Activists fight Alabama execution by targeting death penalty supply chain
By Brendan Kirby
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ALABAMA (WALA) — Alabama’s controversial plan to execute a condemned prisoner using an untested method has drawn protests and calls for Gov. Kay Ivey and the courts to intervene.
One activist organization, though, is taking aim at the death penalty supply chain.
An organization called Worth Rises has been collecting signatures for a petition targeting a company called Allegro Industries, which manufactures the mask that Alabama prison officials will place over Kenneth Eugene Smith’s face as nitrogen replaces the oxygen he breathes. The petition demands that Allegro and its parent company, Walter Surface Technologies, prohibit states from using their products in executions.
Dana Floberg, the director of corporate campaigns for Wealth Rises, told FOX10 News that the nonprofit organization has had success with other companies. For instance, a Tennessee firm called FDR Safety pulled out of a contract to develop a nitrogen execution method. In another instance, Airgas, a subsidiary of the French company Air Liquide, announced earlier this year that it would not sell nitrogen gas for executions.
“Our goal was to reach out to those corporations to inform them and to urge them to take action and to make it clear that their products are meant to be used to keep people safe and healthy as opposed to the reverse,” Floberg said.
Floberg said Allegro Industries has not responded to the organization’s requests. And the company also did not immediately respond to FOX10 News.
It appears unlikely that pressuring companies will be enough to save Smith, who has been on death row for the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett in Colbert County. Jurors found him and another man guilty of capital murder, finding they took money from a hit man who had been paid of Sennett’s husband. The U.S. Supreme Court declined Wednesday to block the execution, which means it likely will be carried out on Thursday.
“Obviously, in this particular moment, we are watching a ticking clock,” Floberg said. “We not only need these corporations to respond but to response with real urgency.”
But Floberg said the strategy can work over time.
“There’s real potential for this kind of strategy to, in coordination with those other strategies, to lead to change. … I on a longer scale, too, we have seen this make an impact, right?” Floberg said. “Part of the reason Alabama was interested in developing the nitrogen method is because of how difficult it has become to get the drugs necessary to execute via lethal injection.”
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