During the night between Thursday and Friday in a prison in Alabama, in the United States, the death sentence was carried out for Jimi Barberby lethal injection. Barber had appealed the method by which the death sentence was to be carried out, but it had been rejected by both a judge in Alabama and the Supreme Court.
The appeal was motivated by the fact that in 2022 in Alabama there had been complications with the administration of the lethal injection on three different occasions, which in two cases had led to the postponement of the execution. Following these episodes, the state government had decided to suspend executions to review the procedure by which they were carried out. The review had been widely criticized for its lack of transparency. Barber is the first inmate to be killed since the introduction of the new protocol.
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Barber had asked to be killed by nitrogen inhalation, an execution technique permitted by Alabama law. His lawyers had specified that Barber weighed a lot and had a very massive build, and it might not have been easy for the workers to immediately find the vein for the injection: however, the Alabama attorney general had opposed it, arguing that there were not yet all the necessary means to proceed with nitrogen hypoxia.