Oklahoma plans to start carrying out executions with nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used in the U.S. but that some states have already approved amid difficulties with lethal injections.
At a news conference Wednesday, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh said that over the next few months the state would develop a protocol for using nitrogen.
[...] In recent years, Oklahoma and other states have struggled to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections, the most common execution method but one that has increasingly faced scrutiny.
In 2015, a state court put a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma after a series of botched executions, including one in which an inmate convulsed for 43 minutes before dying and another in which the wrong drug was administered.
Oklahoma is poised to become the first state to use nitrogen gas in executions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:51AM
Sort of, it's the reversal that's probably more helpful. You can displace the necessary oxygen with other gasses fairly quickly, but going back to an environment that prison officials can breath in is substantially easier if you're displacing the oxygen with nitrogen.
Even better would probably be a mixture of CO2 and N2 to make that switch back even more efficient.