Washington [US], September 23: The Alabama Supreme Court is considering allowing this state to become the first state in the US to execute the death penalty on prisoners using a new method: asphyxiation with nitrogen gas.
Last month, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the court to allow the execution of death row inmate Kenneth Smith, who was convicted of murder in 1996, using a mask connected to a nitrogen gas tank to cause him to die. suffocated due to lack of oxygen, according to Reuters.
Mr. Smith's lawyers said the unproven method could go against the US constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments", and argued that the attempt to carry out his death penalty would be unfair . Any method a second time is unconstitutional.
Death penalty experts also said that the state of Alabama has not provided enough information to prove that using a colorless, odorless gas inside the execution room can minimize the danger to the execution force. and others.
Mr. Smith, 58, is one of only two people alive in the United States who have not died while on death row. During the execution that took place last November by lethal injection, many attempts to inject drugs intravenously into this death row prisoner failed.
Most executions in the US use lethal injection of nerve blockers, but the decades-old method has faced increasing difficulties in recent years.
Some states have had difficulty obtaining needed drugs when pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell them to prison systems. Autopsies have found that the lungs of people executed by lethal injection were filled with a bubbling, bloody liquid. According to opponents of the death penalty, this shows that death row inmates must endure the feeling of drowning when executed by this method.
To win the court's approval, the Alabama attorney general's office released a heavily redacted version of the document outlining how to carry out the death penalty with nitrogen gas, a method it called a "shortage state." oxygen because of nitrogen".
In the gas chambers used in previous executions in the US states, as well as in Nazi concentration camps, toxic gases such as hydrogen cyanide were used to kill people. However, nitrogen is non-toxic, making up about 78% of the air humans breathe. In Alabama's proposed method, approved by state lawmakers in 2018, nitrogen is used to replace the oxygen inhaled by a death row inmate, thereby gradually causing the person to lack oxygen and die.
The US states of Oklahoma and Mississippi have also approved the execution of the death penalty using this method, but have never applied it in practice.
Source: ThanhNien Newspaper