Alabama Readies Death Chamber for Nitrogen Hypoxia Executions

As South Carolina and Arizona pre­pare to resume exe­cu­tions using grue­some meth­ods of the past, Alabama pros­e­cu­tors say the state is near­ly ready to per­form exe­cu­tions using a new, untest­ed method, nitrogen hypoxia. 

In court fil­ings on June 8, 2021, in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, the Alabama Attorney General’s office said the Alabama Department of Corrections ​“is near­ing com­ple­tion of the ini­tial phys­i­cal build for the nitro­gen hypox­ia sys­tem and its safe­ty mea­sures.” ​“Once the build is com­plet­ed,” pros­e­cu­tors wrote, ​“a safe­ty expert will make a site vis­it to eval­u­ate the sys­tem and look for any points of con­cern that need to be addressed.” 

The fil­ings, which came in the case of a pris­on­er who is seek­ing to have a spir­i­tu­al advi­sor present dur­ing his exe­cu­tion, did not indi­cate whether Alabama intend­ed to car­ry out nitro­gen-gas exe­cu­tions by flood­ing a spe­cial­ly con­struct­ed cham­ber with the gas or by admin­is­ter­ing a lethal dose of the gas through a breath­ing appa­ra­tus strapped to the prisoner’s face. It also did not address whether a spir­i­tu­al advi­sor will be able to be safe­ly present dur­ing a nitro­gen hypoxia execution.

Alabama is one of three states, along with Oklahoma and Mississippi, that autho­rizes nitro­gen hypox­ia as an exe­cu­tion method, but no state has per­formed an exe­cu­tion using it. Alabama legal­ized the method in 2018 and gave pris­on­ers a short peri­od of time to des­ig­nate nitro­gen hypox­ia as the means of their exe­cu­tion. Lethal injec­tion remains the state’s pri­ma­ry method of exe­cu­tion and is the default method if the pris­on­er makes no designation. 

In a nitro­gen hypox­ia exe­cu­tion, the pris­on­er would breathe pure nitro­gen, depriv­ing his or her body of oxy­gen and caus­ing asphyx­i­a­tion. Its pro­po­nents argue it is a more humane method of exe­cu­tion, but it can­not eth­i­cal­ly be tested. 

“In a very real sense, exe­cu­tion by nitro­gen hypox­ia is exper­i­men­tal,” DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham told Newsweek. ​“It has nev­er been done before and no one has any idea whether it is going to work the way its pro­po­nents say it will. And there is no way to test it because it is com­plete­ly uneth­i­cal to exper­i­men­tal­ly kill some­one against their will.”

Despite the legal fil­ings stat­ing that the sys­tem is near­ly com­plete, Alabama declined to dis­close any details about its plans to use the method. In a state­ment, a spokesper­son for the Alabama Department of Corrections said that the ​“nitro­gen hypox­ia exe­cu­tion pro­to­col is still under devel­op­ment, and the phys­i­cal build­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the exe­cu­tion cham­ber are still in process. Due to the fact those two items are not yet in a final­ized state and poten­tial secu­ri­ty con­cerns exist, that is all we are able to share at this time.”

The news comes amidst nation­wide con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing exe­cu­tion meth­ods. South Carolina plans to resume exe­cu­tions after a ten-year hia­tus and says it will use the elec­tric chair to exe­cute Brad Sigmon on June 18, 2021 and Freddie Owens on June 25, 2021. Earlier in June, Arizona announced that it has ​“refur­bished” its gas cham­ber and is pre­pared to car­ry out exe­cu­tions with cyanide gas, the same gas used by the Nazis to mur­der more than a mil­lion peo­ple dur­ing the Holocaust. 

Oklahoma, the only state oth­er than Alabama to have pub­licly dis­cussed efforts to per­form nitro­gen hypox­ia exe­cu­tions, said in 2019 that at least sev­en com­pa­nies declined to sell them a ​“gas deliv­ery device” for exe­cu­tions. The com­pa­nies’ refusal to sell mate­ri­als for exe­cu­tions mir­rors the con­sen­sus among phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies that pro­vid­ing drugs for exe­cu­tions vio­lates the pur­pose of their busi­ness. Alabama did not reveal how it obtained the mate­ri­als nec­es­sary for its execution protocol.