'Tonight ... marked the first time in the nation that nitrogen hypoxia was used as the method of execution ...an effective and humane method of execution.'
FILE - Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall listens to a reporter's question following oral arguments in an Alabama redistricting case, outside the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 4, 2022. "Tonight ... marked the first time in the nation – and the world – that 'nitrogen hypoxia' was used as the method of execution ... an effective and humane method of execution.
The Attorney General of Alabama said the execution went 'textbook.' ... This was never done before, so they sure wrote the textbook really quickly, in seconds I guess," Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the Emory University School of Medicine, told The National Desk.by the Commissioner of Alabama's Department of Corrections, John Q.
At around 8:02 p.m., Smith is described as gasping for air for the next five minutes until he "appeared to take his last breath." The curtains from the observation room into the execution chamber were closed at around 8:15, however Attorney General's office does not list Smith's pronounced time of death until 8:25 - nearly a 30 full minutes after his execution began.
Zivot, a self-professed "reluctant expert in lethal injection and capital punishment" who also holds masters degrees in law and bioethics, says that Smith did not die of 'nitrogen hypoxia' -- a term he says is not in the scientific lexicon and instead something close to "scientific cosplay" -- but likely, broadly, due to "'anoxia' -- a lack of oxygen -- to die in that way is painful.
Smith ultimately requested nitrogen hypoxia, as the vernacular used by the state of Alabama is known, for his execution after the state made an initial attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, one of a string of botched executions by the state that year. One of them was so botched, the attempted capital punishment of Joe Nathan James Jr.
The decision by the 11th Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court was unsurprising to constitutional historians like Corinna Barrett Lain, a professor of law at the University of Richmond and the author of a forthcoming book about the legal sage of lethal injection: "Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection."
Veterinarians have also made observations, when experimenting with nitrogen gas as part of animal euthanasia, that the process is not as quick and painless as advocates like the Alabama Attorney General have stated it is. Both experts attribute one of the origins to what they and others argue is the myth of nitrogen gas as a painlessly, quick method of execution to screenwriter and marketing executive Stuart Creque, who first praised its use for National Review -- "Killing With Kindness: Capital Punishment by Nitrogen Asphyxiation" -- after California found the gas chamber, its then current method of execution, unconstitutional.
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