On a chilly morning in Carson City in February 1924, Nevada State Prison officials fired up an electric heater in a stone barbershop building and escorted an inmate inside. But the prisoner’s comfort wasn’t the priority. The heat was supposed to warm up cyanide acid so it would vaporize and execute Gee Jon, a young Chinese immigrant accused of murdering a laundryman.
The heater malfunctioned, and most of the acid fell as liquid to the floor of the makeshift gas chamber. But there was enough gas to kill Gee, strapped to a plain pine chair, in about six minutes as horrified witnesses watched his head lurch and his eyes roll upward. Some observers jumped back from an outside window when they thought they smelled almonds — the scent of cyanide. No autopsy was performed out of fear that gas in Gee’s body would poison onlookers.
Still, officials and journalists deemed the world’s first gas-chamber execution to be a success. “Nevada’s novel death law is upheld by the highest court — humanity,” proclaimed a Reno newspaper.
Nearly 600 inmates would die in American gas chambers over the next 75 years. Now, an Alabama man faces execution by nitrogen hypoxia on Thursday. If the execution goes forward as scheduled, he will be the first person in the United States to be killed by gas in a quarter-century.
Things are different this time. Instead of sitting in a sealed chamber full of cyanide gas, convicted murderer Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, is slated to breathe nitrogen gas through an industrial, full-face mask. But one thing hasn’t changed since that Carson City morning almost exactly a century ago: There’s plenty of room for error, and death may not come instantly or easily.
“Every gas execution involved torture of some sort. It’s the worst method of execution we’ve ever had and the most cruel,” said death penalty historian Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York. “The inmate is conscious and aware of what’s going on, and the torment is obvious.”
This wasn’t the plan. Execution by gas was supposed to be a humane advance for a progressive era. “Unlike most countries which chose one method and stuck with it, for more than 150 years the U.S. has been on a search for an ever-better method of execution,” said death penalty historian Austin D. Sarat, chair of political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
The goal, he said, has always been to find a way to kill prisoners in a “safe, reliable and humane” way.
Public hangings, initially popular, went out of style in the 19th century. Then electrocution was touted as more humane than hanging, which could decapitate prisoners or excruciatingly strangle them. But electrocutions often went horribly wrong as prisoners burst into flames.
One state, Minnesota, abolished the death penalty altogether. But Nevada, the nation’s least-populated state in 1920, with just 77,407 residents, chose to find a new way to kill.
Supporters described death by cyanide gas as “absolutely painless,” administered at higher concentrations than in World War I battlefield gas attacks so death would be quick. Ideally, Silver State prisoners would breathe the gas as they slept in their cells. Officials determined that idea was impractical, however, and they developed the gas chamber instead.
Four Carson City prison guards quit rather than take part in the first gas execution, and officials had a hard time locating and delivering cyanide acid to the prison. A gas chamber test on an unfortunate cat and two kittens revealed a hole in a wall that could have gassed witnesses; it was patched.
Then came the execution, which took place after a guard urged Gee to “take it like a man.”
Gas chambers became common, most famously in California, which installed its version at the Bay Area’s San Quentin State Prison in 1938. From Oregon to North Carolina, prisons developed unique protocols such as coating a gas chamber doorway with Vaseline to keep the gas in and patting down an inmate’s hair and clothes after executions to get the gas out so no one got sick while handling the body. Some prisoners were shaved and stripped to their underwear to lower the risk.
“But the gas chamber never took off the way the electric chair or lethal injection did,” Sarat said. “Why would you want to go to all the trouble of constructing a gas chamber when you could more cheaply — and presumably more efficiently — go with the electric chair and then with lethal injection?”
And there were horrific deaths. In 1983, a Mississippi prisoner repeatedly “snapped” his head into a steel pole as he convulsed, gasped and groaned over eight minutes, UPI reported. Observers were told to leave while the inmate appeared to still be breathing in a chamber full of gas and mosquitoes. An official claimed the prisoner died after just two minutes, adding that physicians present believed “it was a prompt and easy death.”
