Second death row inmate facing ‘torturous’ execution by nitrogen gas

 Alan Eugene Miller has been on death row since 2000 (Picture: AP)

A second prisoner in the US could be facing a nitrogen-gas death less than a month after Kenneth Smith’s ‘torturous’ execution last month.

Alabama’s attorney general has requested the state’s Supreme Court to authorise a second execution by nitrogen hypoxia.

This comes despite experts describing the method as ‘an unambiguous definition of cruelty’.

On January 25, Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first person in the world to be put to death using the untested method.

Witnesses say the ‘horrific’ execution saw him die within 22 minutes, convulsing in his chair and tugging against his restraints before losing consciousness.

Authorities had initially claimed he would fall unconscious within seconds and die within minutes, but the outcome was very different.

Officials escort murderer Alan Eugene Miller away from the Pelham City Jail in Alabama (Picture: AP)

Afterwards, the Alabama Department of Corrections said Smith’s execution went exactly as planned.

Despite the agonising death, Alabama’s attorney general Steve Marshall vowed to keep using nitrogen gas to execute inmates.

He maintained that the execution was ‘textbook’ and has filed a motion asking the court to allow the Alabama Department of Corrections to execute Alan Eugene Miller.

‘The State of Alabama is prepared to carry out the execution of Miller’s sentence by means of nitrogen hypoxia,’ his office wrote.

The 59-year-old has been on death row since 2000 for murdering two co-workers and a former co-worker at separate locations in 1999.

Miller was convicted of capital murder in a workplace shooting rampage that killed three men in 1999 (Picture: AP)

Like Smith, Miller survived a previous lethal injection attempt. The state attempted to execute him by lethal injection in September 2022.

The execution was called off after officials were unable to get an intravenous line connected to the 159-kilogram prisoner’s veins.

After that attempt, the state struck an agreement with his lawyers that it would never again seek to execute Miller by lethal injection and that any attempt to execute him in the future would be done with nitrogen gas.

‘Nitrogen hypoxia is the wrong name. It should be called execution by suffocation,’ Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of the anti-death penalty group Death Penalty Action wrote in an email.

The group had protested outside the Alabama prison ahead of Smith’s execution.

Miller said that during the aborted 2022 lethal injection attempt, prison staff poked him with needles for over an hour as they tried to find a vein and at one point left him hanging vertically as he lay strapped to a gurney.

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