Kenneth Eugene Smith

At 7:53 p.m. on January 25, 2024, in the death chamber at William C. Holman Correctional Facility outside Atmore, Alabama, the state of Alabama initiated the first execution by nitrogen hypoxia in the recorded history of the world. Kenneth Eugene Smith — 58 years old, 34 years on death row, a survivor of Alabama's own botched attempt to kill him fourteen months earlier — was strapped to the same gurney the state had failed to kill him on in November 2022. Over his face was a full-face industrial respirator, a mask never designed for a human being pinned down against his will.

For approximately four minutes after the nitrogen began to flow, Smith shook and heaved against the restraints in what witnesses uniformly described as violent, sustained physical distress. He gasped. He strained. He appeared to hold his breath and then release it. He remained visibly conscious well past the point at which Alabama's own experts had told the federal court he would be unconscious. The state had assured Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. that unconsciousness would arrive in seconds. Reporters on scene wrote what they saw: sustained, seemingly agonized movement that did not stop when the state said it would stop.

Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood stood a few feet away as Smith's spiritual advisor. Hood had already accompanied more men to their deaths than any other minister in the modern era; he would later write that Smith's execution was different in kind, not degree. What Alabama had described in court as a humane, painless method — the least invasive execution ever devised — Hood watched play out as a prolonged, mechanical suffocation of a man whose body would not stop fighting for air.

Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm walked to the podium after the execution and called it 'textbook.' The record of that night — court filings, media witness accounts, autopsy, and Hood's contemporaneous testimony — established the factual predicate that every subsequent nitrogen challenge would build on, up to and including the Lee bench trial in 2026. Every finding in Lee traces, in part, back to the twenty-two minutes Kenneth Smith spent dying on that gurney.