In a 2021 op-ed, an Arizona attorney recalled his client writhing in agony during a 1992 execution as he wore only diaper-like underwear: “His face and body turned a deep red, and the veins in his temple and neck began to bulge until I thought they might explode.”
Sarat examined 8,776 American executions performed from 1890 to 2010 and found that more than 5 percent of gas chamber deaths didn’t follow standard protocol and “caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner” or displayed incompetence on the part of the executioner. Only lethal injections went botched more often (7 percent of the time), while errors were less common in hangings (3 percent) and electrocutions (2 percent).
Even when protocol was followed, things didn’t always go according to plan. Caryl Chessman, a best-selling prison author, was executed in the San Quentin gas chamber in 1960 after a judge tried to stop the execution at the last minute but apparently dialed the wrong number. In an earlier case, in 1957, the California governor tried to stop an execution, but the gas had already started wafting through the chamber as the phone rang. It was too late.
The first execution by injection was performed in 1982 — President Ronald Reagan was an early fan of the idea when he was California governor — and the method soon became popular. The thinking was that executions would be “very clean, clinical and peaceful-looking,” said Robin M. Maher, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
The specter of Nazi gas chambers during World War II also appears to have hastened the decline of gas executions in the United States, the late journalist Scott Christianson wrote in “The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber,” although “America’s struggle over lethal gas was remarkably subdued.”
Only 11 gas executions have been performed since a Supreme Court moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976, compared to 1,402 lethal injections, 163 electrocutions, three hangings and three deaths by firing squad.
In recent years, however, it’s become harder for states to obtain drugs for lethal injections, and several executions using the method have been botched. In 2022, the execution of Smith, the Alabama prisoner scheduled to be executed by gas Thursday, was called off after prison staff failed to find a usable vein for an hour. It was Alabama’s second unsuccessful lethal injection in two months.
Smith was sentenced to death in 1996 after he was convicted of killing Elizabeth Sennett in 1988 as part of a murder-for-hire plot. Prosecutors alleged Sennett’s pastor husband set up the murder to collect on insurance and paid $1,000 each to Smith and an accomplice, who was later executed. The husband died by suicide. Earlier this month, one of Sennett’s sons told an Alabama TV station that Smith “has been in prison right at twice as long as we knew our mom.”
Now Smith is scheduled be killed by nitrogen gas as his attorneys try to convince judges to stop the execution. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the method is approved in Alabama, where prisoners can choose it or electrocution instead of lethal injection, and in Oklahoma and Mississippi, where it can be used if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional or “otherwise unavailable.” The method is also under consideration in Nebraska, where a legislator said it is “very humane.”
Smith opted for gas. Alabama officials required Smith’s spiritual adviser to sign a waiver acknowledging that he may face a risk from being in the room with Smith as the prisoner inhales nitrogen gas via a face mask, NPR reported.
While cyanide gas works by preventing the body’s cells from transforming oxygen into fuel, nitrogen gas — a normal component of air — causes asphyxiation when no oxygen is delivered to the lungs, said death penalty opponent Joel B. Zivot, an anesthesiologist at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Zivot has pushed for the United Nations to oppose the Alabama execution, and the United Nations Human Rights Office called for it to be halted. But an international outcry didn’t stop the last American gas chamber execution, in 1999.
Then, on a warm winter evening, an Arizona inmate convicted of killing a bank manager took 18 minutes to die in front of more than 30 witnesses, the Tucson Citizen reported, including the victim’s daughter, who held a photo of her father. As the gas rose “like steam in a shower,” the prisoner coughed violently, twitched and clenched his reddened hands. With about 12 minutes left until his heart stopped, the daughter “left the room, which had become uncomfortably warm.”
correction
An earlier version of this story mistakenly identified the Death Penalty Information Center as opposed to capital punishment. In fact, it says it "does not take a position on the death penalty itself but is critical of problems in its application." The story has been corrected.
