*This is the first of five Holy Week posts engaging my new book, Suffocation by Design: The Story of America’s Newest Execution Method.
Suffocation By Design
On Holy Monday, Jesus walked into the Temple and overturned the money changers’ tables. It was not a gentle moment. It was an act of prophetic fury — a refusal to let sacred space be turned into a marketplace, a refusal to let religious language cover exploitation. “You have made it a den of robbers,” he declared, and the furniture flew.
I think about overturned tables often now. Because I have spent years watching systems dress violence in the language of mercy…watching states promise humanity while engineering suffocation, watching courts construct legal frameworks so elaborate they obscure the simple truth of what is happening: a human being is being strapped to a gurney and slowly killed while the people responsible call it justice.
My book, Suffocation by Design: The Story of America’s Newest Execution Method, is, at its core, an act of table-turning. It is a refusal to let the official narrative stand unopposed. It is the record of what actually happened…execution by execution, breath by breath…when nitrogen hypoxia was introduced as America’s newest method of killing.
Suffocation By Design: The Promise and the Lie
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall stood before the cameras after Kenneth Eugene Smith was executed on January 25, 2024…the first nitrogen hypoxia execution in history…and called it “historic” and “humane.” He said Alabama had “demonstrated the effectiveness of a humane alternative to lethal injection.”
What witnesses had just seen told a different story entirely. One media eyewitness reported that Smith “began to shake and writhe violently, in thrashing spasms and seizure-like movements… The force of his movements caused the gurney to visibly move at least once. Smith’s arms pulled against the straps holding him to the gurney. He lifted his head off the gurney and then fell back.” Another reporter described Smith as appearing awake for several minutes, “at times appearing to shake and writhe on the gurney and pull against his restraints. This was followed by several minutes of heavy breathing, until his breathing was no longer perceptible.” The ACLU of Alabama reported that Smith “shook, convulsed, writhed, and gasped for minutes until he was pronounced dead at least 22 minutes after the execution began.”
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights did not mince words: the method, they stated, “may amount to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
“This was not peaceful. This was not painless. This was suffocation.”
The Attorney General called it humane. The United Nations called it torture.
The Den of Robbers
What has been built around nitrogen hypoxia is not just a new execution method. It is a legal and procedural architecture designed to make the method nearly unchallengeable…a den of robbers, dressed in the language of the law.
Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. authorized Alabama’s first nitrogen execution despite the fact that the method had never been used on a human being. His legal reasoning created what critics called a logical paradox: to challenge a first-use method, the condemned must provide evidence that can only be generated through actual use. The state gets to experiment on a person precisely because no prior experiments exist. Huffaker described the inmates’ evidence as “speculation” and “scientific controversy,” and required proof of risk “to any degree of certainty or likelihood”…a standard that is by definition impossible to meet before the first human execution.
When later inmates pointed to the violent convulsions of Kenneth Smith’s execution as proof that the method caused suffering, Huffaker dismissed eyewitness accounts as “conflicting and inconsistent” and concluded that the execution was successful because the state achieved its fundamental objective: death within ten minutes. Treating ambiguity as cutting against the prisoner rather than the state became the defining feature of his jurisprudence.
Protocols were accepted by courts in heavily redacted form. Independent experts were denied the technical specifications necessary for genuine evaluation. When Alan Miller’s attorneys challenged the nitrogen protocol after Smith’s execution and called it “a disaster”…citing how the state’s protocol had not delivered the “quick death” it had promised…the case was settled the day before a scheduled evidentiary hearing. The terms were confidential. The Attorney General called the settlement proof that Alabama’s nitrogen system was “reliable and humane.” Miller’s own attorneys pushed back, noting that no court had upheld the method’s constitutionality, and that “by definition, a settlement agreement does not involve a ruling on the merits.”
“The individual challenging the execution must provide evidence that can only be generated through actual use, yet the method cannot lawfully be used until the court is satisfied that such evidence does not indicate substantial risk. Huffaker’s opinion thus institutionalizes a procedural hurdle that makes successful first-use challenges exceedingly difficult, essentially requiring plaintiffs to prove a negative risk in an inherently uncertain domain.”
The Voice That Cried Out
Not every judicial voice was silent. Judge Jill Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals dissented powerfully when Alabama sought to execute Kenneth Smith. She wrote about the real risks with unflinching specificity…panic, prolonged consciousness, the terrifying possibility of vomiting inside a sealed mask with no one permitted to intervene. “If Mr. Smith vomits,” she wrote, “his executioners will not intervene… even as vomit fills the mask.” She warned that the court was sanctioning human experimentation without informed consent, and she placed Smith’s PTSD…a documented condition…at the center of her analysis, arguing that oxygen deprivation in a man with his history created predictable and foreseeable risks of acute psychological terror.
She closed with words I have carried ever since: “He will die. The cost, I fear, will be Mr. Smith’s human dignity, and ours.”
That is the prophetic tradition operating inside the legal system itself…a judge who refused to let the machinery run without moral accounting, who overturned her own table, even if the majority did not listen. The majority proceeded. The gurney moved. The gas hissed.
Suffocation By Design: Why the Tables Must Be Turned
Jesus’s fury in the Temple was not a loss of control. It was love expressing itself as refusal…refusal to let the sacred be desecrated, refusal to let the language of religion protect what was profane. The money changers weren’t cartoonishly evil. They were doing their jobs. That’s what made the fury necessary.
The same is true here. The officials who call nitrogen hypoxia humane have constructed a system with enough procedural distance…redacted protocols, evidentiary burdens, confidential settlements…that the truth of what happens in those chambers can be held at arm’s length.
That is what this book is for. That is what Holy Monday is for. I was in that chamber. I heard the gas. I saw what the body did. And I am telling you: the official story cannot stand. The truth must be told. The tables of silence must be overturned by the weight of witness.
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