Alabama savagely gas-tortured a sixth man to death

Although it was unwanted by the victim’s son, Alabama savagely gas-tortured-to-death yet another condemned man on September 25th, Geoffrey West, the sixth human the state has suffocated with nitrogen. As I’ve documented in my previous essays following each of these gassing-tortures— “Alabama savagely gas tortured a fifth man to death”; “Atrocity after atrocity in Alabama”; “Alabama gas-tortured a 3rd man to death”; “Alabama arrogantly asphyxiates another condemned man”; and “Alabama torture outrage muted and unconscionably insufficient”—Alabama’s nitrogen-gassings are an abomination on the road to the descent of mankind.

Although Alabama’s Attorney General and his acolytes promised in court—in the face of medical-legal expert opinion to the contrary—that gassing human beings “will cause unconsciousness in a matter of seconds, rendering [the prisoner] unable to feel pain,” that wasn’t West’s experience nor that of the other five men in Alabama executed this way before him (as well as another man, too, when Alabama exported its nitrogen-gassing abomination to Louisiana).

Ivana Hrynkiw, an eyewitness to West’s execution, published this narrative report for al.com: “The curtain to the execution chamber opened at 5:52 p.m. At 5:55, [West] smiled toward the spiritual advisor. Around the same time, a correctional officer appeared to check the seal of the gas mask around West’s face using his fingers. [The spiritual advisor] approached West’s feet to pray quickly and stepped away. West gave another thumbs up towards his sole witness, his attorney. He breathed deeply several times, and [West’s spiritual advisor] nodded to him. Around 5:58 p.m., West coughed and gasped deeply as his head rolled to the side. He appeared to foam at the mouth, and his left fist curled upward. His face appeared purple as his head rolled back toward the witness room where reporters sat. His breathing became more even, as his hand remained curled. At 6:01 p.m., West started a series of about eight deep, gulping breaths. Those breaths turned to shallow, smaller gasps around 6:02 p.m. for about two minutes. At 6:06 p.m., West appeared to have about a dozen small pulses in his torso. He appeared to stop moving about a minute later.”

Sarah Clifton witnessed and reported on West’s execution for The Montgomery Advertiser, and her account essentially squares with Hrynkiw’s though Clifton describes “shuddering gulps for breath” and “breaths appear[ing] to be choking breaths that stopped short, followed by his breath apparently hitching”; Clifton’s report further observes that West’s “gasping breaths seemed inconsistent, appearing to come in intervals ranging between 5 and at least 20 seconds apart.”

In my essay “Shoot me, hang me, just please don’t gas me” published a few weeks prior to West’s execution, I insisted “state officials are agonizingly doing a see-through and cynical job of trying to explain away what media witnesses have reported seeing: men who are fully conscious gasping, choking, and thrashing around all while being slowly suffocated by forced nitrogen-inhalation.” Drawing from this playbook, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm did the exact same thing at a press conference following West’s execution. Hamm held forth that “There’s always involuntary movement and everybody’s different, because we have seen a variation of movement in the six we’ve done. But yes, West was the least movement that we’ve seen.” Notably, Hrynkiw reported “Hamm said he had no assessment of when West lost consciousness and couldn’t see West’s eyes or much of West’s face from his vantage point. He believed any visible movement from West was involuntary.”

Once in a column called “The Cow-Patty Stench of Texas’s Death Penalty,” I relied upon Professor Harry Gordon Frankfurt’s celebrated 2005 book “On Bullshit” for which a twentieth anniversary edition has recently been published with a postscript in which Frankfurt emphasizes that “indifference to the truth is extremely dangerous.”

“On Bullshit” is on point and not just when it comes to what Texas’s death penalty smells like, but because it describes the fragrance of what Hamm’s been saying about these nitrogen-gassings.

The Princeton University Press writes that “‘On Bullshit’ is a small book that explains a great deal about our time.” Perceptively, “Frankfurt argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do—that is, by deliberately making false claims about what’s true. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant….Liars at least acknowledge that the truth matters.” Because of this, Frankfurt ominously concludes “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

Someday and somewhere there’ll be a reckoning for these nitrogen-gassing executions. Civilized people will come together and force change. They’ll say: Enough of this bullshit that “nitrogen hypoxia” is a humane execution method. Until then “Alabama’s torturous death penalty hums on,” and humans continue to be treated the same as bloodily slaughtered hogs.

The seventh nitrogen-gassing-execution torture in Alabama is scheduled on October 23rd. Before then the actions that people take—or don’t take—will be indicative of how comfortable our nation is with repetitive nitrogen-gassing torture. That’s not unmitigated bullshit. That’s truth.