Oklahoma Turns to Gas for Executions Amid Turmoil Over Lethal Injection

[thackney]

Oklahoma Turns to Gas for Executions Amid Turmoil Over Lethal Injection
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/us/oklahoma-nitrogen-executions.html

Oklahoma announced Wednesday that after failing to obtain lethal injection drugs, it will seek to execute inmates on death row by asphyxiating them with nitrogen gas.

If the plan is approved by state and federal authorities and courts, Oklahoma would be the first state to put prisoners to death using this method.

The state has 49 inmates on death row, including 16 who have exhausted their appeals, Mike Hunter, the state’s attorney general, said at a news conference.

“We can no longer sit on the sidelines and wait to find drugs,” he said. The method, in which a mask would be placed over a condemned person’s nose and mouth to flood the lungs with nitrogen, would be “effective, simple to administer, easy to obtain and requires no complex medical procedures,” Mr. Hunter said.

Nitrogen gas is not poisonous under normal circumstances, but breathing it alone would starve the body of oxygen....

[thackney]

Oklahoma announces it will be the first state to use nitrogen for executions (but its use is banned for euthanizing mammals because it's too slow)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5505225/Oklahoma-U-S-state-use-nitrogen-executions.html

...Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center...

...Dunham said he was not aware nitrogen hypoxia had ever been used anywhere in the world to execute a person.

Although some countries are notorious for covering up information relating to capital punishments and the death penalty, all the evidence suggests that he is right to say none have used nitrogen to date.   

Durnham added that  the American Veterinary Medical Association deemed the nitrogen process inappropriate for euthanizing mammals and said it would take more than seven minutes to bring about the death of a 70-pound (32-kg) pig.

'This is another execution process that is untested, untried and experimental,' he said....

...Mr Hunter said the technique, in which a mask would be placed over a condemned person's nose and mouth to flood the lungs with nitrogen, would be 'effective, simple to administer, easy to obtain and requires no complex medical procedures'....