After Alabama became the first state to execute a death row prisoner via nitrogen gas in January, the state is set to perform the second-ever execution on Thursday.

Alabama is set to perform the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday.

Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis.

Miller was to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.

  • @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
    1•3 months ago

    Assuming that “concern” was in good faith in the first place. I believe it was a bad faith pretext for not venting the gas because it’s a well known fact that nitrogen makes up a significant portion of the atmosphere. If they were really worried about the nitrogen displacing enough oxygen to be dangerous, I can think of several ways to eliminate that risk even if I play along and accept that it’s possible.

    1. Vent the room. Or use a large room and a fan.
    2. Place oxygen meters in the room that sound an alarm if oxygen drops below 20%.
    3. Give oxygen masks to anyone who needs to be in the room.
    • @chaogomu@lemmy.world
      2•3 months ago

      Instead they went with the stupidest and most cruel option. Make sure there’s no ventilation on the mask, and that it had a tight seal before turning on the gas. A gas they were treating like a deadly poison.

      And since there was no ventilation at all, there was no gas flow. There was no oxygen displacement. Just the CO2 buildup.