“I’m being housed in a ‘death camp.’ I mean that literally … [T]here is nothing resembling ‘correction’ that goes on for most of these prisoners. Like the Nazi concentration camps, this is a death camp for sure!” – Russell Maroon Shoatz
“Many of the condemned, with constitutional error rife throughout their records, will soon be executed without meaningful review. States … now ready their machinery: generators whine, poison liquids are mixed, gases are measured and readied, silent chambers await the order to smother life.” – Mumia Abu-Jamal
On Jan. 25, Alabama marked the first known use of nitrogen hypoxia to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith. This new method comes years after pharmaceutical companies refused to sell certain drug cocktails to death penalty states for use in executions. The change sent authorities searching for new ways to carry out capital punishment, and Alabama’s deadly decision recalls a horrific national legacy that inspired Nazi Germany. Furthermore, it reveals how carceral structures implement policy that test and force abuses onto subjugated populations before inflicting them onto broader society. Alabama’s nitrogen gas execution may seem like a mere adjustment in how the state kills prisoners, but it’s highlighting a threat to us all. As the U.S. becomes even more draconian in its execution practices, it’s necessary to observe some of the history of gassing, ask what it’s setting the stage for, and demand the abolition of the death penalty altogether.
A grisly anniversary followed Alabama’s experimental nitrogen hypoxia execution. Jan. 28 marked the 107th anniversary of when 17-year-old Carmelita Torres, a maid from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, who cleaned houses in El Paso, Texas, refused to take a kerosene bath, and what would be known as “The Bath Riots” ensued. At the time, those entering the U.S. were subjected to humiliating procedures like poisonous baths in addition to IQ tests and puzzles, processes put in place because U.S. officials subscribed to white supremacist ideas of racial purity and eugenicist notions of cleanliness. When Torres began organizing women to refuse these violations, a protest of hundreds grew into thousands and eventually shut down the border. Civil disobedience and violent resistance intermixed in a days-long confrontation that led to imprisonment and even execution for some.
One of the more disturbing aspects of this history and what followed lies in the fact that during processing, beginning in the 1920s, those detained at the Southern border were being “deloused” with Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide. And like Native reservations and other facets of U.S. white supremacist policies, those official acts would go on to inspire the Nazis. When German chemist Dr. Gerhard Peters published two photos of the El Paso “Disinfection Plant” in a German pest science journal, he called for the use of Zyklon B in Nazi desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers). Peters went on to become managing director of the company that supplied the chemical to the camps, where it was used to kill millions during the Holocaust. The border is one of the world’s most explicit manifestations of carcerality, dictating who does and does not belong in a given society. Its connection to detention, prisons, and execution is made plain by the regularity of the violence carried out around it, both directly and passively.
The regular usage of Zyklon B at the U.S. border established the tone for a fascist future. That’s why Smith’s execution by nitrogen hypoxia cannot be carelessly accepted. It’s already bad enough that tear-gassing protesters with a “banned” chemical weapon of war has become normalized. Even condemning chemical weapons and invoking international law are unreliable conventions to protect masses of people from the state. Instead, those in power believe the law should be in their interests, albeit veiled to have the public believe it’s for some common good. As a result, the wealthy, police, and militaries are not held to the standards they create to punish others with. The death penalty and the U.S. prison system are great examples of this, and they warn us of what could be in store for the wider public.
As I’ve written before, what happens in prisons sets the stage for the future we’ll inherit. And what’s happening in U.S. prisons is not common throughout the world. More than 70% of the world’s countries have abolished the death penalty, but the U.S. remains terribly regressive, much like it is with health care, labor rights, and incarceration rates. So, while most of the world has moved away from the practice of execution, the U.S. is further entrenching itself in the practice by seeking experimental and innovative ways to kill. When Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton Lockett with midazolam in 2014 and this debacle of seeking new execution methods began, there was an opportunity to change. Some death penalty states halted their executions, and moratoriums were enforced.
One of the most obscene examples of this state-sanctioned chaos lies in the fact that death penalty states had stockpiled sedative and paralytic drugs, like midazolam, vecuronium bromide, rocuronium bromide, and fentanyl, that could have been used to help people suffering in this ongoing pandemic and instead used them to kill prisoners. Authorities had to be urged to save lives instead of hoarding drugs to kill people, laying the true purpose of this criminal legal system bare.
Currently, the situation is especially horrific. Before President Donald Trump left office, he went on a killing spree, executing more federal prisoners than at any time since World War II, using methods that included hiring private executioners paid cash, middle-of-the-night killings, and incomplete justifications. And at the state level, death-penalty states now have six different execution protocols at their disposal: “lethal injection, electric chair, lethal gas including cyanide, firing squad, hanging and now Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia,” according to a report in The Guardian. In 2022, Richard Bernard Moore, imprisoned in South Carolina, was forced to choose the firing squad over other botched execution methods. It was “the year of the botched execution,” according to death penalty watchdogs, because of “executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves.” States mismanaged a horrific 35% of executions that year, and the trend of expansion around alternative methods continued in 2023.
Although a record low percentage of people believe the death penalty is applied fairly and approval of the practice has been low for decades, the U.S. could be at an impasse if that lack of support doesn’t materialize into an outright rejection of the practice. Historically, when Black radical prisoners described U.S. prisons as “death camps,” it wasn’t simply hyperbole. The millions languishing in prison already constitute one of modern times’ most unacceptable societal standards imaginable. The business of policing, incarcerating, and killing fueled by the prison-industrial complex must be abolished.
Alabama prisons constitute some of the worst aspects of this as a site of so much terror that the Department of Justice was compelled to intervene and release a report in 2019. Mysterious deaths, overcrowding, and rampant abuse plague the Alabama Department of Corrections while they experiment with killing. The Free Alabama Movement has long documented these horrors and coordinated the largest prison strike in U.S. history. They plan to organize against gas executions among many other demands, but they should not be alone in their fight. It’s all of our fight because whatever we accept, from executions behind bars to public police executions outside of them, will shape the contours of the struggle we’re in. We can let these problems cement themselves further or push to obliterate them now before they’re set in stone.
