Alabama is seeking to put a second inmate to death using nitrogen gas, a move that comes a month after the state carried out the first execution using the controversial new method.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office asked the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to set an execution date for Alan Eugene Miller. The state said Miller’s execution would be carried out using nitrogen. Miller, now 59, was convicted of killing three people during a pair of 1999 workplace shootings in suburban Birmingham.
“The State of Alabama is prepared to carry out the execution of Miller’s sentence by means of nitrogen hypoxia,” the attorney general’s office wrote, adding that Miller has been on death row since 2000 and that it is time to carry out his sentence.
Nitrogen Asphyxiation in the workplace is insanely dangerous specifically because humans (and most animals) don’t have a way to detect nitrogen displacement…
The body detects hypoxia by build up of CO2, or more accurately carbonic acid, not loss of O2 - it doesn’t expect for nitrogen to be the thing to displace all the oxygen, so you literally don’t notice it. There’s countless stories of people fainting and dying due to not realising the situation they were in.
So how in fuck’s name did Alabama manage to botch it so badly that the first guy had an agonising death via seizure?? It takes a special kind of neglect to make that happen.