Alabama calls nitrogen execution method 'painless' and 'humane,' but critics raise doubts
Alabama calls nitrogen execution method 'painless' and 'humane,' but critics raise doubts
Alabama intends to put a man to death with nitrogen gas this week unless stopped by the courts. It would be the nation's first execution attempt with the method.
Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney Thursday and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method.
The Alabama attorney general’s office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” But what exactly Smith, 58, will feel after the warden switches on the gas is unknown, some doctors and critics say.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
Keller, who was not involved in developing the Alabama protocol, said the plan is to “eliminate all of the oxygen from the air” that Smith is breathing by replacing it with nitrogen.
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I want to recap the long sequence of events that has led up to this point:
- In the beginning of this narrative, every death penalty state was doing lethal injections with a three drug protocol.
- Italy and maybe some other European nations start arresting pharmaceutical executives and charging them with murder, because their drugs are being used for these lethal injections in the United States.
- Drug companies stop selling their drugs to state penitentiaries. States are not able to perform executions.
- Death penalty states start amending their protocols to switch to different drugs and sometimes a single dose barbiturate protocol.
- Those drugs become harder and harder to source. Pharma companies become completely unwilling to dispense the drugs at all. State legislatures start allowing corrections officials to change the protocol without amending state law, in an effort to keep up.
- States resort to buying drugs from shady compounding pharmacies in secret. Having prison guards write dosage protocols turns out to have been a bad idea. Because, guess what, anesthesiologists are a highly compensated medical specialty, because what they do is highly complicated. So some exit l executions are botched, which delays things even more.
- It's in this environment that this nitrogen idea migrates from internet boards into the state legislatures.
The big picture here is that if execution remains legal, but you take away all the options, death penalty states will go looking for alternative options.
This is super interesting and I'd love it if you had some sources I could follow. Trying to dig but Google is useless these days.