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I remember this documentary! I watched it only once, when it came out, so it must have left an impression.
Honestly this seems like a big nothing to me. Even if you consider that the article wasn't really fair (though it seems reasonably balanced) it's not really reasonable to expect the BBC to have a consistent journalistic line on a specific, previously hypothetical execution method. the UN and especially the EU are just straight up against the death penalty - you can't join the EU if you have it - their opinions are not defined by a 15 year old speculative documentary. Also, the implication that Alabama was in any way shape or form concerned with the opinions of Yurop when they adopted this policy is hilarious.
The 'someone' they interviewed in the documentary wasn't some random from a trailer park - it was Professor Robert Blecker, who was (apparently) an extremely prominent figure in the death penalty debate. seems like the documentary made some effort to find a steelman for the pro-death-penalty side, no? Yes, yes, I know, journalists are the enemy, they love to misrepresent. But nobody forced that (probably very media savvy) professor to go on the air and talk about how humane execution is stupid because murderers should suffer. That "bloodthirsty cruelty is the point." was literally his point.
Edit: based on the timeline found by @sodiummuffin I’m going to take back the next paragraph about Alabama fucking it up. The guy actually did hold his breath for about 2 mins, struggled for about 2 mins, then passed out and died.
And as for the execution itself, it's pretty simple. They just fucked it up. the execution took 25 minutes and apparently the execute-ee was struggling for most of that. the 'holding his breath' excuse doesn't pass the smell test. Unless the guy was an olympic freediver he would have been able to hold his breath for, like, three minutes, then pass out and die. you can't survive in a nitrogen-only atmosphere for 20+ minutes, it's just physically impossible. Probably they didn't secure the mask properly or something and left the guy breathing diluted atmosphere.
Anyway, Alabama: Good idea, poor execution, 5/10 do better next time.
I think other commenters have a point in that the "struggling and writhing" for two minutes may have been the condemned trying to dislodge the mask and hold up the execution, as well as instinctive struggling against death that he knew was coming.
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"But nobody forced that (probably very media savvy) professor to go on the air and talk about how humane execution is stupid because murderers should suffer. That "bloodthirsty cruelty is the point." was literally his point."
His words may have been taken out of context, as often happens in documentaries and interviews and interviews that are part of documentaries. It happens to people who one would think are media savvy.
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Is it? They probably adopted it due to its reputation as a humane form of execution, some of which is due to Europe.
It's been a while since I deep-dived on US execution policy, but what I remember is that every state has lethal injection, but sanctions from Europe make it progressively harder to obtain lethal injection drugs. The supreme court isn't friendly to the electric chair, so Alabama had to come up with something they could cast as humane, and some of the reputation for humane is due to Europe, but it's more about keeping the supreme court happy.
It’s not European sanctions that are preventing US states from obtaining lethal injection drugs. Yes I’m aware that some states were getting the drugs from, I think, the Netherlands for a while before they blocked the export, but the idea that the US, a country of 330 million people with the largest pharmaceutical industry on the planet, can’t possibly internally source drugs to kill people is absurd. The point being that it isn’t Europeans causing problems for the American death sentence, it’s other Americans.
I suspect that Alabama moving to nitrogen hypoxia is about 1% to do with humane-ness and 99% to do with the fact that unlike controlled drugs, it’s impossible to prevent Alabama from acquiring Nitrogen.
I dunno, if I'm a drug company, I'd look at "manufacturing drugs that very rarely get used" to be a vestigial-at-best method of generating profit versus "make cool and novel drug and get rich off the patent."
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Which, of course, is ridiculous. No one penning the Amendment on cruel and unusual punishment would have regarded hanging as cruel and unusual. To make a legal argument against the Constitutionality of execution basically requires pretending the words don't mean what everyone understood them to mean until approximately last Tuesday.
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