The outrage over Alabama using the previously untested method of nitrogen gas to execute 58-year-old Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday night isn’t misplaced. The use of any human being as a “guinea pig” for a method of execution, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, makes the blood boil. But there’s a chance that the focus on Smith, whom Alabama tried and failed to kill in 2022, will distract attention from the much larger outrage: that our country is still pulling human beings from cages and killing them.
The use of any human being as a “guinea pig,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, makes the blood boil
Not killing them because they’re threatening someone else. Not killing them in the interest of public safety. But killing them based on the flimsy idea that executions foster closure for victims’ families and deter future crimes. Killing them to avoid being attacked as soft on crime. Killing them in the service of a vengeance that can never be satisfied. Especially not, as was the case Thursday, when this punishment for Elizabeth Sennett’s murderer came more than 35 years after his crime.
The record shows that Sennett’s husband, the Rev. Charles Sennett, hired three men in 1988 to kill his wife so that he could collect her insurance money. A jury found that Smith, then 22, was one of the three who stabbed and beat her to death. Sennett’s husband killed himself shortly thereafter.
Many arguments against the death penalty focus on doubts about the condemned person’s guilt. Statistics also show that who gets executed is heavily influenced by the victim’s race and how poor the defendant is. More recently we’ve seen more arguments focus on the likelihood that past executions haven’t been painless and that many have been botched. (For example, Alabama officials poked around Smith’s outstretched body in November 2022 but couldn’t find a vein in which to inject the poison.)
Yes, we can be almost…
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