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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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First nitrogen execution was a ‘botched’ human experiment, Alabama lawsuit alleges

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MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama death row inmate filed a lawsuit Thursday that challenges the constitutionality of nitrogen gas executions, arguing that the first person in the nation put to death by that method shook violently for several minutes in “a human experiment that officials botched miserably.”

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Alabama alleges the January execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen gas was torturous and “cannot be allowed to be repeated.” 

The lawsuit says descriptions from witnesses that Smith shook and convulsed contradicted the state’s promises to federal judges that nitrogen would provide a quick and humane death.

“The results of the first human experiment are now in and they demonstrate that nitrogen gas asphyxiation is neither quick nor painless, but agonizing and painful,” attorney Bernard E. Harcourt wrote in the lawsuit. 



The lawsuit was filed on behalf of death row inmate David Phillip Wilson, who was sentenced to death after he was convicted of killing a man during a 2004 burglary.

The lawsuit seeks a declaratory judgment that the current nitrogen gas asphyxiation protocol violates the inmate’s constitutional right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

Source: The Associated Press, Kim Chandler, February 15, 2024

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