Kenneth Eugene Smith was the first person to be executed with nitrogen in the USA. Officials say everything went according to plan. Local journalist Lee Hedgepeth was there as an eyewitness. In the star he describes a painful agony that lasted more than 20 minutes.
When Kenneth Eugene Smith died, Lee Hedgepeth sat behind a glass window and hoped that the 58-year-old would finally take his last breath. “It was almost unbearable to watch him die,” Hedgepeth says on the phone. His voice trembles, the journalist always takes his time with his answers and seems to weigh every word he says. But he wants to get one thing straight: “I’m not an opponent of the death penalty,” he says. And then continues almost breathlessly: “But, when we execute someone, we should do it properly and not with a wildly nailed together method.”