XPost: alabama.general, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, talk.politics.misc   
   From: yourdime@outlook.com   
      
   Atmore, Alabama   
   AP   
    —   
   A man convicted in the 1994 killing of a female hitchhiker in Alabama   
   was put to death Thursday evening in the nation’s third execution using   
   nitrogen gas.   
      
   Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m. at William C.   
   Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama following the use of   
   the new death penalty method. He was one of four teens convicted of   
   killing Vickie Deblieux, 37, as she was hitchhiking through Alabama on   
   the way to her mother’s home in Louisiana.   
      
   Alabama began using nitrogen gas earlier this year to carry out some   
   executions. The method involves placing a respirator gas mask over the   
   person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing   
   death by lack of oxygen.   
      
   The execution was carried out hours after the US Supreme Court turned   
   down Grayson’s request for a stay. His attorneys had argued that the   
   method needed more scrutiny before being used again.   
      
   Deblieux’s mutilated body was found at the bottom of a bluff near   
   Odenville, Alabama, on February 26, 1994. She was hitchhiking from   
   Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana,   
   when the four teens offered her a ride. Prosecutors said the teens took   
   her to a wooded area and attacked and beat her. They threw her off a   
   cliff and later returned to mutilate her body.   
      
   A medical examiner testified that Deblieux’s face was so fractured that   
   she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Investigators said   
   the teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend   
   one of Deblieux’s severed fingers and boasted about the killing.   
      
   Grayson was the only one of the four teens who faced a death sentence   
   since the other teens were under 18 at the time of the killing. Grayson   
   was 19. Two of the teens were initially sentenced to death but those   
   sentences were set aside when the Supreme Court banned the execution of   
   offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crimes. Another   
   teen involved in Deblieux’s killing was sentenced to life in prison.   
      
   Grayson’s final appeals had focused on a call for more scrutiny of the   
   new execution method. His lawyers argued that the person experiences   
   “conscious suffocation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did   
   not result in swift unconsciousness and death as the state had   
   promised. Lawyers for the Alabama attorney general’s office asked the   
   justices to let the execution proceed, saying a lower court found   
   Grayson’s claims speculative.   
      
   Alabama maintains the method is constitutional. But critics — citing   
   how the first two people executed shook for several minutes — say the   
   method needs more scrutiny, particularly if other states follow   
   Alabama’s path.   
      
   “The normalization of gas suffocation as an execution method is deeply   
   troubling,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty   
   Action, a group seeking to abolish the death penalty.   
      
   So is murder of an innocent human being.   
      
   https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/us/carey-dale-grayson-alabama-   
   execution/index.html   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)