'Excruciating suffocation': Supreme Court blocks execution using nitrogen gas

The Supreme Court blocked the Alabama execution of a death row inmate scheduled to be killed using nitrogen gas — a method used not just for executions, but by advocates and proponents of assisted suicide.

Key Takeaways:

• Jeffery Lee, 49, was convicted of a 1998 double homicide and was scheduled to be executed using nitrogen gas on Thursday.

• The Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling blocking the execution, saying the method was likely unconstitutional.

• Eight people in the United States have been executed using nitrogen hypoxia.

• The assisted suicide industry heavily promotes this method of death, including as a do-it-yourself method of suicide.

The Details:

According to the Equal Justice Initiative:

Last year, Mr. Lee filed a federal lawsuit challenging nitrogen suffocation as cruel and unusual punishment because it “causes inmates to experience prolonged air hunger and feelings of suffocation, which evoke severe anxiety, fear, and physiological distress.” The suit claimed the method cruelly superadds pain in violation of the Eighth Amendment because it triggers the person’s survival instincts to breathe oxygen while also preventing them from doing so.

Alabama’s use of the experimental method has raised serious concerns that it causes significant and lengthy suffering. Forcing a person to breathe nitrogen gas through a facemask until they die from lack of oxygen, Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized, inflicts the “unnecessary psychological terror” of “conscious, excruciating suffocation” and “severe emotional suffering” while “consciously experiencing the ‘primal urge to breath.’”

The New York Times reported that Lee was given a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court, which issued an emergency ruling. A federal appeals court had previously blocked Lee's execution, and the state of Alabama asked the Supreme Court to overturn that decision.

Lee was due to be killed through experimental nitrogen hypoxia, and would have been the ninth person in the United States to do so. In this method, the inmate has a mask strapped to their face, and is forced to breathe in pure nitrogen. The person is effectively suffocated to death.

Previously, Judge Emily Marks of U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama sided with the state and gave the OK for the execution to move forward. Lee appealed, saying an execution via firing squad would be faster, more humane, and less painful.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit disagreed with Marks and sent the case back to her, at which point she reversed her ruling and permanently blocked Alabama from killing Lee using nitrogen gas.

The Big Picture:

Execution via nitrogen hypoxia is still considered experimental, though several people have been killed using it.

It has been criticized as being torturous. A previous execution using this method, for a man named Kenneth Smith, took over 20 minutes to cause death. Smith's convulsions were so violent that the entire gurney shook, and one reporter publicly reported that the death was particularly horrific.

“I’ve been to four previous executions and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” Lee Hedgepeth said. “Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”

However, this exact same method is frequently promoted by proponents of assisted suicide.

The Sarco pod

Philip Nitschke, founder of the “Sarco” assisted suicide death pod, is ardently against execution by nitrogen hypoxia, not because it’s inhumane or torturous, but because it's how he kills people in Sarco, and the negative coverage of such executions harms the assisted suicide movement.

Nitschke complained, “Nitrogen hypoxia has been advocated for over 15 years by the right to die movement as an effective way to obtain a quick, peaceful and reliable Do It Yourself (DIY) death.”

Indeed, people have begun killing their loved ones using nitrogen and calling it assisted suicide.

One woman has been killed through Nitschke's Sarco device, and there were numerous questions raised about her death. Though the woman, who has not been named, was allegedly unconscious within 30 seconds, a motion-activated camera turned on in less than three minutes. The window to the outside of the Sarco pod fogged up, and had a dark spot on it, likely due to the woman’s body cramping and her knees hitting the window. At just over six minutes in to her suicide, an alarm began to sound.

Present at her death was Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, which is an affiliate of Nitschke’s Exit International. He was on the phone with Nitschke at the time, and was seemingly concerned.

“She’s still alive, Philip,” he said.

The woman allegedly took 30 minutes to die, and a forensic scientist later said she had “serious neck injuries” reminiscent of strangulation, though Last Resort claimed this was due to the woman’s medical diagnosis of skull base osteomyelitis.

The Bottom Line:

The drugs used in assisted suicide are frequently also used in death penalty executions, and are significantly more violent than most expect.