The state of Alabama halted the execution of a death row inmate Thursday night after failing to comply with protocols before a midnight deadline, officials say.
Alan Eugene Miller was set to be executed by lethal injection after a US Supreme Court ruling earlier Thursday overturned a court ruling in a long-running dispute over whether Miller would die by that method or by nitrogen hypoxia, an untested and unproven method that Alabama officials had. he said they were not ready to use.
But after the Supreme Court ruled the execution could proceed by lethal injection, state officials said Thursday they could not access Miller’s veins within time limits, according to AL.com.
“Due to time constraints that delayed the judicial process, the execution was canceled when it was determined that the inmate’s veins could not be accessed in accordance with our protocol prior to the expiration of the death warrant,” the Alabama Department of Corrections said. Commissioner John Hamm, according to AL.com.
Miller was returned to his death row cell, Hamm said. Gov. Kay Ivey “expects that execution will be reinstated as soon as possible,” her office said in a statement.
Hamm met with the families of the victims to inform them of the cancellation before meeting with the press, Ivey said in a statement obtained by CNN.
“Despite the circumstances that led to the cancellation of this execution, nothing will change the fact that a jury heard the evidence in this case and reached a decision. It does not change the fact that Mr. Miller never contested his crimes. And it doesn’t change the fact that three families are still grieving,” Ivey said.
Miller was sentenced to death for the murders of former and current colleagues Lee Michael Holdbrooks, Christopher S. Yancey and Terry Lee Jarvis, each of whom was fatally shot. A forensic psychiatrist who testified in Miller’s defense found that he was mentally ill and suffered from a delusional disorder, leading him to believe that the victims were spreading rumors about him. However, the psychiatrist concluded that Miller’s mental illness did not meet the standards for an insanity defense in Alabama.
The botched execution attempt followed weeks of legal battles between the state and Miller’s lawyers over the method by which he would die — a battle that eventually ended in the Supreme Court.
On Monday, a federal district court judge blocked the state from killing Miller by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia — an execution method never before used in the US and which critics and experts say has not yet been proven. humane or effective than its proponents. claims it could be safer, easier and cheaper than lethal injection.
The inmate had sued the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the state attorney general and its chief, alleging that prison officials were moving to execute him by lethal injection after he lost paperwork in which he claimed he had chosen to die by nitrogen asphyxiation .
Failure to grant his request, according to Miller’s complaint, violated his constitutional rights.
State officials — who suggested Miller had made no such choice and had no record of his preference — said in court filings they were not ready to use nitrogen hypoxia, which Alabama approved as an alternative method of execution in 2018 .
The department had “completed many of the preparations necessary to carry out hypoxia executions” but its protocol “was not yet complete,” he told CNN last week in a statement. “Once the nitrogen hypoxia protocol is completed, (department) personnel will need sufficient time to be thoroughly trained before an execution can be conducted using this method.”
State officials appealed the district court judge’s order, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to allow him to proceed with Miller’s execution by lethal injection.
The Eleventh Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision, writing in a 32-page decision that the district court had found it was “substantially probable that Mr. Miller timely filed an election form, even though the State says it has no physical record of a form .”
“The State does not dispute this factual finding and has completely failed to argue (much less show) that it will suffer irreparable harm,” the order said.
State officials appealed to the US Supreme Court, which in a ruling late Thursday ruled 5-4 that the execution could go ahead. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to remain in place.
The claims of those who support executions by nitrogen gas may sound appealing, given states’ ongoing problems with obtaining drugs for lethal injections and with recent executions deemed improper, either because an inmate suffered too much or because the process deviated from the protocol set by the officials.
But critics and experts reject those arguments, saying there’s no proof that nitrogen hypoxia executions would honor prisoners’ constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment because it has never been used and could never be ethically tested.
But inmates like Miller choose the unproven method because of concerns about the level of pain they might suffer during the lethal injection, Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center told CNN: “They’re choosing a method that they hope won’t they are torturous for a method they are sure will be torturous.”
