Death Penalty News

MONTGOMERY, Ala.  — The execution of Anthony Boyd by nitrogen gas in Alabama on Thursday marked the longest use of the untested method in U.S. history, stretching nearly 40 minutes amid convulsions, labored breathing and witness accounts of prolonged agony.  At 37 minutes from the start of the procedure until death was declared, Boyd's final moments have reignited fierce debates over whether the oxygen-deprivation technique — touted by states as a painless alternative to lethal injection — constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The author, a medical ethicist and practicing physician, argues that when executions fail to cause death within five minutes, the Constitution requires immediate medical resuscitation—even if it means saving the life of a condemned prisoner... “It’s hurting so bad,” Byron Black said five minutes after the State of Tennessee initiated his execution last month. The 69-year-old’s anguished words echoed through the death chamber as a device designed to save lives may have prolonged his dying, creating the very cruelty the Constitution forbids.

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT The practice of execution has been around since the days of ancient civilisations, and, as uncomfortable as it may be to think about, this punishment is still handed out in various countries around the world today. Capital punishment for murder was suspended in the UK as recently as 1965, within living memory.  Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans became the last prisoners to be executed on British soil on August 13, 1964, with the pair hanged at separate prisons in Manchester and Liverpool for the murder of John Alan West. Since then, there have been frequent calls to bring back the death penalty, which some supporters believe to be an effective deterrent against the most despicable crimes. Those on the other side of the debate believe capital punishment to be an inhumane measure, often citing the numerous instances where convicts have faced agonising deaths.

An autopsy report for a South Carolina man executed with the state’s lethal injection protocol raises more questions about whether the process is an unusually cruel and painful method of execution. Marion Bowman Jr. was executed on Jan. 31. The Dorchester County native, who was convicted of shooting and killing 21-year-old Kandee Martin in 2001, chose to die by lethal injection, which in South Carolina is carried out by a single drug, pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.  

(NEW YORK) — Alabama is set to perform the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday. Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis. Miller was to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Missouri’s execution protocol allows for “surgery without anesthesia” if the typical process of finding a suitable vein to inject the lethal drug doesn’t work, lawyers for a death row inmate say in an appeal aimed at sparing his life. Brian Dorsey, 52, is scheduled for execution Tuesday for killing his cousin and her husband at their central Missouri home in 2006. His attorneys are seeking clemency from Gov. Mike Parson and have several appeals pending.

After it intersected with his job as an anesthesiologist, Dr. Joel Zivot devoted years to studying the death penalty. Now, he's concerned about a new form of execution, nitrogen hypoxia, which was used in Alabama for the first time in January. Dr. Joel Zivot first began researching the death penalty 12 years ago when it suddenly affected his day job. As an anesthesiologist in the ICU at Emory University Hospital, Zivot frequently used the drug sodium thiopental. But in 2011, the drug disappeared from the market and caused a drastic shortage in ICUs across the country. When Zivot looked into the cause of the shortage, he found the drug was pulled by manufacturer Hospira after they couldn’t promise the European Union—who threatened to ban the export of lethal injection drugs—that sodium thiopental wasn’t used for executions. “I felt outraged that this drug I used to heal could also be involved in [lethal injection],” says Zivot.

Experts from the United Nations have called on the United States to halt what would be the nation’s first execution by nitrogen gas, warning that it could cause severe suffering and possibly be considered torture. The state of Alabama plans to put Kenneth Eugene Smith to death on January 25 using nitrogen hypoxia, or asphyxiation, by depriving the condemned prisoner of oxygen by having him breathe pure nitrogen gas.

On January 25, Alabama intends to put Kenneth Smith to death using nitrogen hypoxia as its method of execution. If it does so it will be the first time that this method has been used in an American execution. Alabama’s plan is just the latest chapter in a long-running American saga of efforts to find a foolproof execution technology . That saga has carried us from hanging to the electric chair, from the electric chair to the gas chamber, from the gas chamber to lethal injection, and now to nitrogen hypoxia.

The state of Alabama plans to execute a prisoner in January using nitrogen hypoxia, a process so novel and untested that state officials required the man's spiritual adviser to sign a waiver that said he could be exposed to the gas. The acknowledgment form, exclusively obtained by NPR, also reveals that the spiritual adviser, Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, is required to stay at least three feet away from the prisoner, which may violate both their religious liberties.

