Alan Eugene Miller, sentenced to death for three counts of murder, could become the first criminal to be executed with nitrogen in the United States.
As has now become known through the hearing before a US federal court in Alabama, the public prosecutor's office plans to execute the former delivery truck driver next Thursday in the Holman prison in Atmore.
Miller allegedly chose nitrogen hypoxia as his method of execution a few years ago.
Since the corresponding application of the fifty-seven-year-old was lost, the legal authorities in Alabama do not rule out the controversial lethal injection for him.
The case sparked further debate in the United States about the death penalty and methods of execution.
Alabama, Miller's home state, like Mississippi and Oklahoma, decided in 2018 to allow nitrogen as a gas on death row.
After the refusal of many European and American pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs such as the barbiturates pentobarbital and thiopental for executions, many states have been looking for alternatives to lethal injections, which have been the norm up to now.
The southern state of Tennessee executed some murderers in the electric chair.
In South Carolina, lawmakers last year voted to reintroduce firing squads, following the Utah example.
"Death by firing squad is not only instantaneous, but is also intended to be comparatively painless," Sonia Sotomayor, US Supreme Court Justice, summed up the execution by "firing squads" a few years earlier in the case of death row inmate Thomas Arthur.
At the time, opponents of the firing squads referred to the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Nitrogen execution, which Miller is now contesting in federal court in Alabama, is considered less prone to failure than lethal injection.
The planned high concentration of nitrogen leads to unconsciousness after a few breaths.
After about a minute, the death row inmate falls into a coma.
Eventually, death occurs from a lack of oxygen.
Meanwhile, critics point to the lack of scientific tests on nitrogen as an execution gas.
Miller, who shot dead three former colleagues at a Shelby County trucking company in August 1999 for alleged bullying and was sentenced to death a year later, chose to be executed with nitrogen because he was afraid of needles.
Assistant US Attorney James Houts said after this week's hearing that he thought Miller's gassing, the first in America, was "very likely."