Story at a glance:
- The department spent more than $2,000 to obtain the ingredients to make cyanide gas.
- In October 2020, Arizona spent $1.5 million on lethal injections.
- Officials pressed a candle to the window to test if the chamber was sealed.
Arizona’s Department of Corrections is reintroducing its gas chamber to deploy cyanide gas, the same used by Nazis in Auschwitz, to execute death row inmates.
Arizona reportedly spent more than $2,000 on ingredients to make cyanide gas: $1,530 for potassium cyanide, plus a purchase of podium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid, The Guardian reported Friday.
The department says it “refurbished” the chamber that was first built in 1949 and has been idle for 22 years, according to The Guardian.
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The Republican state has accelerated its efforts to push its flawed execution system. In April, State Attorney General Mark Brnovich asked Arizona’s supreme court to issue execution warrants for two death row inmates, which would be the state’s first executions in almost seven years. The request came after the Department of Corrections told the attorney general in March that it is ready to begin executions again, stating it worked “diligently to obtain the drugs necessary” to carry out such killings, according to ABC15.
Arizona’s executions have been suspended for about seven years following the botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014. Wood was injected 15 times for nearly two hours.
In October of last year, the state spent $1.5 million on a batch of pentobarbital, a medication the state wants to use as its primary lethal injection method, according to documents revealed by The Guardian.
Arizona officials went to great — but primitive — lengths to demo the gas chamber’s return, The Guardian reports. In August 2020 inside the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, a series of tests were conducted on the gas chamber’s capabilities.
To test for airtightness, administrators used a candle pressed against the windows to see if the gas would leak. If the flames did not move or flicker, the chamber was considered “operationally ready.”
They also substituted water for the chemicals and used a smoke grenade to simulate the gas.
As Changing America previously reported, the supply of lethal injection drugs in some states like South Carolina has expired since resuming of the death penalty. In South Carolina, death row inmates have the gruesome option to choose between the electric chair or firing squad.
Arizona death row inmates have the option to choose between injection or chamber. However, one of the last people to endure the gas chamber was Walter LaGrand whose death ended with “agonizing choking and gagging,” The Guardian reported. It took 18 minutes for LaGrand to die.
“The witness room fell silent as a mist of gas rose, much like steam in a shower, and Walter LaGrand became enveloped in a cloud of cyanide vapor,” the Tucson Citizen and The Guardian reported.
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