Execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith

Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett, 45, was killed in her Colbert County, Alabama home on March 18, 1988. Her husband, the Reverend Charles Sennett Sr., had recruited tenant Billy Gray Williams to arrange her murder in exchange for payment; Williams in turn recruited Kenneth Eugene Smith and John Forrest Parker. Smith and Parker gained entry to the Sennett home under the pretext of surveying land for hunting, then beat Elizabeth Sennett with household items including a fireplace set, a walking cane, and a length of pipe, before stabbing her eight times with a survival knife. Investigators later concluded that Charles Sennett himself stabbed his wife after returning home and finding her injured, prior to calling police. A week after the murder, once he became a suspect, Charles Sennett confessed to his sons that he had arranged his wife's killing and then fatally shot himself.

Smith was tried in Jefferson County after a change of venue from Colbert County. In his first trial, a jury recommended death by a 10–2 vote and he was sentenced to death in 1989, but that conviction and sentence were vacated on appeal in 1992. In a second trial, the jury recommended a life sentence by an 11–1 vote, but the judge overruled the jury and imposed a death sentence in 1996. Billy Gray Williams was sentenced to life without parole and died in prison in November 2020. John Forrest Parker was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on June 10, 2010.

Smith's first scheduled execution, by lethal injection on November 17, 2022, was called off after the execution team was unable to establish IV access before the death warrant expired, despite a period in which Smith remained strapped to a gurney after a stay had been issued and then lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court. This was described as the third consecutive botched execution carried out by the state of Alabama, prompting Governor Kay Ivey to order a review of execution procedures.

The state subsequently sought, and Smith agreed to, execution by nitrogen hypoxia, a method never previously used in any execution worldwide. Alabama's governor set January 25, 2024, as the execution date. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Smith's final appeal or grant a stay. Smith was fitted with a full-face mask and administered nitrogen gas beginning at 7:57 p.m.; witnesses described him convulsing and breathing heavily for several minutes before he was pronounced dead at 8:25 p.m. Alabama officials characterized his physical reactions as expected involuntary responses, while an autopsy later found signs of pulmonary edema and fluid in his lungs and trachea. Outside medical experts and the United Nations human rights office raised concerns that the method may have caused significant suffering. Sennett's sons stated after the execution that they felt justice had been served for their mother's death.