Death Penalty News

Montgomery, Alabama — Alabama won't seek another lethal injection date for an inmate whose September execution had been halted because of problems establishing an intravenous line , according to the terms of a settlement agreement approved on Monday. The state agreed to never use lethal injection again as an execution method to put Alan Eugene Miller to death. Any future effort to execute Miller will be done by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method authorized in Alabama, but one that has never been used to carry out a death sentence in the U.S.  There is currently no protocol in place for using nitrogen hypoxia.   On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. approved the settlement agreement in a lawsuit brought by Miller seeking to prevent another lethal injection attempt.  Miller had argued that the state lost paperwork stating he picked nitrogen hypoxia as his execution method and then subjected him to torture during the failed execution attempt.  At the...

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey is seeking a pause in executions and ordering a “top-to-bottom” review of the state’s capital punishment system after an unprecedented third failed lethal injection BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey sought a pause in executions and ordered a “top-to-bottom” review of the state’s capital punishment system Monday after an unprecedented third failed lethal injection. Ivey’s office issued a statement saying she had both asked Attorney General Steve Marshall to withdraw motions seeking execution dates for two inmates and requested that the Department of Corrections undertake a full review of the state’s execution process. Ivey also requested that Marshall not seek additional execution dates for any other death row inmates until the review is complete. The move followed the uncompleted execution Thursday of Kenneth Eugene Smith , which was the state’s second such instance of being unable to put an inmate to death in the past two months and its third since 20...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama's string of troubled lethal injections, which worsened late Thursday as prison workers aborted another execution because of a problem with intravenous lines, is unprecedented nationally, a group that tracks capital punishment said Friday . The uncompleted execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith was the state's second such instance of being unable to kill an inmate in the past two months and its third since 2018. The state completed an execution in July, but only after a three-hour delay caused at least partly by the same problem with starting an IV line. A leader at the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death penalty group with a large database on executions, said no state other than Alabama has had to halt an execution in progress since 2017, when Ohio halted Alva Campbell's lethal injection because workers couldn't find a vein. According to Ngozi Ndulue, deputy director of the Washington-based group, the only other lethal injection stopped...

Alabama is asking a court to swiftly set a new execution date for an inmate who had his lethal injection called off last month after multiple failed attempts to connect an intravenous line to the man’s veins. The Alabama attorney general’s office in the Tuesday court filing asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set a new execution date for Alan Eugene Miller. The state did not give a timeframe, but asked the justices to take the matter up before deciding a pending execution date request involving another inmate. The Alabama Department of Corrections attempted to put Miller to death on Sept 22, but officials called off the lethal injection after the execution team was unable to connect the intravenous line. The state faced a midnight deadline to get the execution underway before the death warrant expired. Miller, 57, was sentenced to death after being convicted of a 1999 workplace rampage in which he killed Terry Jarvis, Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy. RELATED | Who’s to blame for Alabama...

Maybe it’s too much to ask the state of Alabama to stop killing people. It’s like asking a dope addict to quit cold turkey. And besides, “right to life” has as much wiggle room around here as “bless your heart.” So maybe the best we can ask is that the state stop torturing people. I know, I know. Alabama has a long and illustrative history of killing those who did wrong, or looked wrong when they did it, or looked like they prolly did it. We used to hang people from trees, because mobs with torches and hoods were convinced some other human had to be the bad guy. The state figured it was more humane to wait until people were convicted by a jury – though in truth it rarely questioned the racial or ethical makeup of those juries – and in 1927 began to strap convicted killers into a death chair, to wait ‘til midnight and zap ‘em with 2,000 volts of electricity. Alabama loved that so much it gave its electric chair a nickname – “Yellow Mama.” You probably remember that name, if not any of t...

Alabama has trouble executing people. That trouble has caused some experts to call for a halt on executions until the state can figure out how to do it better. Some episodes take hours. One man seemed unconscious the whole time. Another was called off due to hours of punctures that never resulted in setting up the intravenous line for the procedure. The latest took so long that the state was afraid the death warrant would expire before they could get the execution going and had to call it off. The state’s troubles executing inmates have put a national spotlight on Alabama. And perhaps no challenge has been greater than finding a vein to start the three-drug lethal injection mixture. The details of the lethal injection execution process are a state secret. The only glimpse into it has been when something goes wrong and the Alabama Department of Corrections makes a statement, or when a judge orders the release of certain documents. In the most recent case of Alan Eugene Miller’s failed e...

A legal battle over nitrogen hypoxia, a new potential method of execution, raises ethical questions Alan Eugene Miller, who killed 3 men in workplace shootings in 1999, was scheduled to be the 1st person executed by nitrogen hypoxia—a new method never before used for the death penalty—on September 22. But a week before his execution, the state of Alabama admitted it was not prepared to go forward with the procedure and would use lethal injection instead. On September 19 the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama issued a preliminary injunction barring the state from killing Miller by any means other than nitrogen hypoxia, essentially amounting to a stay of execution until the state was ready to administer the new method. Earlier this month three academics filed a human rights complaint with the United Nations on Miller’s behalf regarding Alabama’s use of lethal injection, which has been criticized as inhumane for causing excessive suffering. Less than 3 hours before Mil...

Alabama offered death-row inmates an untested method of execution — and then went back to the even worse option The state of Alabama wants to kill Alan Miller. But it is having a hard time getting its act together to do so. On Sept. 12, Alabama made headlines when it announced that it would use nitrogen hypoxia to put Miller to death. It had added this method to its execution arsenal in 2018, making Alabama one of just three states (along with Mississippi and Oklahoma) to authorize it. But none of them has yet to use it in an execution. Nitrogen hypoxia is a new and so far hypothetical method of administering capital punishment in which the air someone breathes is replaced with 100 percent nitrogen. As a CBC report explains, this will "deprive the person of the oxygen needed to maintain bodily functions," presumably leading to a rapid and painless death. Three days after that announcement, Alabama abruptly reversed course and said it would use lethal injection to execute Mill...