We have had reservations for many years about capital punishment. It’s expensive, taking often decades of court appeals before it’s carried out. It asks the state to punish one killing by doing the same. It opens up the possibility of executing an innocent person if the wrong person has been convicted, which has been proven to happen often enough that 23 states have abolished the death penalty and six have put it on indefinite hold.
If, though, a state is going to continue to use the death penalty as punishment for heinous crimes, it needs to ensure it is carried out humanely, inflicting as little physical pain as is medically possible.
The nation’s first execution via nitrogen gas is not reassuring that this method is one Mississippi should try.
Used last week in Alabama to execute a 58-year-old convicted killer, nitrogen hypoxia did not appear to live up to its promise of a quick and painless death. The inmate, as he was being deprived of oxygen by the forced inhalation of nitrogen, convulsed in seizurelike spasms for at least two minutes of the 22-minute execution. The force of his body’s reaction caused the gurney to which he was strapped to visibly shake, followed by several minutes of heavy breathing until he died.
Alabama corrections officials said afterward that the inmate’s final minutes were not as excruciating as they appeared, claiming the writhing and thrashing appeared to be involuntary movements. “Nothing was out of the ordinary from what we were expecting,” said Corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm.
Really? It certainly wasn’t what the public was expecting, and it wasn’t what Alabama officials had predicted in advance, when they said the inmate would lose consciousness in seconds followed by death in minutes.
After the execution, The Associated Press interviewed a euthanasia expert who has used nitrogen in assisted suicides. He said that the disturbing description of the inmate’s death is to be expected if the gas is being dispensed through a mask and the inmate holds his breath or takes the smallest breaths possible because he doesn’t want to die and isn’t cooperating. That’s going to be the mind-set of most inmates on death row.
Because Mississippi, like other death-penalty states, was having a difficult time getting the drugs it uses for lethal injection, the Legislature changed the law two years ago to give the corrections commissioner the option to use three other execution methods as a backup — electrocution, a firing squad or nitrogen hypoxia.
Before last week, it was anticipated that nitrogen hypoxia would be the best of those alternatives, possibly as humane as lethal injection. Unless eyes are deceiving, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Mississippi should not consider using nitrogen hypoxia until there’s a better understanding of how much suffering it inflicts.
