😨 The Supreme Court Blessed an Experimental Execution in Alabama. It Went So Wrong.

On Thursday night, Alabama executioners killed Kenneth Eugene Smith using nitrogen gas, the first ever use of this method to carry out a capital sentence in America. Smith argued that killing him with nitrogen would violate the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment, but the Supreme Court declined to stay his execution by a 6–3 vote. On Saturday’s Slate Plus segment of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the conservative majority’s refusal to halt Smith’s grisly, torturous death, and how its abandonment of the Eighth Amendment could backfire against the death penalty in the long run. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate     Jan 29, 2024