After being found guilty of shooting three people in 1999, American Alan Eugene Miller was scheduled to be the first person to be executed using nitrogen on September 22. However, a week before his scheduled execution, the US state of Alabama announced that it was not ready to carry out the nitrogen execution and would instead use the more traditional method of execution by syringe.
But on September 19, the Central Alabama District Court issued an injunction forbidding the state from using any method other than nitrogen to put Eugene Miller to death. This effectively means that Miller’s execution will be postponed until Alabama is prepared to execute prisoners using the new method.
Early in September, three academics complained to the UN on Miller’s behalf, claiming that the poison injection violated Miller’s rights because it makes the victim suffer agonising anguish before passing away.
Miller was to have been put to death by lethal injection less than three hours before the scheduled execution of the sentence when the Alabama Supreme Court accepted the state’s appeal of the injunction. However, the state announced that Miller’s sentence had been vacated in the early hours of September 23. the sentence was carried out but the execution was delayed because she was unable to locate a vein in Miller’s body through which to administer the lethal injection.
The significant changes in this case have sparked intense debate in the legal and medical communities about nitrogen execution, the protocols that must be followed to use this technique, the flaws of the poison injection, and the degree to which it violated human rights laws.
One of the academics who co-authored the UN complaint, anesthesiologist Joel Zivot of Emory University in Georgia, claims that the concept of nitrogen execution rests on asphyxiating the offender by forcing him to inhale pure nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen until he passes away.
According to Zyvot, who was mentioned by the scientific research website “Scientific American,” nitrogen is an inert gas that makes up roughly 78% of the air we breathe, meaning that it enters the body with each breath we take without causing any harm. Therefore, anyone can breathe pure nitrogen.
Anyone who is kept from breathing oxygen will die within minutes as his heart will simply cease beating. This is because the body’s cells and organs are deprived of the oxygen required to perform their work, even though they don’t immediately sense any problems.
2014 saw the first mention of nitrogen execution when Oklahoma Representative Mike Christian suggested it as a new method of applying the death penalty.
Michael Copeland, an assistant professor of criminal law at Ada University in Oklahoma, was the one who first came up with the concept.
According to Corinna Barrett-Lane, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has produced a book on the fatal injection, “the entire nitrogen lynching concept is the product of a 14-page report written by a criminal law scholar.” Link to a congressman” was spoken in reference to Rep. Mike Christian.
The term “nitrogen execution” is contentious in American legal and scientific circles.
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