\n<\/p>\n
The United States\u2019 newest execution method, nitrogen gas, appears headed toward a legal showdown amid a widening controversy over whether it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.<\/p>\n
The US supreme court late on Thursday rejected the state of Alabama\u2019s request to execute prisoner Jeffrey Lee with nitrogen gas, a method where a respirator is strapped to an inmate\u2019s face and they breathe pure nitrogen until dying of oxygen deprivation.<\/p>\n
The rebuke culminates a week of setbacks for Alabama, after a federal appeals court and a lower court judge barred the state\u2019s nitrogen gas protocol as unconstitutional.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the supreme court refused to remove the bar imposed by the lower courts. Though Lee will not imminently face execution, Alabama officials have signaled they will push to keep nitrogen execution legal, a move that could force a supreme court battle to determine the legality of nitrogen gas executions nationwide.<\/p>\n
At the center of Alabama\u2019s fight is the case of Lee, a 49-year-old death row prisoner convicted of killing two people during a 1998 robbery. <\/em>Lee\u2019s case was already mired in controversy after the jury\u2019s vote to sentence him to life without parole was overridden by a judge, who sentenced him to death in 2000. Alabama in 2017 became the last state to abolish judicial override and did not make the new law retroactive.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s legal team praised the supreme court\u2019s decision on Thursday night. \u201cHis jury voted for life. Two courts ruled the method unconstitutional. Today, the constitution prevailed,\u201d a statement said.<\/p>\n Alabama\u2019s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, in a statement blasted the high court\u2019s ruling as a \u201cmiscarriage of justice\u201d and said the state is \u201cprepared to do whatever is necessary to see Mr Lee\u2019s lawful sentence carried out\u201d.<\/p>\n The escalating legal fight comes more than two years after Alabama carried out the world\u2019s first known nitrogen hypoxia execution, a then-untested method. Nitrogen executions have emerged as death-penalty states have struggled for alternatives to the troubled lethal injection method, which has faced its own criticism after a string of botched executions in multiple states.<\/p>\n While the current federal rulings only affect Alabama, a supreme court decision would affect all states \u2013 Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma \u2013 that legalized nitrogen executions.<\/p>\n With eight nitrogen executions in the US \u2013 seven in Alabama and one in Louisiana \u2013 critics of the practice argue that state secrecy laws have shielded a fully transparent look at a process that they say was doomed from the start.<\/p>\n From the outset, the method raised concerns for its apparent brutality and drew comparisons to human experimentation. Eugene Smith, the first person to die by nitrogen hypoxia, thrashed and writhed on the gurney, according to media and other witnesses. The last nitrogen execution, of Anthony Boyd, appeared to take more than 30 minutes as Boyd shuddered and gasped. Alabama\u2019s Republican attorney general Steve Marshall called Smith\u2019s execution \u201ctextbook\u201d and has dismissed criticism as sensational and agenda-driven.<\/p>\n Rev Jeff Hood, Smith\u2019s spiritual adviser who was in the death chamber for both Smith\u2019s and Boyd\u2019s executions, said this week\u2019s judicial rulings \u201cvindicates\u201d the reporters and other witnesses who have seen and spoken out about what he described as torturous death.<\/p>\n \u201cThe body doesn\u2019t lie,\u201d Hood said. \u201cOn two different occasions, I\u2019ve seen [inmates] heave back and forth, their entire body tense up, their entire body shaking. And now we know the court believes the testimony of these bodies as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Lee, the Alabama inmate, was scheduled to be executed on 11 June, and sought to avoid becoming the ninth person to die by nitrogen execution. On Tuesday, the US district judge Emily Marks ruled that he had shown by a \u201cpreponderance of the evidence\u201d that \u201cthe protocol constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the eighth amendment\u201d.<\/p>\n For now, Lee\u2019s execution by nitrogen is on pause while the case moves through the courts. Lee had previously selected firing squad as a backup execution method, though the state is not currently set up for that protocol. The supreme court has not yet indicated whether it will take up the Alabama case in its next term.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it goes up to the supreme court and they find [nitrogen hypoxia] unconstitutional, it would be the first method the court has ever found unconstitutional \u2013 and that would be groundbreaking,\u201d said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor and death penalty expert.<\/p>\n Unlike the legal arguments against the nitrogen hypoxia method in the lead-up to Smith\u2019s execution, evidence of how a nitrogen gas death works \u2013 or doesn\u2019t \u2013 is no longer speculative, according to Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, which publishes nonpartisan analysis of the capital punishment system.<\/p>\n Despite this week\u2019s legal setbacks, a spokesperson for Alabama\u2019s Republican governor Kay Ivey said Thursday the state \u201ccontinues to defend its execution protocol in the courts\u201d.<\/p>\n Hood, the pastor, keeps a replica of the respirator used to execute Smith as a visual aid for protests and interviews. On Thursday, he held it and said: \u201cThere\u2019s going to come a time when people will look at this mask and think: \u2018 I can\u2019t believe we were that heinous.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The United States\u2019 newest execution method, nitrogen gas, appears headed toward a legal showdown amid a widening controversy over whether it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The US supreme court late on Thursday rejected the state of Alabama\u2019s request to execute prisoner Jeffrey Lee with nitrogen gas, a method where a respirator is strapped to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[10155,1336,160,19082,867,24736,324,2972,17725,3832,159],"class_list":{"0":"post-50267","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-alabama","9":"tag-blocks","10":"tag-court","11":"tag-execution","12":"tag-gas","13":"tag-heinous","14":"tag-legal","15":"tag-looms","16":"tag-nitrogen","17":"tag-showdown","18":"tag-supreme"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}