Death row do-over, from failed attempt to controversial second chance

In America's execution chambers, a very troubling new method is emerging. It is called "nitrogen hypoxia" and involves suffocating the prisoner to death by depriving them of oxygen.

Several states like Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi now allow using nitrogen gas as an execution method as an alternative to lethal injection. But this practice is incredibly inhumane and brutal.

With nitrogen hypoxia, the inmate wears a mask that feeds them nitrogen gas instead of regular air with oxygen. As they breathe in the nitrogen, their body is slowly starved of the oxygen it needs to survive. It is essentially a controlled form of smothering someone to death.

The prisoner experiences horrifying symptoms as oxygen levels drop. They become confused and nauseous at first. But then comes worse suffering - convulsions, shooting pains, and desperate gasping for air as their organs fail from lack of oxygen. Ultimately, their heart stops from the oxygen deprivation after agonizing minutes.

It is a truly agonizing way to die. The prisoner likely vomits or loses control of their bodily functions from the trauma before perishing. Leading human rights groups have denounced it as a form of illegal torture due to the severe distress inflicted.

This January, Kenneth Smith became the first inmate executed by nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama. We can only imagine the sheer horror he experienced suffocating inside that chamber. Next could be Alan Miller, recently scheduled for a September nitrogen execution despite Alabama previously botching his lethal injection.

Miller shockingly chose to die this way himself, showing inmates' desperation as other execution methods became problematic. But does that make it acceptable for a government to smother someone to death, no matter the crime?

The clear depravity of watching a prisoner choke for air as their life drains away should appaul all humane people. There is no way to make deliberately starving someone of oxygen "humane." It strips away human dignity and ethics.

Yet some officials absurdly praised Smith's killing as the "best alternative" available. How can torturous suffocation somehow represent a lawful, ethical practice in a civilized society? The historical parallels to cruel medieval torture techniques cannot be ignored.

Major human rights groups like the UN have swiftly condemned these "unacceptably cruel" American asphyxiation executions as violating international laws against inhumane treatment. The US has disgraced its founding democratic principles with such barbaric practices.

Rationalizing executions as ever truly "humane" was already dubious. But with nitrogen hypoxia's purposeful infliction of smothering anguish, that defensibility has collapsed entirely. It exposes the execution machine's descent into sociopathic indifference to human suffering.

In those death chambers, the inmate desperately clutches their throat as life drains away in breathless panic, their lungs burning from oxygen starvation. It distills killing to its most primal, uncivilized essence - a brutalizing of human dignity that civilized society should reject.

For officials to subject anyone to this archaic form of torturous strangulation, even after a botched attempt like Miller's case, is unconscionably cruel. It violates core ethics and human rights beyond any rationalization of criminal justice.

The proliferation of death-by-smothering must provoke moral outrage and be condemned. If societies cannot summon the courage to banish such depraved practices, it is a damning indictment on human decency itself.

America should repudiate this ghastly regression into institutionalized suffocation, not find ways to rationalize or normalize it. The ethical solution is clear: abolish capital punishment's slippery slope into legalizing new forms of legalized torture.

For those like Miller gasping to uphold human dignity, the stakes are clear. Society must not sacrifice its ethics and fundamental morality on the altar of indifference towards inflicting agonizing deaths. Any justice facilitated by torture is no justice at all.