Since its advent more than 40 years ago, lethal injection has become by far the most common method of enacting capital punishment in the United States, accounting for the vast majority of executions since the penalty was reinstated in 1976. The US government and 27 states reserve the death penalty for those deemed the worst of the worst. Convicted of particularly heinous crimes, inmates are typically put to death after their appeals run out, often a yearslong process that regularly reaches the US Supreme Court – which has found lethal injection constitutional and not a violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

A ruling Thursday by the Alabama Supreme Court moved the state closer to executing an inmate in a way no state has ever done. Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia method, five years in the making, would use a gas mask to cause death. It is an alternative to the state’s standard method, lethal injection. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air people breathe. Almost all the rest, 21%, is oxygen. With nitrogen hypoxia, the inmate would breathe pure nitrogen and no oxygen until they die.

In August 2023, Alabama released the first-ever execution protocol for nitrogen hypoxia, an untested execution method in which prisoners will be put to death by suffocation as they are forced to breathe pure nitrogen gas. Alabama’s heavily redacted protocol provides that prisoners will be fitted with a mask and breathing tube to control the gas, which will slowly deprive them of oxygen. However, use of this untested method may also pose dangers to spiritual advisors and prison staff in the execution chamber.

When the supply of drugs used for lethal injections began to run out, a couple of prison guards in the US had to go out and find another source. For over 20 years, Randy Workman was the man who walked people to their death. As a senior corrections officer in the state of Oklahoma, he personally participated in 32 executions in various roles, including escorting prisoners, selecting executioners and sourcing lethal injection drugs. "You could tell the moment they expired. You watch enough of them, you can just tell immediately they were gone," he told the BBC.

Nitrogen hypoxia is the gaseous canister version of a knee on the neck. US states that plan to use it must be stopped. Recently, the Department of Corrections of the state of Alabama announced it would try to execute death row prisoner Kenny Smith for a second time, this time with something they call nitrogen hypoxia. On November 17, 2022, Alabama tried and failed to execute Smith with lethal injection owing to an inability to establish intravenous access. My own research has shown that death by lethal injection involves choking on your own blood about 80 percent of the time. Yet, as bad as that sounds, execution by nitrogen gas will actually be worse.

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURERS are refusing to sell their products for use in lethal injection, The Intercept has learned. The stance could further hinder states’ ability to carry out death sentences at a time when similar restrictions have limited access to drugs. The four companies that have raised objections are Baxter International Inc., B. Braun Medical Inc., Fresenius Kabi, and Johnson & Johnson. In addition to manufacturing drugs, they make IV catheters, syringes, medical tubing, and IV bags, products states rely on to administer lethal injection. In statements to The Intercept, the companies said that the use of their equipment in executions contradicts their values.

Alabama is in line to become the first state to execute an inmate by making him breathe pure nitrogen, but death penalty experts have told Newsweek that the state's protocol is "sloppy" and labeled it "short on details, and long on hope." Nitrogen hypoxia has been authorized as an execution method in three states—Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi—but none have ever used the method to carry out a death sentence. That could change if Alabama is allowed to use nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Smith—a man who was subjected to a botched lethal injection last year. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall in August asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set an execution date for Smith using nitrogen hypoxia as the method. Smith, 58, was convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of Elizabeth Sennett.

Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution , having endured an aborted lethal injection last November during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture. Nine months later Smith has been singled out for another undesirable distinction. If the state of Alabama has its way, he will become the test dummy for an execution method that has never before been used in judicial killings and which veterinarians consider unacceptable as a form of euthanasia for animals – death by nitrogen gas.

"Nitrogen hypoxia" is the latest brilliant idea in the ugly history of supposedly painless execution methods The state of Alabama now says it is ready to try again to put Kenneth Smith to death . Smith has twice been convicted of murdering a woman named Elizabeth Sennett in 1988, in an apparent contract killing arranged by her husband.. On Nov. 17, 2022, Alabama officials tried to execute Smith by lethal injection , but were forced to abandon the attempt when the execution team failed repeatedly to insert the IV necessary to carry the lethal chemicals. That was the third time since 2018 that the state had failed to complete an execution.

Some argue nitrogen hypoxia is a painless way to kill, but critics fear there's not enough evidence. A new execution method could potentially soon be used for the first time in the US: nitrogen hypoxia. While its proponents argue it is a humane and effective means of capital punishment, its critics say there’s simply not enough evidence to justify its use. Nitrogen hypoxia involves forcing a person to breathe pure nitrogen gas, starving them of oxygen until they die. Although the exact protocols have not yet been drawn up, there is some idea of what they might entail: “The protocol would likely involve placing some type of mask over the condemned inmate’s head and pumping it full of 100 percent nitrogen, thereby depriving that person of oxygen. The inmate would die not by suffocation, which is caused by an inability to exhale and a subsequent (and very painful) buildup of carbon dioxide in the body, but rather by becoming gradually oxygen-deprived, which is essentially painless,” ...