ROME (AP) — A Vatican-affiliated Catholic charity made an urgent appeal Tuesday to the U.S. state of Alabama to halt a planned execution this week using nitrogen gas, saying the method is “barbarous” and “uncivilized” and would bring “indelible shame” to the state.
The Rome-based Sant’Egidio Community has lobbied for decades to abolish the death penalty around the world. It has turned its attention to Thursday’s scheduled execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in what would be the first U.S. execution using nitrogen hypoxia.
Unless stopped by courts, Smith will be put to death for the 1988 murder-for-hire of a preacher’s wife. In legal filings, Alabama has said Smith will wear a gas mask and that breathable air will be replaced with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen needed to stay alive.
“In many respects, Alabama seems to have the awful ambition of setting a new, downward standard of humanity in the already questionable and barbaric world of capital executions,” Mario Marazziti, in charge of Sant’Egidio’s death penalty abolition group, told a Rome press conference.