Daily dispatch from the Death Cult We are a very primitive people using technology for primitive ends: The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to stay the execution of an Alabama inmate by nitrogen hypoxia, an untested method that experts have warned could cause him extreme pain and suffering. Should a separate appeal still pending in federal court not pan out the way advocates and his legal team hope, Kenneth Eugene Smith will be the first person in the United States to be lethally suffocated by nitrogen gas on Thursday evening. A terse court order noted that both Smith’s application for a stay and his petition for a writ of certiorari—a request for the high court to take up his case—had been denied. No justices publicly dissented from the order. Smith has been on death row for more than a quarter-century for the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of preacher’s wife Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett. In 2022, he survived an attempt by the state to execute him by lethal injection. After officials spent hours jabbing at him with needles, probing for a vein they could use to put him to death, the execution was called off before the death warrant could expire at midnight. “They were just sticking me over and over, going in the same hole like a freaking sewing machine,” Smith told NPR recently. “I was absolutely alone in a room full of people, and not one of them tried to help me at all—and I was crying out for help.” The use of nitrogen gas in Alabama’s…