An Alabama inmate said prison staff poked him with needles for over an hour as they tried to find a vein during an aborted lethal injection last month.
At one point, they left him hanging vertically on a gurney before state officials made the decision to call off the execution.
Alabama has asked the state Supreme Court to set a new execution date for Miller, saying the execution was canceled only because of a time issue as the state faced a midnight deadline to get the lethal injection underway. The 351-pound inmate testified in an earlier court hearing that medical workers always have difficulty accessing his veins, and that is why he wanted to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, a newly approved execution method that the state has yet to try.
The three men in scrubs stopped their probing and left the chamber after there was a loud knock on a death chamber window from the state's observation room, according to the court filing. A prison officer then raised the gurney to a vertical position. Miller said the wall clock read 11:40 p.m. and he estimated that he hung there for about 20 minutes before he was let down and told that his execution was cancelled for the evening.
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