Alabama is set to conduct its second execution using nitrogen gas later this summer.
Gov. Kay Ivey’s office set Alan Eugene Miller’s execution date for any time between midnight on September 26 and 6 a.m. September 27. The timeframe set by the governor allows the execution to take place during those hours, but the prison system has typically set executions for 6 p.m.
The nitrogen execution will come eight months after Alabama conducted the first and only execution of its kind in the United States.
The first was in January, when Kenneth Eugene Smith was put to death by wearing a gas mask in which he inhaled pure nitrogen. Witnesses to the execution could see Smith writhing with seizure-like movements for about two minutes, before a period of heavy breathing and slight gasping.
Miller, 59, was convicted in the Aug. 5 1999 Shelby County workplace shootings in which he killed Terry Jarvis, 39, Lee Holdbrooks, 32, and Scott Yancy, 28.
Miller killed his victims at his current and former places. Holdbrooks and Yancy were employees of Ferguson Enterprises, while Jarvis worked for Post Airgas in Pelham.
The Alabama Supreme Court last week granted the state’s request to put Miller to death using nitrogen gas.
He’s survived an attempt to be executed once before.
Miller was first set to die by the Alabama’s three-drug lethal injection cocktail in September 2022, but prison officials called off that execution about 30 minutes before the state’s death warrant expired that night. Miller’s veins couldn’t be accessed within execution protocol time limits, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm told reporters gathered at the prison system media center.
The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for the execution to start about 9 p.m. that night, giving members of the prison’s execution team nearly three hours to conduct the lethal injection.
At the time, Hamm said the execution team did start trying to access Miller’s veins to insert the intravenous lines for the fatal cocktail, but he wasn’t sure how long the team worked to try to access a vein. When pressed what was being done during that nearly three-hour period, Hamm would not elaborate. “Like I said, there are several things that we have to do before we even start accessing the veins. And that was taking a little bit longer than we anticipated.”
Miller claimed later in a lawsuit that prison workers poked him for 90 minutes trying to start an IV.
After that attempt, the state agreed with Miller’s lawyers in a federal lawsuit that it would not seek to execute Miller by lethal injection again, and that any attempt to execute him in the future would be done with nitrogen gas.