Kenneth Smith, 58, is facing execution by an untested method that has never before been used in capital punishment in the US. It’s a technique that has been rejected on ethical grounds by veterinarians for the euthanasia of most animals other than pigs: death by nitrogen gas.
I wasn’t aware you were living in a reality where executions aren’t currently happening several times a year.
Here in this timeline, even though there are still executions, thankfully they are on the downswing and hopefully on the way out for good. But at least over the short term, even though every execution deserves to be robustly challenged, activists cannot be expected to win every battle. We also need to plan for what happens if we lose.
States like South Carolina and Idaho have already begun pivoting back to the electric chair and firing squads, and while no anti-capital punishment activist is to blame for it, speaking personally it certainly would not sit right by me to know that I played a part in denying the use of an execution method like nitrogen hypoxia, and the inmate, on whose behalf I was fighting for, wound up dying via electrocution in severe, debilitating pain over the course of 2-15+ minutes instead.
Maybe ultimately convincing judges to ban nitrogen hypoxia is a good thing over the long run, even if it results in short term harm. But that is not a calculus I feel comfortable solving on behalf of others who will suffer while I remain insulated from the consequences of this decision.