Alabama’s Supreme Court is set to decide whether to allow the state to be the first to execute an inmate using a new method: asphyxiation with nitrogen gas, Reuters reports.

Last month, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked a court to allow the state to proceed with the gassing of convicted murderer Kenneth Smith in 1996 using a face mask connected to a nitrogen cylinder designed to deprive him of oxygen.

Smith’s attorneys argued that the unverified protocol could violate the US Constitution’s “cruel and unusual punishments” clause. They are expected to challenge the attorney general’s request for the death penalty in court on Friday.

Death penalty experts also say the state has not provided enough information about how it will reduce the danger to execution staff and others from the use of invisible, odorless gas in the “death chamber.”

A convict who survived a lethal injection

Smith, 58, is one of only two people alive in the US to have survived an execution attempt since Alabama missed a previously scheduled execution by lethal injection last November when several attempts to insert a needle into a vein failed.

Most executions in the US are carried out by lethal injection of barbiturates, but the decades-old method has become more sophisticated in recent years. Some states struggle to get the drugs they need because drug companies refuse to sell them to prison systems.

After autopsies, it was found that the lungs of people executed by lethal injection were filled with bloody foamy fluid, which, according to opponents of the punishment, indicates that they experienced the sensation of drowning before death.

In a warrant filing, the attorney general’s office released a heavily redacted version of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ new gassing protocol, which it calls “nitrogen hypoxia.”

Gas chambers used in previous executions in the US states and in Nazi concentration camps used poisonous gases such as hydrogen cyanide to kill.

However, nitrogen is not poisonous and makes up about 78% of breathable air. In Alabama’s proposed method, which lawmakers approved in 2018, it is designed to replace the oxygen an inmate breathes.

“It is clear to me that they do not understand what they are doing”

Oklahoma and Mississippi have also approved executions by nitrogen asphyxiation, but have not yet tried the method.

Uncensored parts of the protocol in Alabama indicate that Smith will be placed on a stretcher and a mask will be placed over his face. Many details about the new device remain unclear, but the mask has both an inlet tube and an exhaust mechanism for exhalation.

Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at Emory School of Medicine who served as an expert witness in a challenge to the execution protocols, said it’s difficult for doctors to maintain a seal when applying a mask to an unconscious patient, and it’s not clear how Alabama approaches this problem when using a mask. on a prisoner who is conscious and possibly uncooperative.

“It is clear to me that they do not understand what they are doing. If air gets under the mask, he will not die,” said Zivot. Someone who is temporarily deprived of oxygen, but does not die, risks serious damage to the brain and other organs.

Kenneth Smith was convicted of murdering a preacher’s wife in 1988, a contract killing paid for by the preacher himself.