The prison pastor for Kenneth Eugene Smith, the first US inmate to be put to death with nitrogen gas, revealed the death row resident was ‘really struggling’ in his final hours.
Smith, 58, had his Hail Mary request to the US Supreme Court to stay his execution rejected on Thursday night, hours before he was suffocated via nitrogen hypoxia.
Pastor John Ewell told DailyMail.com hours before Smith’s scheduled execution that he was struggling to come to terms with the experimental execution method.
‘He’s being strong for his family, but it’s rough,’ he said from outside the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, where Smith was pronounced dead at 8:25pm local time.
He was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher’s wife in 1988, for which he was only paid $1,000 for the hit.
Kenneth Eugene Smith was sentenced to death in 1996 after admitting the murder-for-hire killing of a pastor’s wife who was beaten and stabbed in 1988
Prison pastor John Ewell told DailyMail.com that Smith was ‘really struggling’ in the hours before his execution, saying he was ‘being strong for his family, but it’s rough’
Smith was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, 45, who was found dead on March 18, 1988, in her home in Alabama’s Colbert County. She had been stabbed eight times in the chest and once on each side of neck
Pastor Ewell spoke from outside the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, where Smith remains waiting for to enter the chamber
According to the Alabama Department of Corrections, Smith’s final day began with him refusing a breakfast of eggs, biscuits, grape jelly, apple sauce and orange juice.
He then received a tray for lunch but again refused it, although he did drink Mountain Dew and Pepsi.
Smith was ordered to have only clear liquids from 4pm, after barely touching his final meal of steak, hashbrowns and eggs.
The final meal was reportedly from Waffle House, slathered with steak sauce, before he had one last phone call with his wife, Deanna Smith.
In his desperate appeals to halt his execution, Smith begged for it to be called off, citing his fears that the experimental gassing method will cause excruciating pain or cause him to vomit.
The Supreme Court yesterday denied an application for a stay. He filed another request today with the court as the execution approached, which was rejected Thursday night.
Pastor Ewell said that Smith was relying on his faith to help him through his final moments, adding: ‘He’s a Godly man, and he loves Jesus, but this stuff would be hard on anybody.’
Alabama’s lethal injection chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., is pictured in this Oct. 7, 2002 file photo. Kenneth Smith, 58, is scheduled to be executed Jan. 25, 2024
Smith’s planned execution by nitrogen gas has been branded by the UN as ‘torture’, and scientists have largely banned it from animal experiments
Ewell said he has been seeing Smith every week for the past two years, including at the time Smith was previously intended to be executed on November 17, 2022.
That execution was botched as Smith lay on the execution table, as prison staffers failed to insert an IV line for several hours, leaving the killer in extreme pain and ultimately causing him to wet himself.
Ewell said that Smith was expectedly downcast before potentially entering the chamber, but he was ‘putting a lot of hope into this thing being stopped.’
‘I was with him around a year and change ago when they did this before, and I think he’s hoping that it’s going to be stopped again.’
Ewell was not in the execution chamber when Smith was put to death, with Reverand Dr. Jeff Hood instead chosen as the spiritual advisor in the room.
Hood also condemned the execution style, saying in a statement beforehand: ‘The eyes of the world are on this impending moral apocalypse.
‘Our prayer is that people will not turn their heads. We simply cannot normalize the suffocation of each other.’
Elizabeth’s preacher husband Charles Sennett Sr., paid Smith and another man, John Forrest Parker, $1000 each to kill his wife, hoping to cash in on her insurance. Charles later killed himself when he came under suspicion
John Forrest Parker, the other man convicted in the slaying, was executed in 2010
Pastor Ewell said that Smith was relying on his faith to help him through his final moments, adding: ‘He’s a Godly man, and he loves Jesus, but this stuff would be hard on anybody’
Ewell said he was unaware of Smith’s crime and did not care to find out, saying the man he met behind bars was a ‘godly man, and that is what’s hard.’
However, while Ewell hoped the execution was called off again, others felt Smith’s 1988 crime was deserving of his place on death row.
Aged 22, Smith was one of two men convicted in the murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, 45, the wife of preacher Charles Sennet Sr. who paid the men to kill his wife in an insurance plot.
His initial 1989 conviction was overturned on appeal, but he was retried and convicted again in 1996.
Prosecutors said he and John Forrest Parker were each paid $1,000 for the murder, with Sennett’s husband hoping to collect on her insurance.
She was found dead March 18 that year in her home in Colbert County with eight stab wounds in the chest and one on each side of her neck.
After finding out that he was suspected of being involved in the plot, Charles Sennett Sr. killed himself.