USA - Arizona's gas chamber

USA - Arizona. Gas chamber refurbished

May 28, 2021:

Arizona is planning to execute prisoners with the same deadly gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz.
Over the past few months the Republican-controlled state has moved aggressively to restart its deeply flawed execution system.
The state of Arizona has plans to use hydrogen cyanide, the deadly gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other extermination camps, to kill inmates on death row, documents obtained by The Guardian's Ed Pilkington say.
The Arizona Department of Corrections spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients for the gas, The Guardian reported, citing the partially-redacted documents.
The ingredients purchased include a solid brick of potassium cyanide, sodium hydroxide pellets, and sulfuric acid, per the documents.
Cyanide is lethal in that it prevents the body from using oxygen. It was used in both World Wars - by French and Austrian troops in World War I, and by Nazi Germany in World War II. The trade name for hydrogen cyanide is Zyklon B.
The department has also refurbished a gas chamber in Florence, Arizona, built in 1949 but had not been used for 22 years, The Guardian reported.
The chamber was tested for "operational functionality" and "air tightness" last August, and in December, following a refurbishment, officials "verbally indicated that the vessel is operationally ready."
The Guardian’s documents, obtained through public records requests, show that officials have also gone to considerable lengths to revive the state’s mothballed gas chamber, housed at ASPC-Florence. A series of tests were conducted last August to appraise its “operability”.
Seals on windows and the door were checked to ensure airtightness, and drains cleared of blockage. Water was used in the tests in place of the deadly chemicals, with a smoke grenade ignited to simulate the gas.
Some of the techniques used to test the safety of the chamber were astonishingly primitive, the documents reveal. Prison officials checked for gas seepages with a candle.
The flame of the candle was held up to the sealed windows and door and if its flame remained steady and did not flicker the chamber was deemed to be airtight. In December staff declared the vessel “operationally ready”.
In a statement to Insider, the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry said it was "prepared to perform its legal obligation and commence the execution process as part of the legally imposed sentence, regardless of method selected."
The last person to be executed in the gas chamber in Arizona was the German national Walter LaGrand, an armed robber put to death in 1999. A witness account published in the Tucson Citizen said that it took LaGrand 18 minutes to die. The witness account said: “The witness room fell silent as a mist of gas rose, much like steam in a shower, and Walter LaGrand became enveloped in a cloud of cyanide vapor,” the Citizen reported. “He began coughing violently – three or four loud hacks – and made a gagging sound before falling forward.”
The newspaper recorded that over many minutes the inmate’s head and arms twitched, and his hands were “red and clenched”.
Arizona law says that anyone who was sentenced to death before November 1992 can choose whether to be executed by lethal injection or lethal gas.
However, there have been no executions for seven years following the botched death penalty of the murderer Joseph Wood in 2014, according to The Guardian. Woods took 2 hours to die following 15 injections as he lay gasping and gulping on a gurney.
In April, The Guardian reported that the state had spent $1.5 million on execution drugs, including one thousand 1-gram vials of pentobarbital sodium salt.
Pentobarbital is used in Arizona in 5-gram doses to cause a fatal overdose.

https://news.yahoo.com/arizona-planning-execute-prisoners-same-105544333.html

https://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2021/05/arizona-refurbishes-its-gas-chamber-to.html