Oklahoma Will Be First State to Use Nitrogen Gas for Executions

Oklahoma is planning to become the first state to use nitrogen gas for executions.

On Wednesday, officials in the state of Oklahoma announced that the state was planning to start using nitrogen gas for executions, in which would become the first such method of capital punishment in the United States, Reuters reports. The move comes after Oklahoma and other states became unable to acquire drugs required for lethal injections due to opposition from manufacturers to their products being used for capital punishment.

Nitrogen, an odorless and tasteless gas, makes up about 78% of the air that humans breathe. It causes death when inhaled without oxygen. The state would use nitrogen hypoxia, or asphyxiation by breathing in the gas, as its primary means of execution once a protocol has been finalized.

"Using an inert gas will be effective, simple to administer, easy to obtain and requires no complex medical procedures," Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said in the statement.

Robert Durnham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a capital punishment monitor, said that it would be some time before the state could carry out executions with the new method and that it would face a court order requiring it to wait 150 days until after a use protocol was published and would likely face litigation.

Durnham also added that the American Veterinary Medical Association deemed the process inappropriate for euthanizing mammals, citing that it would take more than seven minutes to kill a 70-pound pig.

"This is another execution process that is untested, untried and experimental" Dunham said.

Oklahoma has not carried out an execution since 2015 after a series of mishaps, including a botched lethal injection where an inmate was writhing in pain. Another execution included an inmate executed using a drug not approved by the state.

Last month, an inmate in the state of Alabama endured a botched execution that has been described as "torture" after he was prodded with needles for over two hours in an attempt to find a vein for the lethal drug to be injected.

The execution was eventually called off and a medically examination of the inmate, Doyle Lee Hamm, revealed that he had suffered 11 puncture wounds on his arms, ankles and groin, as well as bruising to his legs, feet and groin.

Hamm is now suing following the botched execution and his defense team is asking for relief from his "unconstitutional sentence of death," claiming that the botched procedure, during which time Hamm reportedly wished that he'd die, was a "constitutionally prohibited cruel, unnecessarily painful, slow, and lingering process to death."