Three major nitrogen gas manufacturers told the Guardian https://tinyurl.com/vjtyr732 earlier this month that they have taken steps to ensure that corrections departments in the U.S. cannot obtain their nitrogen cylinders for use in executions. Airgas, owned by the French company Air Liquide, spearheaded the effort, which was joined by Matheson and Air Products.
According to the Guardian, Airgas publicly stated in 2019 that “supplying nitrogen for the purposes of execution was not consistent with its values.” The paper reports that Matheson echoed that stance, telling the Guardian that supplying nitrogen gas for executions “was not consistent with our company values.” And Air Products said it formally prohibits the use of its nitrogen gas “for the intentional killing of any person.”
“We applaud this action by the nitrogen gas manufacturers and are hopeful other manufacturers will follow,” DPF Board President Mike Farrell stated. “Much as the pharmaceutical companies barred their drugs from being used in lethal injections, making it difficult for the death penalty states to execute people by lethal injection, barring this new method is another humane effort by corporations to stop state killing in the U.S.”
In January, Alabama executed Kenneth Smith with nitrogen gas, the first time the method had ever been used on a human being. State Attorney General Steve Marshall boasted afterward that Smith’s execution was quick and “textbook” and proved that “nitrogen hypoxia as a means of execution is no longer an untested method. It is a proven one.” But the five reporters chosen by the Corrections Department to witness the execution told a very different story. In his newsletter, https://www.treadbylee.com/p/never-alone-the-suffocation-of-kenneth, “Tread,” Lee Hedgepeth, one of the witnesses, writes that as the nitrogen began flowing into Smith’s mask, “He began thrashing against the straps, his whole body and head violently jerking back and forth for several minutes. He convulsed, [and] appeared to be heaving and retching inside the mask.” He said Smith “continued to gasp for air” and “his body lifted against the restraints” before he died ten minutes after the execution began.
“What these bloodthirsty lawmakers can’t seem to understand is that there is no just way of killing a human being against their will It’s a brutal and violent act, no matter what method you use,” says Farrell.
State AG Marshall is undeterred, however. He asked the state Supreme Court to set a date for Alan Eugene Miller to be killed by nitrogen hypoxia. Miller was sentenced to death for the killing of three people in 1999. If the Court sets a date, this will be Alabama’s second attempt to kill him. Corrections officials tried to execute him by lethal injection for over an hour in 2022 but were unable to find a usable vein. After that botched attempt, the state and Miller’s lawyers agreed that any further attempts to execute him would not be by lethal injection.
In the meantime, a lawyer for another man on Alabama’s death row has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s new method of execution by nitrogen gas. It was filed by a lawyer for David Wilson, who has been on Alabama’s death row since 2008. Bernard Harcourt is all too familiar with Alabama’s history of botched executions. The state’s attempt to kill his client, Doyle Lee Hamm, in 2018 was called off after a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal that was so botched it “almost certainly punctured Doyle’s bladder because he was urinating blood for the next day. They may have hit his femoral artery as well, because suddenly, there was a lot of blood gushing out. There were multiple puncture wounds on the ankles, calf, and right groin area, around a dozen,” Harcourt wrote in a blog post at the time.
Alabama, “by any metric is the least competent state at carrying out executions in this country,” Wilson’s lawsuit states. It “engaged in human experimentation” last month when it executed Kenneth Smith “by means of a nitrogen gas-mask asphyxiation method that had never been used before in human history,” the lawsuit states.
Wilson doesn’t have an execution date. He was sentenced to death in 2008, in a 10-2 jury vote, for the 2004 murder of Dewey Walker during a burglary.
