Alabama officials called off the lethal injection of a man convicted in a 1999 workplace shooting because of time concerns and trouble accessing the inmate’s veins, reported The Associated Press.
Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the
state halted the scheduled execution of Alan Miller after they determined they
could not get the lethal injection underway before a midnight deadline. Prison
officials made the decision at about 11:30 p.m. The last-minute reprieve came
nearly three hours after a divided U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for
the execution to begin.
“Due to time constraints resulting from the lateness
of the court proceedings, the execution was called off once it was determined
the condemned inmate’s veins could not be accessed in accordance with our
protocol before the expiration of the death warrant,” Hamm said.
Hamm said "accessing the veins was taking a
little bit longer than we anticipated." He did not know how long the team
tried to establish a connection, but noted there are a number of procedures to
be done before the team begins trying to connect the IV line.
Miller was returned to his regular cell at a south
Alabama prison.
The aborted execution came after the state's July
execution of Joe Nathan James took more than three hours to get
underway after the state had difficulties establishing an intravenous line,
leading to accusations that the execution was botched.
Miller, 57, was sentenced to death after being
convicted of a 1999 workplace rampage in which he killed Terry Jarvis, Lee
Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy.
“Despite the circumstances that led to the
cancellation of this execution, nothing will change the fact that a jury heard
the evidence of this case and made a decision," Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said
in a statement. She added that three families are still grieving.
“We all know full well that Michael Holdbrooks, Terry
Lee Jarvis and Christopher Scott Yancey did not choose to die by bullets to the
chest. Tonight, my prayers are with the victims’ families and loved ones as
they are forced to continue reliving the pain of their loss,” Ivey said.
An anti-death penalty group said the situation with
Miller's attempted lethal injection sounded similar to other “botched”
executions.
"It is hard to see how they can persist with
this broken method of execution that keeps going catastrophically wrong, again
and again. In its desperation to execute, Alabama is experimenting on prisoners
behind closed doors — surely the definition of cruel and unusual punishment,”
Maya Foa, director of Reprieve US Forensic Justice Initiative, a human rights
group opposed to the death penalty, said in a statement.
Prosecutors said Miller, a delivery truck driver,
killed co-workers Holdbrooks and Yancy at a business in suburban Birmingham and
then drove off to shoot former supervisor Jarvis at a business where Miller had
previously worked. Each man was shot multiple times and Miller was captured
after a highway chase.
Trial testimony indicated Miller believed the men
were spreading rumors about him, including that he was gay. A psychiatrist
hired by the defense found Miller suffered from severe mental illness and
delusions but also said Miller’s condition wasn’t bad enough to use as a basis
for an insanity defense under state law.
Justices in a 5-4 decision lifted an injunction —
issued by a federal judge and left in place by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals — that had blocked Miller's execution from going forward. Miller’s
attorneys said the state lost the paperwork requesting his execution be carried
out using nitrogen hypoxia, a method legally available to him but never before
used in the U.S.
When Alabama approved nitrogen hypoxia as an
execution method in 2018, state law gave inmates a brief window to designate it
as their execution method. Miller testified that he turned in paperwork four
years ago selecting nitrogen hypoxia as his execution method, putting the
documents in a slot in his cell door at the Holman Correctional Facility for a
prison worker to collect.
U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. issued a
preliminary injunction on Tuesday blocking the state from killing Miller by any
means other than nitrogen hypoxia after finding it was “substantially likely”
that Miller “submitted a timely election form even though the State says that
it does not have any physical record of a form.”
Nitrogen hypoxia is a proposed execution method in
which death would be caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen,
depriving him or her of the oxygen needed to maintain bodily functions.
Nitrogen hypoxia is authorized for executions in three states but none have
attempted to put an inmate to death using the method. Alabama officials told
the judge they are working to finalize the protocol.
Many states have struggled to buy execution drugs in
recent years after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking
the use of their products in lethal injections. That has led some to seek
alternate methods.
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