Tag: DPIC

Alabama execution carried out


Execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith carried out yesterday despite widespread protests

January 2024

Kenneth Smith was executed yesterday (25 January) in Alabama after serving over 30 years on death row. What brought the execution to world-wide attention was the use of nitrogen hypoxia as the chosen method. Reports seem to show that the execution was prolonged and took over 20 minutes to complete. One report said he ‘thrashed violently’ while dying. This is the first time the gas has been used to execute someone and is as a result of pharmaceutical companies, in America and elsewhere, being reluctant to supply the drugs needed for lethal injection. 

The jury in his trial voted for a life sentence but the judge in the case overruled them. 

This was not the first attempt at executing Smith: there was an attempt in November 2022 by lethal injection but which failed after several unsuccessful efforts to find a vein. Smith suffered considerably during and after that attempt. 

Executions are declining in the USA, the only country in the Americas which still executes its citizens.

Amnesty is opposed to the use of the death penalty in all circumstances.

Sources: BBC; Death Penalty Information Center; Montgomery Advertiser; Birmingham Real-Time News

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Execution ‘spree’ in USA


Lisa Montgomery execution to go ahead in the dying days of the Trump presidency

The execution by lethal injection of Lisa Montgomery is now scheduled to take place at Terre Haute Federal prison Indiana on January 12 just days before president-elect Joe Biden takes office.  She is the first woman to be executed in almost six decades.

Lisa’s crime was truly awful and involved murder of a woman and the removal of her unborn baby.  The argument has been about her mental state and her background.  She was the victim of gang rape, incest and sex trafficking.  Her defence (defense) has argued that the balance of her mind was disturbed at the time of the murder.

It is some kind of fitting end to the President’s term of office to rush through a number of Federal executions including this one.  No other lame duck president has carried out more than one execution since Grover Cleveland’s first presidency in 1888 – 89.

This has been an administration that’s been historically out of step. Not just out of step with the views of America in 2020, but out of step with federal practices by administrations, Democratic or Republican, for the course of [a] century, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham told The Washington Post.

The USA is the only country in the Americas to retain the death penalty.

China executes more of its citizens than the rest of the world combined but details are a state secret.

See our latest monthly death penalty report.

Further details of other executions being rushed through on the Death Penalty Information Center

Sources: USA Today; Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Washington Post; Guardian; US Dept. of Justice

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