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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.

Missouri executes David Hosier

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David Hosier, who maintained innocence in 2009 murders of Angela and Rodney Gilpin, pronounced dead at 6.11pm

Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday night, the state’s second lethal injection carried out this year.

David Hosier, 69, was pronounced dead at 6.11pm following a single-dose injection of the sedative pentobarbital at the state prison in Bonne Terre, said Missouri corrections department spokeswoman Karen Pojmann via text message.

Hosier has maintained his innocence in the 2009 murders of a couple, Angela and Rodney Gilpin, and two Missouri Congress members called for the execution to be halted earlier this week.

“I’ve been able to speak the truth of my innocence,” Hosier said in a written statement before his execution, NBC News reported. “I’ve been able to reminisce with family and friends new and old. I’ve been able to learn to be the fullest version of me … I leave you all with love.”

Hosier has acknowledged that he had an affair with Angela Gilpin, telling the Associated Press that she ended the relationship and got back together with her husband. The couple was fatally shot near the doorway of their apartment in Jefferson City, the state capital, in September 2009.

Police said Hosier had made comments threatening to kill Angela Gilpin prior to the shooting and that authorities later found in the woman’s purse an application for a protective order that referenced fears Hosier could harm her and her husband.

Hosier was arrested in Oklahoma and had weapons in his car, though ballistic tests on the weapons were inconclusive.

Lawyers for Hosier focused on the defendant’s traumatic childhood in his clemency petition, which Missouri governor Mike Parson rejected on Monday. The petition noted that Hosier’s father, Glen Hosier, was murdered when he was 16 years old. His father was a detective sergeant with the Indiana state police and was fatally shot on the job by a man he was trying to arrest.

Hosier previously served in the US Navy and worked as a firefighter and EMT. His lawyers noted that prosecutors had at one point offered a plea deal for life in prison without parole: “It seems that if the prosecutor thought such a sentence was appropriate given all the facts, such a sentence should now be seriously considered,” the clemency petition said.

In recent interviews with the AP and NBC News, Hosier has criticized his lawyers for focusing on his childhood, saying he had asked them to prioritize his innocence claim, including the lack of DNA evidence at the crime scene: “I will maintain that ’till the day they stick a needle in my arm and kill me. I’ll still be innocent, even though I’m dead,” he told the news station.

Larry Komp, one of Hosier’s federal public defenders, criticized the governor’s decision to allow the execution to move forward, saying in a statement: “It sends the wrong message to execute and marginalize a veteran and an individual harmed by the tragedy of his father being killed in the line of duty, which spun his life into a different direction. The context of his life history with the paucity of evidence related to his guilt makes this a compounding of tragedies, nothing is gained by killing him.”

The Republican governor, a former sheriff, has overseen ten executions since 2018. In a statement on Monday, Parson said Hosier “displays no remorse for his senseless violence”, adding: “For these heinous acts, Hosier earned maximum punishment under the law.”

The execution follows the widely criticized lethal injection of Brian Dorsey in Missouri in April. Dorsey was sentenced to death for murdering his cousin and her husband in 2006, but his clemency petition was supported by more than 70 current and former prison staff, Republican lawmakers, jurors and an appeals judge who had upheld the death sentence. That judge said he regretted his decision.

A total of 24 people were executed in the US last year, with capital punishments carried out in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama. A Gallup poll last year found that half of Americans now believe the death penalty is carried out unfairly in the US.

Source: The Guardian, Sam Levin, The Associated Press, June 12, 2024

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde



Location: Missouri, USA
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