The state will use this cruel method in the face of a shortage of substances for lethal injection

Leer en español: Oklahoma, nitrógeno para los condenados a muerte

Oklahoma is famous in the United States for being the territory of this country in which more inmates are executed, besides being a pioneer in the use of lethal injection. Always at the forefront in terms of the death penalty, its latest "innovation" is to gas with nitrogen the 12 inmates who are currently on death row and who have exhausted all their legal resources.

The reason for choosing this cruel method is that given the refusal of many pharmaceuticals to supply the components of lethal injection, finding these substances has become a problem for states that still apply the death penalty. For instance, Nevada and Nebraska have had to resort to the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, for their executions.

The attorney general of Oklahoma, Mike Hunter, was firm in stating: "we cannot stay in the margins and wait for the drugs to arrive. Nitrogen is effective, easy to administer, easy to obtain and does not require complex medical procedures".

Joe Allbaugh, director of the Penitentiary Department, went further and stated that "some prisoners in Oklahoma are making it difficult for us, since they resort to dehydration to make it difficult to insert the needles for the lethal injection. It is true that we have never tried executions with nitrogen, but we have looked for the components for lethal injection even in India and nothing, without the collaboration of pharmaceutical companies it is an almost impossible task".

The inhalation of nitrogen by the inmate would be through a mask, generating death due to lack of oxygen (hypoxia). The condemned would experience fatigue, dizziness, headache, loss of breathing and consciousness, thus producing death in a few minutes. Some humanitarian organizations have been quick to show their rejection of this method by stating that it has never been used before, and prisoners would be used as guinea pigs, besides of the fact that they could die with great suffering.

Many are the criticisms that fall on Oklahoma because the execution of Clayton Lockett is still fresh in the memory. Lockett was convicted in 2014 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl; he took 43 minutes to die, with a terrible agony, after being injected with a drug little studied for terminal applications. Even President Barack Obama himself described the episode as inhumane. A few months later, a similar case was about to take place, but at the last moment one of the guards realized that the combination of drugs was wrong. Since October 2015 Oklahoma has not executed again.

Despite this record, it does not seem like the use of nitrogen will encounter many obstacles, for the state parliament approved on November 8, 2016 the use of any enforcement system which was not prohibited in the Constitution of the United States. TIt must be added that the re-elected governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, is a strong advocate of capital punishment and one of the people who has insisted on finding alternative methods to lethal injection.

Latin American Post | José María González Alonso

Translated from "Oklahoma, nitrógeno para los condenados a muerte"