Botched Execution in Alabama Reveals Nitrogen Hypoxia’s True Colors, and It Is Not a Pretty Picture

Nitrogen hypoxia is a failure as an execution methodology. It really works by depriving individuals of oxygen till they die in a ugly spectacle.

It’s simply the most recent in a sequence of fads within the ongoing and futile seek for a means of killing demise row inmates that may be secure, dependable, and humane. Electrocution, the fuel chamber, deadly injection, and now nitrogen hypoxia—every of them was launched with nice fanfare and the hope that they’d enable executions to proceed in a means that may soothe our conscience.

Every of them has been unable to ship on its promise, with nitrogen hypoxia, which was first used when Alabama put Kenneth Smith to demise in 2024, most lately becoming a member of the checklist.

Utilizing oxygen deprivation as a means for states to place individuals to demise was proposed thirty years in the past in a Nationwide Overview article entitled “Killing With Kindness: Capital Punishment by Nitrogen Asphyxiation.” Different sources agreed that nitrogen hypoxia would kill with kindness, together with a BBC documentary referred to as “Methods to Kill a Human Being“ and Slate’s Tom McNichol, who wrote a bit referred to as “Dying by Nitrogen“ in 2014.

In 2015, Oklahoma grew to become the primary state to incorporate it in its menu of execution strategies, however solely as a backup if it couldn’t perform deadly injections. On the time, Mike Christian, the state consultant who launched the laws, claimed, “The method is quick and painless…. It’s foolproof.”

Since then, 4 different states have adopted go well with, however solely two, Alabama and Louisiana, have truly used it.

Eight individuals have been killed by nitrogen hypoxia, seven in Alabama and one in Louisiana. Their executions have been neither quick nor painless. Actually, every execution by nitrogen hypoxia resulted in what Supreme Court docket Justice Sonia Sotomayor has referred to as “psychological terror” and “excruciating suffocation.”

The most recent passed off on October 23, when Alabama killed Anthony Boyd, a Black man who was convicted and sentenced to demise in 1995 for murdering Gregory Huguley. He didn’t fare any higher than others executed by nitrogen hypoxia.

What this implies is that the seek for a technological magic bullet with which to place individuals to demise has proved futile but once more. Doing the identical factor and anticipating a special end result isn’t solely the definition of madness; it’s, because the Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig writes, “absurd.”

Bruenig is true to say that “there is no such thing as a solution to kill somebody with out some component of torture, both psychological, bodily, or each.”

Now, with the reminiscence of Boyd’s demise nonetheless contemporary, it’s time to say no extra, no extra nitrogen hypoxia executions, no extra capital punishment.

Justice Sotomayor tried and did not persuade the conservative majority on the Supreme Court docket to spare Boyd from demise by nitrogen hypoxia and to permit him to die by the firing squad. She referred to as his request “the barest type of mercy.”

Having did not persuade them to grant it, she did America an actual service by providing a graphic description of the best way nitrogen hypoxia works in phrases all of us might perceive.

“Take out your telephone,” she wrote, “go to the clock app, and discover the stopwatch. Click on begin. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. On the thirty-second mark, your thoughts begins to wander. One minute passes, and you start to assume that that is taking a very long time. Two. . . . three. . . . The clock ticks on. Then, lastly, you make it to 4 minutes. Hit cease.”

“Now,” she requested her readers, “think about for that total time, you’re suffocating. You wish to breathe; it’s a must to breathe. However you’re strapped to a gurney with a masks in your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen fuel. Your thoughts is aware of that the fuel will kill you. However your physique retains telling you to breathe.”

Then, precisely predicting what would occur to Anthony Boyd, Justice Sotomayor continued, “For 2 to 4 minutes, Boyd will stay aware whereas the State of Alabama kills him on this means. When the fuel begins flowing, he’ll instantly convulse. He’ll gasp for air. And he’ll thrash violently in opposition to the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment till he lastly loses consciousness. Simply in need of twenty minutes later, Boyd can be declared lifeless.”

Sotomayor joined a protracted line of demise penalty critics who’ve tried to coach the general public in regards to the realities of execution within the hope that they’d be much less prone to assist capital punishment.

For instance, within the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, Supreme Court docket Justice Thurgood Marshall steered that if the American public have been absolutely knowledgeable in regards to the demise penalty, they’d reject it.

Fifteen years earlier, writing in regards to the guillotine, the French author Albert Camus argued, “If persons are proven the machine, made to the touch the wooden and metal and to listen to the sound of a head falling, then public creativeness, out of the blue woke up, would repudiate…the penalty.”

That’s why Justice Sotomayor supplied detailed descriptions in regards to the executions already carried out by nitrogen hypoxia. “Begin with Kenneth Eugene Smith,” she stated, “the primary particular person to be executed utilizing nitrogen hypoxia in our nation’s historical past. When the nitrogen fuel began flowing, Smith made ‘violent actions’ instantly as he ‘gasp[ed] for . . . air.’ His ‘toes and head left the gurney [and] his arms appeared to pressure in opposition to his restraints. Smith convulsed for about two to 4 minutes, shaking the gurney a number of instances. His spouse testified that it was like ‘watching somebody drown with out water.’”

Summarizing what occurred in every execution by nitrogen hypoxia, in every of them, “witnesses have reported related observations every time: obvious consciousness for minutes, not seconds; and violent convulsing, eyes bulging, constant thrashing in opposition to the restraints, and clear gasping for the air that won’t come.”

The Boyd execution adopted go well with.

Witnesses reported that when it began, “Boyd clenched his fist, raised his head off the gurney barely and commenced shaking. He then raised his legs off the gurney a number of inches…. [A few minutes later], he started a protracted sequence of heaving breaths that lasted at the least quarter-hour, earlier than changing into nonetheless.”

One in every of them, the Rev. Jeff Hood, Boyd’s non secular advisor, who stood close to him as he died and who was additionally on the first nitrogen fuel execution, characterised what he noticed as “the worst one but. I feel they’re completely incompetent on the subject of finishing up these executions.”

He stated, “he believed Boyd deliberate to attempt to talk by his leg actions. He stated he believed there was ‘some degree of consciousness, in my view, for at the least 16 minutes.’” Hood identified that “Alabama had promised nitrogen was a ‘fast, painless, straightforward type of execution and that is by far nothing anyplace near that.’”

Not surprisingly, state officers insisted that every little thing in Boyd’s execution had gone in keeping with plan.

If this is so, then they need us to hitch them in concluding that what occurred to Boyd is suitable. Earlier than we do, we should always keep in mind that how a society punishes reveals as a lot about those that impose it as those that obtain it.

All Individuals ought to learn Justice Sotomayor’s opinion and think about whether or not we wish to be the type of people that use an execution method that imposes “aware terror and psychological ache” and provides to the condemned particular person’s struggling after “it begins and whereas it’s being carried out to completion.”

Because the Justice put it, “Permitting the nitrogen hypoxia experiment to proceed regardless of mounting and unbroken proof that it violates the Structure by inflicting pointless struggling fails to “‘protec[t] [the] dignity’ of ‘the Nation we’ve been, the Nation we’re, and the Nation we aspire to be.’”