Terminally ill American dies weeks before execution

Christopher Sepulvado died Saturday "of natural causes as a result of complications from his pre-existing medical conditions," according to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. His attorney, Sean Nolan, noted that his client had been weakened physically and mentally in recent years and had been recommended for hospice care.

Sepulvado was convicted of murdering his six-year-old stepson in 1992 and sentenced to death in 1993.

Earlier, in the American state of Alabama, for the first time in the country's history, a criminal was executed using nitrogen . According to a statement from the press service of the local attorney general, Steve Marshall, the sentence of 58-year-old Kenneth Eugene Smith was carried out in this way. The procedure lasted about 30 minutes in total. It is noted that the criminal himself chose how to end his life.

Earlier, Alexander Goev, a lecturer at the medical faculty of the State University of Education, said that execution by nitrogen hypoxia is more humane than the lethal injection currently used in the United States, when the condemned person receives a cocktail of drugs. If everything is done technically correctly, then “the condemned person will simply fall asleep, without suffocation, hallucinations or pain,” he explained.