Abstract
In 2024 and 2025, Alabama executed eleven people. During this time and in the years leading up to it, the State botched multiple lethal injections. Seeking an ostensibly constitutional way to continue carrying out executions, Alabama introduced death by nitrogen gas suffocation. The problems with lethal injection are not unique to Alabama, but Alabama was the first to adopt and use the novel nitrogen gas method, despite concerns from medical professionals, the public, and inmates themselves. Alabama put little to no protocol in place for inmates to exercise their statutory right to elect this method, leading to confusion and harm. This Note follows constitutional challenges brought by several death row inmates against Alabama which resulted from the adoption of nitrogen gas execution. Alongside an analysis of the Supreme Court’s method of execution precedent, this Note applies principles of contract law to present Alabama’s procedural errors as unconscionable. Finally, this Note advocates for a strict knowledge requirement and protections against unconscionability for waiver of Eighth Amendment rights.
Recommended Citation
Caroline E. Penfield,
Before the Last Breath: How Alabama’s Nitrogen Execution Adoption Created a Procedural Crisis on Death Row,
32 Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc. Just. 683
(2026).
Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol32/iss2/8
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