The most common method of executing condemned prisoners in the U.S. - lethal injection - has suffered a mountain of setbacks in recent months. Most notably, executions using relatively untested drugs have not gone as intended in several states, including Arizona, Ohio and Oklahoma.
But 1 Oklahoma lawmaker thinks he might have a potential solution to the lethal-injection crisis: nitrogen gas.
Rep. Mike Christian, a Republican from Oklahoma City, is slated to present the idea Tuesday to the state legislature, inviting its members to take up a broader study on the issue.
According to a story by a local television station:
[Rep. Christian] wants to use nitrogen gas. . . . The process is officially called Nitrogen Asphyxiation, a fancy term for the process of slowly replacing oxygen with nitrogen. Those who have studied the process say it causes no pain and can kill a person within a matter of minutes.
A message left with Rep. Christian wasn't immediately returned. But he told NewsChannel 4 that "if you deplete oxygen it's within 8-to-14 seconds, up to no more than 20 seconds that they pass out. And then, within a few minutes, up to 8 minutes, probably less, that they would be pronounced dead." According to the Oklahoman, nitrogen has likely never been used for an execution. But Mr. Christian told the paper that the approach seems humane. "Some who have received an accidental excess of the gas have even said the effect was mildly euphoric," according to the story.
Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization largely opposed to the death penalty, said "a lot more study" would be needed before a state adopted such a proposal. "This is just more experimenting with human lives," he told Law Blog.
In the wake of problems with lethal injections, several states have revisited bringing back older techniques. Tennessee in May passed a law allowing for use of the electric chair in situations in which lethal-injection wasn't possible. This week, lawmakers in Wyoming moved a bill forward that would authorize the state to use a firing squad to execute inmates on death-row if prison officials fail to obtain drugs for lethal injections.
Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 16, 2014
