The state of Alabama chose barbarism last night with its execution of Kenneth Smith by an untested method that experts have deemed too cruel to use on animals.

Death penalty inmates aren’t the most sympathetic representatives of the oppressed, and Kenneth Smith is no exception. He was condemned of assisting in the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett, who died of eight stab wounds, and of being paid $1,000 for the task, by her husband, Charles Sennett. (Sennett, having outsourced his wife’s murder to Smith and his accomplices, evaded accountability and punishment by killing himself as soon as he realized he had become a suspect.)

But Alabama, in its premeditated killing of Smith by nitrogen hypoxia, has eclipsed the convicted murderer “on the barbarism scale,” as Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter put it this week. Nitrogen hypoxia has been condemned by veterinary scientists and professional organizations for use in animal euthanasia.