After the execution squad and the electric chair, the gas chamber: the conservative US states, which are struggling to obtain materials for the lethal injectable solutions they use in the executions of death row inmates, are looking for alternatives of the often controversial past.
On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court set for June 8 its execution Frank Adwood, who was sentenced in 1987 to death for the murder of an 8-year-old girl. But it gave him the right to choose between the solution for injection or the gas chamber.
According to his lawyer, the penitentiary authorities are considering the use of hydrocyanic acid, the key ingredient in Zyklon-B, which was used in Nazi concentration camps to kill prisoners. But Frank Adwood’s mother was Jewish and left Austria in 1939 to escape the Nazis. explained Joe Perkovic.
In the USA, only seven States allow the use of gases to execute detainees. In practice, no one has performed such an execution since 1999. Most executions have been performed for years with the injection solution. Doubts about the legality of this protocol – it is believed that the lethal solution for injection can cause unbearable pain to convicts – and the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to supply penitentiary services with such drugs have led to the postponement of many executions in recent years. No executions have taken place in Arizona since 2014, when a death row inmate suffered convulsions and struggled for two hours until he died after being given an injectable solution.
Arizona authorities have decided to resume executions this year. Claude Dixon, who was convicted of killing a female student, is scheduled to be executed on May 11 before Atwood. He also had two weeks to declare whether he wished to be executed in a gas chamber. His silence meant that he agreed to be executed with a solution for injection.
In February, the local Jewish community appealedin vain, to prevent the authorities from using hydrocyanic acid in executions. “It is frightening that Arizona chose Zyklon-B, the chemical used by the Nazis in Auschwitz to kill more than a million people.”explained Tim Estein, President of the Council of the Jewish Community of Greater Phoenix (JCRC).
In April, South Carolina caused a stir when it asked a death row inmate to choose whether to be executed in the executive branch or in the electric chair. The execution was finally suspended at the last minute by the State Supreme Court.
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