Alabama officials halted Thursday’s lethal injection of a man convicted of a 1999 workplace shooting, citing timing concerns and problems accessing the inmate’s veins. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said the state halted the planned execution of Alan Miller after they determined they could not administer the lethal injection before midnight. Corrections officials made the decision at about 11:30 p.m. The last-minute stay came nearly three hours after a divided US Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to begin. “Due to time constraints resulting from the delay in the judicial process, the execution was canceled when it was determined that the condemned inmate’s veins could not be accessed according to our protocol prior to the expiration of the death warrant,” Hamm said. The execution team began trying to establish IV access, but did not know for how long. Miller returned to his regular cell at a south Alabama prison. Miller, 57, was convicted of killing three people in a workplace rampage in 1999, carrying the death penalty. The justices in a 5-4 decision lifted an injunction — issued by a federal judge and upheld by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — that had prevented Miller’s execution from going forward. Miller’s lawyers said the state lost the paperwork that required his execution to be carried out using hypoxia nitrogen, a method legally available to him but never before used in the United States. When Alabama approved nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method in 2018, state law gave inmates a short window to designate it as an execution method. Miller testified that he filed documents four years ago choosing nitrogen hypoxia as his method of execution, putting the documents in a slot in his cell door at Holman Correctional Institution for a prison official to pick up. U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday preventing the state from killing Miller by any means other than nitrogen hypoxia after finding it was “substantially probable” that Miller “filed a timely election, even though the state says it has none physical form file’. Prosecutors said Miller, a delivery truck driver, killed co-workers Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancey at a business in suburban Birmingham and then left to shoot former supervisor Terry Jarvis at a business where Miller had previously worked. Each man was shot multiple times, and Miller was captured after a highway chase. Testimony indicated that Miller believed the men were spreading rumors about him, including that he was gay. A psychiatrist hired by the defense found that Miller suffered from a serious mental illness, but also said that Miller’s condition was not bad enough to be used as the basis for an insanity defense under state law. “In Alabama, we are committed to law and order and the maintenance of justice. Despite the circumstances that led to the cancellation of this execution, nothing will change the fact that a jury heard the evidence in this case and reached a decision. it changes the fact that Mr. Miller never contested his crimes. And it doesn’t change the fact that three families are still grieving,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement. “We all know very well that Michael Holdbrooks, Terry Lee Jarvis and Christopher Scott Yancey did not choose to die with bullets to the chest. Tonight, my prayers are with the families and loved ones of the victims as they are forced to continue to relive the pain for their loss,” Ivy said. Although Alabama has approved nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, the state has never executed anyone using the method, and Alabama’s prison system has not completed procedures for using it to carry out the death penalty. Nitrogen hypoxia is a proposed method of execution in which death would be caused by forcing the prisoner to breathe only nitrogen, thus depriving him of the oxygen he needs to maintain bodily functions. It is approved as an execution method in three states, but no state has attempted to execute an inmate with the untested method. Alabama officials told the judge they are working to finalize the protocol. Many states have struggled to buy execution drugs in recent years after US and European drug companies began blocking their products from being used in lethal injections. This has led some to look for alternative methods. The aborted execution came after the July execution of Joe Nathan James took more than three hours to begin after the state ran into difficulties establishing an IV line, leading to accusations that the execution had failed.
