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.

  • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    Alabama this week:

    “All life is sacred in the eyes of God!!!”

    “Gas that motherfucker til his eyes bleed!!”

    • zcd@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      But not in a chamber or anything, we’re gonna fuck it up with a mask and bottles of nitrogen and shit

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        6 months ago

        I’m an opponent of the death penalty in general, but I’ve always felt that if a state is going to execute someone anyway and I can’t stop that then at least they should be using inert gas asphyxiation. Because only a drooling moron could possibly mess that up and cause the process to be painful somehow.

        Alabama once again manages to impress.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      I mean, we could, maybe not be killing people, but that failing, if they do it right the victim just euphorically slumbers away into death. It’s not that hard you just give them nitrogen to breathe. How the f*** can they screw this up?

      • normalexit@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        6 months ago

        I always thought suicide bags with nitrogen or helium were the way to go. I didn’t read why the last guy had such a miserable death, but I did read it wasn’t pretty.

        I feel like they could put someone under some anesthesia and finish the job with the gas. Or even better, don’t kill people, like you said.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    6 months ago

    Looks like Alabama is run by non-intelligent life forms. Because one key feature of intelligence is to be able to learn from past mistakes.

  • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      They put him in a mask instead of a sealed room. The mask filled with CO2, and may have not had a perfect seal due to thrashing as he struggled to breathe.

      • Rakonat@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        6 months ago

        There are ways the masks could have worked but really to do this kind of thing humanly you need a sealed chamber with enough volume for CO2 to diffuse into or some kind of scrubber at the bottom pulling air out and displaced with pure N2 at the top.

        It’s difficult to tell if they are using the setup they are because of incompetence trying to seek out the cheapest solution, or malice and using the cheapest solution that will cause the maximum agony and suffering. It’s pretty bad when bringing back hanging would be a more humane way of executing people than this travesty.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          6 months ago

          I don’t understand how they even fucked it up. You have a very shallow mask with positive pressure from the nitrogen gas and a valve that opens when there is any extra pressure. Person breathes out CO2 and some nitrogen gas is expelled, person breathes in, almost only Nitrogen gas is inhaled. Am I missing something? I am not an engineer, but this seems like a way you could do it.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Nah. You need it after a Civil War. Not using it the last time to hang the Confederate officers really fucked us over in the long run.