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| Photo Credit: AP. |
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama officials called off the Thursday lethal injection of a man convicted in a 1999 workplace shooting because of time concerns and trouble accessing the inmate’s veins.
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.