Death Penalty News

The state is using a new untested method that’s prompted backlash. A controversial Alabama execution taking place on Thursday has reignited scrutiny of the death penalty and highlighted the enduring nature of the practice despite attempts to end it. Physicians and human rights experts have condemned the execution — which relies on an untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia — because there are concerns it could be painful and inhumane. 

The U.S. Supreme Court did not intervene to stop the nation’s first execution by nitrogen hypoxia — a move that all three justices of the court’s liberal wing opposed. “With deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment, I respectfully dissent,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent issued Thursday afternoon regarding the then-pending execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith. Smith, 58, was put to death Thursday night.

The Alabama Department of Corrections announced Tuesday night that it will deny Kenny Smith all solid food for up to 20 hours starting at 10 am on Thursday, January 25, the day of his scheduled execution. The change was announced after lawyers reported that Mr. Smith has been vomiting continuously for several days. The vomiting is likely due to post-traumatic stress disorder, they explained, caused by Alabama’s first failed attempt to execute Mr. Smith.

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...

Oklahoma will soon begin executing death row inmates at a pace of about 1 man per month, with plans to put to death 25 prisoners over the next 2 years despite cries by critics and experts who point not only to outstanding questions of the mental fitness or possible innocence of some but also the state’s recent history of botched lethal injections. “It’s just yet one more reckless move by Oklahoma,” Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor, told CNN of the state’s scheduled execution timetable, which she said is in line with its staunch, decadeslong record of capital punishment. “If there was going to be any state that was going to do something so obviously irresponsible and unjust … it would be the state of Oklahoma, given the history.” James Coddington is the 1st scheduled to be executed on August 25. He would have been followed about a month later by Richard Glossip, who has maintained his innocence and on Tuesday got a 60-day stay of execution so an appeals court can comple...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Scott Crow (pictured), who helped oversee the state’s return to carrying out the death penalty after a nearly seven-year hiatus, announced Monday he’s stepping down. In a statement announcing his resignation, Crow did not cite a reason for stepping down, but called it “one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever encountered.” Crow, who was appointed director by Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2019 following nearly 25 years with the agency, helped oversee the state’s return to carrying out lethal injections.  In 2020, he joined Stitt and then-Attorney General Mike Hunter in announcing that the state had secured a source for the lethal injection drugs and planned to move forward with executions that were put on hold following a series of death-chamber mishaps. Crow was inside the death chamber for the last four lethal injections in Oklahoma, including the October 2021 execution of John Marion Grant who convulsed and vomited on th...

On July 2, Oklahoma announced a plan to execute 25 inmates over the next 29 months. The first is scheduled for Aug. 25, with subsequent executions every 4 weeks. If Oklahoma sticks to this schedule, more than 1/2 of the inmates currently on its death row will be dead by the end of 2024. The state’s planned execution spree is unprecedented in its history, but it rivals similar ones in states like Texas and Arkansas, and in the federal death penalty under former President Trump. Turning on the spigot after a long period with no or few executions is a familiar pattern in America’s death penalty system. But in the rush to execute, whether in Oklahoma or elsewhere, errors inevitably will be made, and injustices tolerated rather than addressed. In fact, all of the glaring errors in the American death penalty system will be horribly on view if these executions go forward — punishment of those who are disabled or mentally ill, botched executions, proceedings where legal counsel has been inadeq...

A legal battle in Oklahoma over whether prisoners feel severe pain after being given the sedative, midazolam, will determine whether its use is constitutional. The status of executions across the country has been in turmoil for more than a decade, ever since pharmaceutical companies began halting their delivery of the most widely used drugs for executions. State prison systems were left to create cocktails of the drugs they could still get their hands on, often relying on one sedative in particular, midazolam, to start the execution process. But the lethal new formulations have led to legal challenges across the country, with death row prisoners and their lawyers arguing that the sedative now in use in about a half-dozen states is ineffective at its primary purpose : keeping prisoners from feeling pain as they die. The first full trial on the challenges to midazolam played out this past week in Oklahoma, where a prisoner vomited and shook for several minutes after he was injected with...

At trial, he was called "Dr. Doe." That's not his real name, of course. By state law, the identity of the physician hired by the Corrections Department to participate in executions is kept confidential, even in court proceedings. Once the lethal injection process begins, he has 2 main roles — to check if an inmate is unconscious and to check if the inmate has died. How well he fulfills the first role was at issue last week at the trial in Oklahoma City federal court over the lethal injection procedure. More than 2 dozen inmates are asking U.S. District Stephen Friot to rule the state's protocol is in violation of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Their attorneys specifically complain about the first drug, the sedative midazolam. They say it does not prevent inmates from feeling excruciating pain during the the rest of the procedure. RELATED | Does Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol lead to cruel and unusual punishment? A feder...

Botched executions are a repeated feature of the death penalty system in the United States. But from listening to the after-the-fact accounts of state officials, you would never know. They seem to have developed a shared vocabulary for reassuring the public that there was nothing to see or worry about, even when an execution goes wrong. Take the case of John Marion Grant, put to death by the state of Oklahoma in October of last year. This week an autopsy report was released that revealed just how badly botched his execution was and just how absurd was Oklahoma’s head-in-the-sand response to it. Grant’s execution made headlines when witnesses provided disturbing eyewitness accounts of his suffering. Dan Snyder, a local television reporter and one of the five media members present, offered a minute-by-minute account of what happened. Snyder reported that shortly after the start of the midazolam, the first drug in Oklahoma’s drug cocktail, things started going wrong. Midazolam is a se...