Alabama executes inmate Carey Dale Grayson with nitrogen gas

A third Alabama death row inmate was put to death on Thursday using a controversial method of execution.

Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was pronounced dead at 6.33pm local time after he elected to die by nitrogen hypoxia.

He had languished on death row for the grisly 1994 murder and bludgeoning of hitchhiker Vickie Deblieux, 37, when he was just 19 years old and his co-defendants were under the age of 18.

Prosecutors had said she was hitchhiking from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to visit her mother in Louisiana when Grayson and his three teenage friends, Kenny Loggins, Trace Duncan and Louis Mangione approached her on Interstate 59, the Montgomery Advertiser reports.

They had lured her to a wooded area claiming that they were going to switch vehicles when the four men beat her, stomped on her and kicked her to death.

Testimony shows one of the suspects even stood on Deblieuxs throat in an effort to kill her, before they threw her off a cliff.

The teenagers later returned to the site of the crime and mutilated her body, cutting it at least 180 times, removing a portion of one of her lungs and cutting off all of her fingers.

They were ultimately linked to the crime after Mangione showed one of Deblieuxs fingers to his friends, prosecutors said.

Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was executed in Alabama on Thursday using nitrogen gas

Grayson was sentenced to death, while the others involved in the crime had their death sentences amended to life sentences in 2005, after the US Supreme Court ruled that executing an individual for a crime committed when they were a minor is unconstitutional.

Graysons lawyers made a last-ditch effort to appeal his case to the US Supreme Court on Tuesday.

They argued that his death by nitrogen hypoxia raises issues of national importance in states that allow for the death penalty about whether the Eighth Amendment prohibits suffocating a conscious prisoner and whether a states refusal to prevent conscious suffocation via a novel method of execution superadds terror and pain in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The method involves placing a respirator gas mask over the inmate’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death by lack of oxygen.

But when the state executed Alan Eugene Miller, 59, and Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, earlier this year they were both seen shaking and trembling on the gurney for about two minutes as the nitrogen made its way into their systems.

In his filing on Tuesday, attorney John Palombi also noted that both men were conscious as their bodies reacted to the procedure.

I would submit to the court that being conscious and being suffocated for a period of time constitutes terror that is superadded to this protocol that does not have to be there, as acknowledged by the fact that the state is willing to, if he requests it, give Mr. Grayson a sedative, he wrote, according to NBC News. 

Robert Overing, Alabamas deputy solicitor general, however, countered that nitrogen hypoxia is not the same as suffocation.

This is really apples and oranges, trying to use the term "suffocation" to evoke a fear and pain that doesnt exist with this method, he argued.

Graysons attorneys had argued that the novel form of execution violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution

The Supreme Court ultimately denied the request on Thursday, just hours before Grayson was set to die. 

Protestors had also written to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to halt the execution, sharing a petition that claimed Grayson had a traumatic childhood due to the loss of his mother at a young age and neglect from his father - which promoted early drug and alcohol abuse.

It also claims the inmate suffered from bipolar disorder, and noted that state prosecutors argued that the other co-defendants were as guilty if not more so than Grayson.

Allowing him to be executed while the other three are serving life sentences, would be unfair and unjust, they said.