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U.S. | Execution by nitrogen hypoxia doesn’t seem headed for widespread adoption as bills fall short and nitrogen producers object

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The day after Alabama carried out the first-known US execution using nitrogen gas, its attorney general sent a clear message to death penalty states that might want to follow suit: “Alabama has done it, and now so can you.” Indeed, in the weeks immediately following the January execution of Kenneth Smith, it appeared a handful of states were listening, introducing bills that would adopt the method known as nitrogen hypoxia or a similar one. Officials behind each framed the legislation as an alternative method that could help resume executions where they had long been stalled.

Georgia: Mark McClain executed

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Condemned inmate Mark McClain was killed by lethal injection at 7:24 p.m. tonight in Jackson.

McClain, 42, was sentenced to death by a Richmond County jury for the 1994 murder of a Richmond County Domino's Pizza store manager, Kevin Brown. The 28-year-old was shot once in the chest for the $130 in his till.

McClain acknowledged shooting Brown, but said it was unintentional. Jurors sided with the prosecution, who labeled McClain an experienced criminal who "preferred to kill."

Both the U.S. and the Georgia Supreme courts denied a stay of execution earlier Tuesday. McClain's attorney, Brian Kammer, called it "an intolerable result which institutionalizes a fundamental arbitrariness within Georgia's capital punishment system."

Capital punishment opponents held vigils outside the prison and around the state.

"[W]e ask the state not to respond by taking another life and forcing another family to experience that same loss and grief," said James Clark, coordinator of Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

McClain declined a special last meal, choosing instead to have the dinner served to other inmates at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison -- chicken and rice, carrots, beans, cornbread and bread pudding.

McClain was the third person executed in Georgia this year and the 45th since 1983, when the resumed executions once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital punishment to be constitutional.

Georgia juries convicted 55 people of committing a murder during an armed robbery in 1995. Prosecutors sought the death penalty in 16 of those cases, but McClain was the only one sentenced to die.

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 20, 2009
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