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An Alabama death row inmate is suing the state to prevent them from attempting a second execution after a botched lethal injection saw state employees jab him with needles for more than an hour.
Alan Eugene Miller, 57, said staff struggled to locate a vein in which to inject the cocktail of drugs designed to end his life and left him strapped to a gurney before officials made the decision to abort the execution attempt.
Miller’s legal team detailed the September 22 botched execution in a court filing and is now trying to stop the state from attempting a second lethal injection.
The attorneys wrote that their client is now ‘the only living execution survivor’ in the country, and was subjected to ‘the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain that the Eighth Amendment was intended to prohibit.’
According to the filing, Miller was probed by prison staff for an hour as they attempted to find a vein. He was poked with needles in the arms, legs, feet, and hands.
The two men in scrubs at one point used a cell phone flashlight to help them try and find a vein.
Miller was sentenced to death at the turn of the century after being convicted of a 1999 workplace rampage during which he killed three people – Terry Jarvis, Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy.
He was formerly a delivery truck driver.
Alan Eugene Miller, 57, (pictured here in 1999) was convicted in 2000 of the murder of three people during a workplace rampage. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 22, 2022
Miller’s attorneys are now attempting to stop the state from trying for a second time to kill the murderer
On three separate occasions inside the last five years, the state of Alabama has been compromised in its efforts to carry out a lethal injection on a death row inmate
Alabama has requested that the state Supreme Court set a new date for Miller’s execution, arguing that the first attempt was only canceled due to the lateness of the hour and the state’s midnight deadline to get the lethal injection process started.
Miller said he was led into the execution chamber at 10.00pm and strapped to a gurney, just one hour after the US Supreme Court had lifted an injunction blocking the lethal injection.
Two men used needles to probe his body for upwards of an hour, Miller reported via the court filing.
‘He could feel that they were not accessing his veins, but rather stabbing around his veins,’ reads the filing.
Miller is a 351-pound man, which makes it difficult for medical workers to access his veins.
He had previously requested dying by nitrogen hypoxia, a supposedly more humane execution method that would force an inmate to breathe only nitrogen, thereby depriving that person of the oxygen needed to maintain bodily functions. Nitrogen hypoxia has been authorized by Alabama and two other states but has not yet been attempted.
A third man eventually joined the set of probers and began slapping Miller’s neck in an apparent effort to find a vein.
At 11.40pm Miller says he was raised to a vertical position and left there for about 20 minutes before being told his execution was off for the night.
‘Mr. Miller felt nauseous, disoriented, confused, and fearful about whether he was about to be killed, and was deeply disturbed by his view of state employees silently staring at him from the observation room while he was hanging vertically from the gurney. Blood was leaking from some of Mr. Miller´s wounds,’ reads the motion.
The body of one of Miller’s colleagues at Ferguson Enterprises is brought out by employees of the coroner’s office. Miller killed three people the morning of August 5, 1999
Miller requested that he die by nitrogen hypoxia, a recently approved execution method that has not yet been tried in Alabama. Because of his 351-pound weight, medical professionals sometimes have a hard time locating a vein
‘Despite this failed execution, the physical and mental torture it inflicted upon Mr. Miller, and the fact that Defendants have now botched three lethal injection executions in just four years, Defendants relentlessly seek to execute Mr. Miller again-presumably by lethal injection,’ wrote Miller’s legal team, referencing an Alabama execution that was canceled and another that took three hours to get underway.
‘What then, in Defendants’ view, is a constitutional amount of time to spend stabbing someone with needles in an attempt to kill them?’
The September incident marks at least the third time the southern state has acknowledged issues with vein access during a lethal injection.
It took more than three hours to get the July execution of Joe Nathan James started, and the state called off the 2018 execution of Doyle Hamm after being unable to locate an intravenous line.
The state attorney general’s office wrote, ‘Due to the lateness of the hour, the Alabama Department of Corrections was limited in the number of attempts to gain intravenous access it could make. ADOC made the decision to halt its efforts to obtain IV access at approximately 11:30 p.m., resulting in the expiration of the court’s execution warrant.’
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