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‘Astonishingly cruel’: Alabama seeks to test execution method on death row ‘guinea pig’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution, having endured an aborted lethal injection last November during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture.
If the state of Alabama has its way, he will become the test dummy for an execution method that has never before been used in judicial killings and which veterinarians consider unacceptable as a form of euthanasia for animals – death by nitrogen gas.
The choice of Smith as the first candidate for the technique, less than a year after he experienced a failed execution, has also been criticized as a double violation of the eighth amendment protection against “cruel and unusual punishments”.
Earlier that year, the state took more than three hours to kill Joe Nathan James and later abandoned the execution of Alan Miller after also failing to find a vein.
“The mask will be placed and adjusted on the condemned inmate’s face”, it says, and then after the prisoner has been allowed to make a final statement “the Warden will activate the nitrogen hypoxia system”.
Like many death penalty states, Oklahoma was looking for an alternative to lethal injection, having struggled to procure the necessary drugs as a result of an international boycott by pharmaceutical companies.
The original article contains 1,116 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!