When Kenneth Eugene Smith enters the death chamber at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., on Thursday night, he will be in a place that is at once familiar and entirely unknown. Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics. Smith, 58, is expected to be placed on the same gurney that was used 14 months earlier, when he survived a botched lethal injection that was eventually called off because his death warrant was expiring and prison workers failed to set his IV line. But instead of being administered lethal drugs, prison workers will place a mask over his face and start the process of making Smith the first person executed by an untested method that uses nitrogen gas to force death by oxygen deprivation, a process known as nitrogen hypoxia.

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