On Thursday night, Alan Eugene Miller He became the most recent prisoner to be executed in the United States. Miller, 59, died in an Alabama correctional facility by the method of nitrogen hypoxia.
Miller is the second man in the country to be executed with nitrogen gas. The state of Alabama sentenced him to death for a triple homicide in 1999, and two years ago, his execution by lethal injection failed.
The inmate had been on death row since 2000 and was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in September 2022, but staff couldn’t access his veins for the tracks before his death sentence expired.
Miller and his defense team reached an agreement with the state in which lethal injection would not be used in a second execution attempt, opting instead for hypoxia with nitrogen gas.
Miller had the opportunity to make one final statement. ““I didn’t do anything to be here.”said. His next words were inaudible, but he seemed to ask his family to take care of someone. “I didn’t do anything to be on death row. Thank you,” he finally said.
Alabama corrections officials then They pumped nitrogen gas to a mask that covered Miller’s face from forehead to chin.
According to eyewitnesses, his left hand shook and balled into a fist several times, and he was forced to lift his head off the stretcher. This was followed by some six minutes of periodic gasping breaths before he finally went still. Miller was finally pronounced dead around 6:38 p.m. local time, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said.
“There are involuntary body movements as the body runs out of oxygen, so it’s nothing we didn’t expect,” Hamm said. “Everything went as planned and according to our protocol, so it went just as we had planned,” he added.
But Hamm later admitted that a correctional officer had to adjust the mask of the inmate before the gas began to flow.
This was the second execution using the new method that Alabama first employed in January, when Kenneth Smith was executed.
The method involves placing a respiratory gas mask over the inmate’s face to replace the breathing air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death due to lack of oxygen.
