Alabama’s pro-gassing federal judge’s latest nonsensical ruling

[ad_1]

Stephen Cooper | Special to the Advertiser

Federal district judge R. Austin Huffaker has established himself — given the deference the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and the Supreme Court have given him — as the judge most responsible for turning America into a country that uses nitrogen to gas humans to death.Unbiased eyewitnesses from divers news organizations reported that the first two gassing executions Huffaker rubber-stamped resulted in patently torturous, pro-longed executions — replete with gasping, writhing, and convulsing — no different than choking the life out of a man.Despite this, Huffaker issued a 53-page ruling on November 6 approving a third gruesome and gasping nitrogen-gassing execution in Alabama. According to Huffaker, it will not be cruel and unusual punishment — despite the manifestly cruel and unusual deaths of the last two men gassed to death in Alabama — for the state to gas Carey Grayson to death on November 21.How did R. Austin Huffaker assume this awesome — and awful — authority to turn our nation into one that emulates the way the Nazis gassed Jews to death during the Holocaust? Appointed to office by Trump in 2019, Huffaker was previously in private practice where he specialized in civil litigation and served as a Commissioner for the Alabama Securities Commission. Absent from his resume: expertise in nitrogen-gassing as well as criminal and constitutional law. These are not areas Huffaker had any depth of experience in before becoming a judge—and it shows.Because, ideally, the opinions of federal judges should be clear, logical, well supported, and, one can only hope given their importance: well written. Lay people and lawyers should be able to read and make sense of them whether they agree with them or not. Huffakers’s nitrogen-gassing opinions have not come remotely close to meeting this standard, especially his most recent.

Regular readers of these pages will recall that after Huffaker first used our law to abominably approve nitrogen-gassing as not being cruel and unusual — deciding it was good enough for government work including killing another flesh-and-blood human being — I wrote: “Mengele-like logic underpins Alabama’s plan to gas a man to death.” It does so for Carey Grayson, too.In the first place Huffaker — in pure Trumpian fashion — dismisses outright the devastatingly disturbing descriptions of the media witnesses to Alabama’s first two nitrogen-gassings. With no explication Huffaker’s opinion calls these “eyewitness accounts of highly questionable value.” He might as well have written that these accounts are “fake news.”

But shouldn’t the citizens of Alabama and the rest of America, too — not to mention the reporters who have witnessed Alabama’s gassing executions so far — deserve an explanation as to why Huffaker discredits the media accounts of the unusual and cruel suffering they reported? This would seem especially important for Judge Huffaker to do since his conclusions about the cruelty of nitrogen-gassing executions don’t jibe at all with the eyewitness accounts of them.Concerning Kenneth Smith’s nitrogen-gassing torture at the end of January, Huffaker wrote in his decision greenlighting Grayson’s upcoming execution: “what the evidence did show was that [Alabama’s] nitrogen hypoxia protocol was successful and resulted in death in less than ten minutes and loss of consciousness in even less time.”

This gaslighting (no pun intended), revisionist history about the success of nitrogen-gassing in Alabama is belied by the fact proponents of nitrogen gassing had promised loss of consciousness would occur in seconds, and death quickly thereafter — not many minutes after being asphyxiated. But also, in direct contraposition to nitrogen-gassing in Smith’s case being “successful,” and as I previously outlined in an essay I titled “Alabama-Torture Outrage Muted and Unconscionably Insufficient” — concerning Smith’s gassing—“eyewitness reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser, Marty [Roney], reported: ‘Smith was shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head.’ [Roney] also told the New York Times: ‘For four minutes he was gasping for air. He appeared to be conscious. He was convulsing, he was writhing, the gurney was shaking noticeably.’ [Roney’s] observations were echoed by another eyewitness, journalist Lee Hedgepeth. Hedgepeth said soon after the noxious nitrogen began its nasty mission: Smith ‘began thrashing against the straps, his whole body and head violently jerking back and forth for several minutes.’ The Inquirer grimly catalogued too, in the aftermath: “Smith’s execution lasted roughly 22 minutes from the time the viewing room curtains opened and closed…[Smith’s] eyes were open as he gasped and convulsed. That was followed by five to seven minutes of heavy breathing.”

Furthermore, in “Alabama arrogantly asphyxiates another condemned man,” and more recently in “Alabama’s gruesome and gasping nitrogen-gassings” — again in The Advertiser — I equally quoted eyewitness accounts of Alabama’s second nitrogen-gassing torture, that of Alan Miller, to showed how it was as barbaric and un-American as Kenneth Smith’s gassing was. (And of course, in “5 reasons why Alabama shouldn’t gas humans to death” and “Gassing humans to death is wrong” — special to The Advertiser — I argued that gassing men to death is wrong and immoral no matter what their crimes.) Huffaker’s opinion paints a rosy view of Alan Miller’s execution because it wasn’t quite as violent, gruesome and gasping as compared to Kenneth Smith’s. Is this now the standard our Constitution requires to find a punishment to be cruel and unusual? Is that the kind of country we want? Can someone ask Judge Huffaker and the rest of the judges who back him?

Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public. defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on "X"/Twitter @SteveCooperEsq

[ad_1]

Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6736fb4b96b24048a8651558835bf142&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fstory%2Fopinion%2Fcontributors%2F2024%2F11%2F14%2Falabamas-pro-gassing-federal-judges-latest-nonsensical-ruling-stephen-cooper%2F76316195007%2F&c=1080645106663822983&mkt=en-us Author : Publish date : 2024-11-13 15:00:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .