An oxygen mask. Alabama attaches a similar-looking mask to a condemned inmate when conducting executions using nitrogen hypoxia. (Getty Images)
When it comes to administering the death penalty, perhaps the most intractable difficulty is that it’s just really, really difficult to kill someone in a way that isn’t cruel or unusual or messy or doesn’t make us unduly squeamish.
Taking someone who is alive and making them dead requires some level of violence — injecting a fatal dose of chemicals, zapping them with electricity, shooting them, breaking their neck with a rope — that raises profound moral and constitutional issues. And state legislators, including here in Arkansas, are finding new and creative ways to tinker with the machinery of death, as they try to overcome hurdles slowing the pace of executions…