Alabama is seeking to put a second inmate to death using nitrogen gas, a move that comes a month after the state carried out the first execution using the controversial new method.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office asked the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to set an execution date for Alan Eugene Miller. The state said Miller’s execution would be carried out using nitrogen. Miller, now 59, was convicted of killing three people during a pair of 1999 workplace shootings in suburban Birmingham.
“The State of Alabama is prepared to carry out the execution of Miller’s sentence by means of nitrogen hypoxia,” the attorney general’s office wrote, adding that Miller has been on death row since 2000 and that it is time to carry out his sentence.
I think it just didn’t end up working as well as scientists thought it would. Maybe there’s more to painless nitrogen execution besides just filling a container with nitrogen. It’s not like they can just test a nitrogen death chamber before rolling it out. We’ll see if the next execution goes the same way or not.
Alabama did not listen to scientists. Medical science understands the roles of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen quite well, and predicted that filling a mask with nitrogen would be a horrible application of the technology. The mask did not ventilate his own breathe, so the high concentrations of nitrogen did not displace the oxygen and carbon dioxide fast enough to avoid the gasping asphyxiation reflex.
There were specific recommendations made by scientists. Either use a mask with a one-way valve that exhausts exhalation, or fill a chamber of sufficient volume that will render the concentrations of his own exhalation insignificant. Alabama did neither, and it was a disaster.
I think the problem was that they didn’t actually use a chamber and instead tried to use a mask, IIRC