An attempted lethal injection was abandoned after Alabama prison officials had trouble finding Alan Miller’s veins. Miller was convicted was murdering three people in 1999 in a shooting.
“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,” John Hamm, Alabama corrections commissioner, said.
Hamm said that “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 said there are a number of procedures to be done before the team begins trying to connect the intravenous line.
This is not the first time in recent months that an execution was botched in Alabama. It took some three and a half hours to execute Joe Nathan James using lethal injection this past July.
“Alabama officials tortured Joe Nathan James to death for over three hours trying to set up an IV line, and then covered it up. Instead of pausing and investigating how their actions led to what may have been the longest recorded execution in our country’s history, they instead rushed Alan Miller to the execution chamber weeks later and tried to kill him in secret,” said Maya Foa, director of Reprieve US.
“Officials knew it was likely they would subject Alan Miller to the very same long and agonizing procedure as Joe Nathan James and Doyle Lee Hamm [whose execution was abandoned in 2018 after prison officials spent two and a half hours trying to access his veins] and yet they ploughed ahead anyway – adding to the state’s horrific history of 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.”
Alabama needs to reevaluate their methods. I’m sure the families of the victims would like them to get their process under control as well.
Source The Guardian
