Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner using nitrogen. Nitrogen hypoxia has been authorized as an execution method in Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi, but no state has used the method to carry out a death sentence. Professor Deborah Denno gave her thoughts on Alabama’s proposal.
Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert at Fordham Law School, said that unlike lethal injection and electrocution, which have been used for decades, “experts could only speculate about how a state might conduct a nitrogen hypoxia execution.” She said the filed Alabama protocol does not provide answers because of its vagueness and heavy redactions.
“This is a vague, sloppy, dangerous, and unjustifiably deficient protocol made all the more incomprehensible by heavy redaction in the most important places,” Denno wrote in an email.
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