Hamstrung by troubles with lethal injection - gruesomely botched attempts, legal battles and growing difficulty obtaining drugs - states are looking for alternative ways to carry out the death penalty. High on the list for some is a method that has never been used before: inhaling nitrogen gas.
Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi have authorized nitrogen for executions and are developing protocols to use it, which represents a leap into the unknown. There is no scientific data on executing people with nitrogen, leading some experts to question whether states, in trying to solve old problems, may create new ones.
“If and when states begin carrying out executions with nitrogen, it will amount to the same type of experimentation we see in the different variations of lethal injection,” said Jen Moreno, a lawyer who is an expert on lethal injection at the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic.
With some 2,750 inmates on death row in 31 states and in federal and military prisons, any jurisdiction that tries something new will be scrutinized as a test lab.
The push for change comes because lethal injection, introduced 40 years ago as more efficient and humane than the electric chair or gas chamber, has not met that promise. Indeed, it has sometimes resulted in spectacles that rival the ones it was meant to avert.
One pitfall is that execution teams must find a vein to infuse, a process that can be excruciating. In February, an Alabama execution team gave up after trying for more than two hours on an inmate whose blood vessels had been damaged by chemotherapy and drug abuse. His lawyer accused the team of opening an artery and puncturing the prisoner’s bladder. The state later said it would not try again to execute him.
Nitrogen itself is not poisonous, but someone who inhales it, with no air, will pass out quickly, probably in less than a minute, and die soon after - from lack of oxygen. The same is true of other physiologically inert gases, including helium and argon, which kill only by replacing oxygen.
- nytimes.com