11 May 2024 :
May 9, 2024 - Alabama. Alabama sets nitrogen-gas execution for Alan Eugene Miller who survived botched 2022 effort. State rejects warnings that gas-mask method represents cruel and unusual punishment.
Alabama has set 9.26.24 as the execution date for Miller.
Barring last-minute judicial moves, Alan Miller, 59, will be put to his death on 26 September, after an execution date was set on Thursday by the state’s Republican governor Kay Ivey. Should it go ahead, the killing would be exceptional not only as only the 2nd time that nitrogen has been used in the US, but also because Miller has already been subjected to a botched execution, which he survived.
In September 2022, he was escorted into the death chamber at Holman correctional facility in southern Alabama and put through what his lawyers said was physical and mental torture. He was strapped to the gurney for 2 hours while members of the execution team pierced his arms, hands and feet with needles in search of a vein through which to inject lethal drugs.
Failing to achieve a line, the team raised the gurney into the vertical position and left Miller suspended as on a crucifix for about 20 minutes, court documents show. By the time they lowered him, blood was seeping from his puncture wounds. The state eventually called off the execution.
Miller was convicted of the 1999 murder of three men, Terry Jarvis, Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy, in a workplace shooting.
The state’s plan to kill Miller is a chilling repetition of what Alabama did to Kenneth Smith in January. Smith had also survived a botched execution, in November 2022, which had been called off after four hours on the gurney for want of finding a vein.
He too was then sent to the death chamber a second time, becoming the first person in the US to be executed using nitrogen. Though the state insisted the method was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”, witnesses described the prisoner writhing and convulsing for several minutes and his body shaking violently.
Smith was killed after an 11th-hour appeal for a stay of execution was denied by the US supreme court.
