The nation’s third nitrogen gas execution is scheduled for Thursday in Alabama.
Carey Grayson, 50, is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Central Time. The 1994 murder of 37-year-old Vickie Deblieux led to his death sentence.
He was among four adolescents convicted of capital murder. Deblieux was traveling from Tennessee to her mother’s house in Louisiana when two youngsters gave her a ride. The prosecutors claim they picked her up, took her to a forested area, attacked her, hurled her off a cliff, and then butchered her body.
The United States Supreme Court prohibited the execution of convicts under the age of 18 at the time of the offense, so Grayson is the only one facing the death penalty. Grayson was nineteen. The court sentenced another teenager involved in the murder to life in prison.
Grayson’s attorneys are attempting to delay his execution, claiming that the nitrogen hypoxia treatment causes unlawful levels of torture.
The execution method involves placing a respirator gas mask over an inmate’s face, which replaces breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, resulting in death from oxygen deprivation. Alabama initially used the procedure to execute Kenneth Smith in January. The state used nitrogen gas to execute Alan Miller in September.
Experts who testified for the state projected that nitrogen gas would put a person unconscious in 10 to 40 seconds. However, media witnesses, including Associated Press reporters, stated Smith and Miller trembled on the gurney for at least two minutes.
An appeal to the United States Supreme Court is pending.
“Two prisoners—Kenneth Eugene Smith and Alan Eugene Miller—have been executed by nitrogen hypoxia, and their executions did not match what Respondents promised (including to this Court),” Grayson’s attorneys wrote in a petition to Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday.
“Executing Mr. Grayson in the same way as Messrs. Smith and Miller will result in an Eighth Amendment violation if Mr. Grayson’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment and Baze is correct,” they wrote, referring to the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision that Kentucky’s lethal injection scheme did not violate the Eighth Amendment.
They added: “Given this is the first new execution method used in the United States since lethal injection was first used in 1982, it is appropriate for this Court to reach the issues surrounding this novel method. Without a stay and grant of certiorari, this Court will continue to face the questions raised in the petition about this novel method, and Mr. Grayson will be subject to an execution with superadded terror and pain in 49 hours.”
The last-minute filing comes after the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court order on Monday, allowing Grayson’s execution to proceed using the same nitrogen gas protocol that Alabama used to execute Smith and Miller.
The verdict came after justices heard oral arguments from Grayson’s lawyers and the Alabama attorney general’s office, who presented contrasting accounts of the state’s first two nitrogen gas executions.
Grayson’s counsel, John Palombi, told the court that the patient will experience “conscious suffocation” before the nitrogen knocks them unconscious. However, a state lawyer maintained that nitrogen hypoxia induces unconsciousness with no physical pain.
