Imagine a movie in which state executioners strap a man to a gurney and affix a do-it-yourself mask to his face — one crafted to kill by making the man breathe pure nitrogen gas. Then after the man flops around on the gurney like a fish out of water, tortured by having the oxygen slowly and painfully squeezed from his body, instead of abandoning the practice, the state — in the movie, mind you — executes more men in the same exact way, making it the “new normal?”
Oh wait. No need to imagine. This dystopian horror is happening — in real life — in Alabama.
As reported by the Associated Press (AP), on September 26, during the 1,600 execution in the United States in the modern era, Alan Miller was tortured to death via an abominable and still-experimental method of execution dubbed “nitrogen hypoxia” — which is just a cold and clinical way of saying that, in 2024, Alabama has started to gas human beings to death.
AP reporter Kim Chandler, an eyewitness to Miller’s execution, wrote that as the nitrogen gas filled the mask, Miller “shook and trembled on the gurney for about two minutes with his body at times pulling against the restraints. That was followed by about six minutes of periodic gulping breaths before he became still.” (As an aside, imagine the longest scene in a movie you’ve seen where some character was choked to death. I guarantee the scene was exponentially shorter than the violent, gasping deaths Alabama’s two nitrogen-gassing executions have thus far yielded.)