Alabama will help bring nitrogen asphyxiation executions to other states

investing.com:

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) -Alabama offered assistance on Friday to other U.S. states seeking to carry out executions using asphyxiation by nitrogen gas, a few hours after pioneering the new method to kill Kenneth Smith, a prisoner condemned for a 1988 murder.

The state also promised more to come in Alabama: Attorney General Steve Marshall said 43 other people on death row had chosen asphyxiation over lethal injections since lawmakers approved the method in 2018.

Alabama called the new method «humane,» while human rights groups condemned it as cruel and torturous. A spokesperson for U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat who campaigned on a promise he has not fulfilled of abolishing the federal death penalty, said the execution was «troubling.»

«Alabama has done it, and now so can you, and we stand ready to assist you in implementing this method in your states,» Marshall, a Republican, told reporters on Friday.

Oklahoma and Mississippi lawmakers have added nitrogen asphyxiation to their states' allowed execution methods, but have not yet used it. Alabama has provided the Oklahoma Department of Corrections with an unredacted version of its new protocol, an Oklahoma spokesperson said.

Marshall said asphyxiation by nitrogen, the first new execution method since lethal injections began in the U.S. in 1982, is «no longer an untested method.»

«It is a proven one,» he said.

Nearly half of U.S. states have abolished the death penalty, but for other states the main method remains lethal injections. Some states have found lethal injections increasingly difficult, struggling to find either the required drugs or a suitable vein in a prisoner, forcing them to contemplate other methods.

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