Alabama gets state supreme court OK to use nitrogen in upcoming execution

The Alabama Supreme Court voted 6-2 on Wednesday to approve the use of nitrogen hypoxia to execute prisoners. The court’s ruling put Alabama at the front of the line of states that want to use nitrogen instead of lethal injection to put a prisoner to death.

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The all-Republican court delivered its split decision with no comment, the Associated Press reported. The decision comes after a botched attempt on Sept. 22 to execute Alan Eugene Miller, who killed three men in workplace shootings in 1999. The week before Miller’s execution, the state admitted it was unready to deploy the nitrogen method and reverted to lethal injection, which failed.

In the early morning of Sept. 23, officials had to call off Miller’s execution because they were unable to insert two needles necessary for lethal injection. The execution is expected to be rescheduled.

The high court’s ruling makes Kenneth Eugene Smith, whose first execution was also aborted, next in line for nitrogen execution for the 1988 murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Senne, a pastor’s wife who was beaten and stabbed. He confessed to his role in the crime.

Smith’s lawyers have objected to their client being the first to undergo “an experimental, never-before-used method and with a protocol that has never been fully disclosed to him or his counsel,” according to the AP.

Smith was set to be executed in November 2022, but again, the state called off the execution because workers could not properly insert the needles.

The nitrogen hypoxia method has received criticism from members of the medical community and human rights advocates. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Emory University, co-authored a human rights complaint against the method, according to Scientific American.

Nitrogen hypoxia is not a medical term, Zivot said, but a means of giving a scientific-sounding term to what amounts to suffocating a person by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen and starving them of oxygen until they die.

“There is nitrogen gas—that’s a real thing. There’s hypoxia—that means low oxygen. ... But ‘nitrogen hypoxia’ is a made-up two-word expression meant to sound like you’re on the bridge of the starship Enterprise,” he said, referring to the spaceship of “Star Trek” fame.

Instead, Zivot recommends calling the procedure “nitrogen gas execution,” Scientific American reported.