USA - Mississippi. Attorney General presents death penalty options.

Attorney General presents death penalty options. With the recent expiration of Mississippi's lethal injection drugs, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood released a legislative agenda that could effectively nullify the logistical and ethical issues particular to the cocktails. In place of lethal injection drugs, which can be difficult to acquire and properly administer, Hood proposed 3 alternative execution methods for administering the death penalty in a press release. If Hood's agenda is realized, Mississippi's 48 death row inmates could each face either the electric chair, a firing squad or nitrogen hypoxia. Mississippi previously used the electric chair during a period ending in 1952. Though Mississippi never employed firing squads, other states have, and it is still an accepted method of execution in Utah. Nitrogen hypoxia stands alone as Hood's only untested proposed method. Oklahoma adopted use of Nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method in 2015 and, supported by a report by Michael Copeland, an associate professor of criminal justice at East Central University in Oklahoma. According to the report, "An execution protocol that induced hypoxia via nitrogen inhalation would be a humane method to carry out a death sentence." The report based its argument on the work of right-to-die advocacy groups, such as the Final Exit Organization, which provides support and resources to the terminally ill considering suicide. Such groups commonly suggest inert gas hypoxia through "exit bags" as a preferred suicide method because it is considered humane and peaceful. To carry out a sentence through nitrogen hypoxia, a convict would breathe normally, inhaling the inert gas until losing consciousness and eventually succumbing to oxygen deprivation.