The State of Alabama is set to carry out the nation’s second execution by nitrogen hypoxia tonight. Alan Miller is scheduled to die for the 1999 murders of two co-workers and his supervisor. Alabama conducted the first ever nitrogen gas execution back in January. Robin Mahr is the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. She says the January execution of Eugene Smith in Alabama caused an international response.
“We had calls from media in almost every country I can think of, and they were all intensely curious that Alabama would choose this untested, unproven method of execution, and also confused because they themselves had stopped using the death penalty, of course, many, many years ago, the United States was one of the few countries in the world that continues to use the death penalty,” Mahr said.
Death row inmates in five separate states are set to be put to death in the span of one week. If carried out as planned, the executions will mark the first time in more than 20 years that five executions were held in seven days. The unusually high number defies a yearslong trend of decline in both the use and support of the death penalty in the U.S. The first execution occurred Friday in South Carolina and two others in Missouri and Texas occurred Tuesday. If the remaining scheduled executions for this week proceed, the U.S. will have reached 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Mahr with the Death Penalty Information Center says Alabama is wrong to think nitrogen hypoxia is more reliable than lethal injection.
“Yeah, I think that's exactly what Alabama officials would like everyone to believe,” Mahr said. “The problem with that, of course, is that this is a brand new method of execution. The only person who has been executed with this method is Mr. Smith, and his execution was very troubling. Media witnesses said they saw clear signs of distress and suffering.”
How did 5 executions get set for a 1-week span?
Experts say five executions being scheduled within one week is simply an anomaly that resulted from courts or elected officials in individual states setting dates around the same time after inmates exhausted their appeals. "I'm not aware of any reason other than coincidence," said Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska with expertise in the death penalty and lethal injection. Berger said some factors can result in a backlog of executions, such as a state's inability to obtain the lethal drugs necessary to carry them out, which happened in South Carolina, or a moratorium that resulted from botched executions, like what happened in Oklahoma.
