ovens!
To appease the woke crowd, How about dropping 3 feet high concrete letters from 5 stories high. I suggest the letters K-I-N-D-N-E-S-S.
Built by the ACME Corp. of course.
Another no-suffering route would be to feed him his last meal laced with a fatal dose of Chinese fentanyl (without telling him) and put him to sleep peacefully. (Local police probably have a suitcase of it sitting in a locked safe room waiting for disposal.)
36 years is a lot of food and housing. What a waste.
(Or a bottle of old-fashioned sleep narcotics.)
The reason they don’t use carbon monoxide, is that the media always likes to link causes of death in a negative way. An example of this When Joe-Bob buys a used RV and cleans the toilet with Clorox and ammonia. The media reports he died from chlorine gas, the same gas the Germans used on the WWI battlefield.
If you use CO on death row, the media will report that people who died from faulty furnaces died from the same gas used to kill hardened criminals.
abortion is cruel & unusual to the not-yet-born, i don’t give a s**t about convicted murderers
Instead of Nitrogen, why not Nitrous Oxide? Or Helium?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4An1BrG2u_4&pp=ygUhaXQgY291bGQgd29yayB5b3VuZyBmcmFua2Vuc3RlaW4g
…Or maybe a mixture of both?
Nitrogen is a peaceful way to go. Had no idea air was getting low. Dive partners recognized symptoms, I sure didn’t. Experienced same euphoria in altitude chamber where students are taught to recognize symptoms of hypoxia. Heard the same thing from 2 guys working in a frozen garage using a propane heater. They had no idea. So, ignore cry babies who claim nitrogen is inhumane.
Why not a more eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil gas, like CO2?
China provided us Thousands of pounds of fentanyl, via Mexico.
It Kills thousands of US citizens and the Biden administration doesn’t seem to care if the victims struggle or convulse as they die.
Let’s see if the US Government and Biden can negotiate a better bulk price with China and give it to the States for executions (we have a heavy backlog of deserving recipients).