Holy Tuesday: The Questions That Expose Everything

*This post is part of a series of Holy Week reflections drawn from my new book, Suffocation by Design, tracing the final week of the life of Jesus alongside the story of nitrogen hypoxia executions in America.

Holy Tuesday is the day of questions. Jesus returned to the Temple and spent the day in debate…with the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, the lawyers. They came at him with trap after trap, each question designed to force a contradiction. And in every exchange, the question meant to ensnare him became the question that exposed them.

Nitrogen hypoxia has generated its own set of unanswerable questions…questions the state never anticipated, questions whose answers keep exposing what the official narrative was designed to conceal. My book, Suffocation by Design, is built around them. What does humane actually mean? What does evidence actually require? What does it say about a legal system when ambiguity is always resolved in favor of the state and against the condemned?

Eight Executions and a Pattern

Suffocation by Design documents all eight nitrogen hypoxia executions conducted in the United States between January 2024 and October 2025. They constitute not isolated events but a pattern…and the pattern refuses to be explained away.

Kenneth Smith was first. Convulsions, the gurney moving, 22 minutes. Alan Eugene Miller trembled and pulled against restraints for two minutes, then gulped for six more. His spiritual advisor called it torture. The state called it justice. Carey Dale Grayson’s anesthesiologist testified he would experience “agony” while conscious. Judge Huffaker dismissed this as “speculation.” Grayson’s last act of agency was to raise both middle fingers.

Demetrius Frazier was transferred from Michigan…a state that has abolished the death penalty…to Alabama specifically to be executed. Jessie Hoffman Jr. spread the method to Louisiana. Gregory Hunt represented himself in his final legal challenges and died taking “a series of four or more gasping breaths with long pauses in between.” The phrase four or more is telling…witnesses could not agree on an exact count. Geoffrey Todd West gave a thumbs-up toward his attorney as the nitrogen began to flow, confirming he was conscious…directly contradicting the state’s assurances of near-instantaneous unconsciousness. His was the execution described as showing “the least movement.” It still lasted 26 minutes.

Commissioner Hamm acknowledged afterward that “we have seen a variation in movement.” The method produced wildly consistent, horrific results. And yet the state kept calling it humane.

“Consistent visible distress has not prompted reconsideration…it has been absorbed into the narrative of expected, involuntary and acceptable responses.”

The Question of Psychological Suffering

One of the most consequential judicial questions to emerge from the nitrogen hypoxia litigation is whether psychological suffering counts. Judge Huffaker’s answer, applied consistently across multiple Alabama cases, was essentially: no. In the Grayson case, he wrote that “psychological pain or mental suffering cannot by itself support an Eighth Amendment claim.” Even if a protocol would cause panic, air hunger, terror and desperation…even if all of that were conceded…it was constitutionally irrelevant unless physical pain could be proven with near-scientific certainty.

Judge Shelly Dick, presiding over Louisiana’s first nitrogen case involving Jessie Hoffman Jr., arrived at a different answer. She cited eyewitness accounts of what she described as “shaking, gasping as if drowning in air,” and estimated a 35-to-40-second window of conscious awareness during which Hoffman would likely experience what clinicians call “air hunger”…one of the most primal and terrifying forms of human distress. She concluded this period was constitutionally significant, “precisely because the Eighth Amendment bars punishments that intentionally or knowingly expose a person to subjective terror.” She granted a preliminary injunction…the first federal court to directly halt a nitrogen execution.

Louisiana appealed. The injunction was overturned. Hoffman was executed.

“Medical experts explained that the sensation of suffocation… what clinicians term ‘air hunger’… is one of the most primal and terrifying forms of human distress. Even if the period of conscious awareness is brief, the subjective experience can be overwhelming, triggering panic, desperation, and acute psychological suffering.”

Holy Tuesday: The Questions the System Cannot Answer

Beneath all the legal analysis, the witness accounts, the competing expert testimony, the redacted protocols and the confidential settlements, there is a question that none of the official proceedings have answered honestly. It is the question Holy Tuesday presses toward… the question whose honest answer the authorities could not afford to speak:

What are we actually doing here, and can we justify it?

Attorney General Marshall characterized Kenneth Smith’s execution as demonstrating “the effectiveness of a humane alternative to lethal injection.” But the autopsy had revealed pulmonary edema…significant fluid in the lungs…directly contradicting prior assurances of a clean, complication-free process. This wasn’t simply falling asleep. This was a violent bodily response to suffocation.

The pattern across eight executions is not ambiguous. The bodies did not cooperate. The gurneys moved. The witnesses could not look away. And the state kept calling it humane…kept insisting the movements were “expected” and “involuntary”…kept maintaining that what everyone saw was not what it looked like.

Jesus’s questions on Holy Tuesday forced the authorities to show their hand. These questions do the same.

What does it mean to call a thing humane when the body says otherwise? What does it mean to call it justice when the gurney shakes?