- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.
So this would be fine, but he did have symptoms consistent with hypercapnia, as described in the link you provided
They needed a larger breathable volume to diffuse the carbon dioxide present to keep the man from suffering.
They botched it.
Considering both include convulsions and cardiac arrest can be accompanied by agonal breathing, I don’t think you can definitively state this.
Smith also resisted breathing for as long as he could at the beginning of the procedure and I think that needs to be taken into account. I won’t say they absolutely didn’t botch his execution, but I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence to that effect.
Unless they published their methodology, which they refused to do, we won’t have any compelling evidence.