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Oklahoma wants to start executing prisoners again after a series of mistakes using lethal injection led to a three-year pause. State officials want to try nitrogen gas, a method which has never been used in the U.S. StateImpact Oklahoma's Quinton Chandler reports.
QUINTON CHANDLER, BYLINE: Oklahoma stopped lethal injections after it botched two executions and almost mishandled a third. Drug companies have stopped permitting states to use their products in lethal injections. So that's left Oklahoma Corrections Director Joe Allbaugh in what he calls a mad hunt.
JOE ALLBAUGH: I got to the point in finding these drugs that I was calling all around the world to the back streets of the Indian subcontinent to procure drugs.
CHANDLER: Now the state wants to use nitrogen. The inmate is supposed to suffocate quickly when inhaling the gas. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter says the state was forced to make this change because of one reason - death penalty opponents.
MIKE HUNTER: I think Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito summed it up best in 2015 when he said, opponents of capital punishment are waging a guerrilla war against the death penalty.
CHANDLER: Officials maintain this new protocol will be painless. Don Heath is a pastor who chairs the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He says there's no evidence that's the case.
DON HEATH: The concern with nitrogen hypoxia is that it's untested, and how do you test it on humans?
CHANDLER: Heath says postponements are the next best thing to abolishing the death penalty. For now, the state still has to figure out how it will use the nitrogen in executions. And after that, it has agreed to wait five months before it administers it on an inmate to ensure prisoners' attorneys have time to challenge the new protocol. For NPR News, I'm Quinton Chandler in Norman, Okla. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.