A few nights ago convicted murderer Kenneth Smith was suffocated to death by the state of Alabama . His killing with nitrogen gas was a first. And it was fully approved by the U.S. Supreme Court , which allows death penalty states to experiment at will with different methods of execution. This is a court that steadfastly refuses to recognize that the long, dragged-out confinement and killing of conscious human beings counts as “cruel punishment.”
I’ve read that Mr. Smith convulsed and writhed as his muscles spasmed, deprived of their life source—oxygen. His last agony continued as he heaved against the straps of the gurney gasping for breath. The lethal nitrogen in his body did its job, blocking his lungs from being able to take in oxygen, for which every cell in his body screamed. All witnesses could see from the outside was a man, strapped down on a gurney, writhing and breathing heavily.
I have a question. This question has haunted me from the first time I witnessed the electrocution of Patrick Sonnier in Louisiana in 1984, which inspired my book (later made into a movie) Dead Man Walking . Will we ever morally evolve as a people enough to recognize that government killings of conscious, imaginative human beings are in fact, CRUEL punishment? Even more, that they are the practice of TORTURE.