A man scheduled to be executed using nitrogen hypoxia has gotten a reprieve — for now — as controversy over the method of his execution, which is also used in assisted suicide, continues to grow.
Jessie Hoffman, Jr. is sentenced to be executed for the 1996 rape and murder of Molly Elliott. Elliott’s husband, Andy, said he has conflicting feelings on Hoffman’s execution, saying that it will not bring anyone closure.
“Anyone who has experienced a tragedy of this magnitude will recognize the absolute truth — Molly’s and my families and friends lost a great human being to a senseless series of crimes, the reasons for which we still don’t know,” he said. “The pain is something we simply have learned to live with. That pain cannot be decreased by another death, nor by commuting the sentence of Molly’s assailant to life in prison.”
Hoffman’s execution is scheduled for March 18th, and he was set to be the third person executed using nitrogen hypoxia. A previous execution using this method was said to be torturous; that man, Kenneth Smith, was killed in Alabama, and it took over 20 minutes for him to die. During that time, his convulsions were so violent that the entire gurney shook, with one reporter publicly saying how gruesome the death was.
“I’ve been to four previous executions and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” Lee Hedgepeth said. “Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
READ: More disturbing details emerge about first death in suicide pod: ‘She’s still alive, Philip’
Philip Nitschke, founder of the “Sarco” assisted suicide death pod, has openly criticized execution by nitrogen hypoxia — not because he worries that it’s inhumane or torturous, but because it’s the same method used in Sarco.
Following Smith’s death, Nitschke complained, “Nitrogen hypoxia has been advocated for over 15 years by the right to die movement as an effective way to obtain a quick, peaceful and reliable Do It Yourself (DIY) death.” He said the media coverage of the execution is doing “considerable damage” to assisted suicide and has “set the movement back at least 20 years.”
So far, one person has been killed using Nitschke’s Sarco pod, and her death was much more suspicious and sinister than he would like people to believe.
Chief U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick of the Middle Louisiana District ruled partially in Hoffman’s favor, writing that it is in the public interest to be able to fully examine a “newly proposed method of execution on a fully developed record.” His execution has, therefore, been temporarily halted. “The public has paramount interest in a legal process that enables thoughtful and well-informed deliberations, particularly when the ultimate fundamental right, the right to life, is placed in the government’s hands,” she wrote.
Many of the drugs used in assisted suicide are also used in death penalty executions, and they are often more violent than anticipated. Yet, because the patient is given a paralytic first, the pain and torture they are experiencing goes unseen. With lethal injection, whether for a death penalty execution or an assisted suicide via drugs, the cause of death is pulmonary edema, meaning the person essentially drowns to death in their own secretions. With nitrogen hypoxia, the cause of death is asphyxiation — meaning the person suffocates to death.
