Who was last inmate to be executed by gas in Arizona? State plans to use lethal gas once used at Auschwitz
The state of Arizona is planning to use hydrogen cyanide to kill inmates on death row. It's the same gas the Nazis used at Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The state has been stockpiling ingredients for the lethal Zyklon B gas. Reportedly, Arizona's Department of Corrections has spent more than $2,000 on the ingredients for the same.
The last person to be executed by gas in Arizona was Walter LaGrand in 1999. Arizona suspended executions in 2014 after a death row inmate, Joseph Wood's execution took nearly two hours because of an error with the dose of his lethal injection. Seven years after its last execution, Arizona state is planning to bring the 'gas chamber' execution back. The state had actively sought new methods for the execution of death row inmates over the past few years, including the use of experimental drugs. Newly released documents verify the state's purchase of the ingredients needed to create the drugs necessary for execution by gas poisoning. In addition to stockpiling the deadly gas, Zyklon B's ingredients, the state also bought a brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530, according to The Guardian. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”.
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Who was the last person to be executed by gas in Arizona?
Walter LaGrand, a German national was the last to be executed by gas in Arizona. According to an eyewitness account published in the Tucson Citizen, LaGrand died an 'agonizing choking and gagging' death which lasted 18 minutes from the moment the gas entered the chamber, in 1999.
LaGrand was executed for a botched 1982 armed bank robbery in which a man was killed. The Tucson Citizen described LaGrand's death in a report published March 4, 1999. "The execution proceeded as cyanide pellets were dropped into the acid below the chair, " the report said. "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. He began coughing violently – three or four loud hacks – and then, in what appeared to be his last moments of consciousness, he made a gagging sound before falling forward at about 9:15 p.m."
The state of Arizona has been conducting tests on its mothballed gas chamber at the state prison in Florence. The camber has been out of use since LaGrand's execution. according to The Guardian, the prison staff has been taking part in role-play exercises, acting as inmates.
Arizona has currently 115 inmates on death row. The state has already selected two inmates Frank Atwood, 65 and Clarence Dixon, 65, as likely candidates to be executed. Atwood was sentenced to death in 1984 for the murder of an eight-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson and Dixon was convicted of the 1978 murder of a college student, Deana Bowdoin.
Arizona suspended execution after Wood's' 'horrifying' death in 2014. Wood lay on the gurney in Arizona’s death chamber, gasping and gulping, prison officials kept pumping execution drugs into the convicted killer’s system. By the time Wood died, after nearly two hours, he had been injected with 750mg each of midazolam and hydromorphone: 15 times the amounts called for in the state’s execution protocol. Wood was convicted for killing his former girlfriend and her father in 1989.