The Indiana House of Representatives advanced a bill this week to expand Indiana’s methods for carrying out capital punishment. Authored by Representative Jim Lucas, the bill would add the firing squad and nitrogen hypoxia to the state’s list of authorized methods, which currently only includes lethal injection. Lucas hopes to emulate similar legislation elsewhere, including a failed attempt in Montana and a success in Florida.
After restarting executions in 2024, Indiana’s had a hard time in the killing business lately, including stays for a number of executions after $600,000 worth of pentobarbital expired. As for the executions it could carry out, that depends on who you believe (even more so than in other states, as Indiana doesn’t allow media witnesses).
Will Indiana’s Executions Be “Humane” Just Because They’re Legal?
Lucas is adamant that the upcoming bill doesn’t concern itself with the ethics of capital punishment (part of the problem that stalled out the previous attempt), which he considers a settled issue.
“This bill is a very simple bill. The only thing it does is it amends existing, long-standing Indiana law. Alabama has used nitrogen hypoxia for almost a decade; these methods have passed court muster in other states. They have been validated, and that is the purpose of what I want to do to existing Indiana law: Bring it up to speed.”
The “almost a decade“ is so strangely out of step with the (fairly copious) documentary record that I wonder where Lucas got the idea. Alabama may have approved nitrogen hypoxia as a method nearly a decade ago, but their (and the world’s) first nitrogen execution was rather famously not until 2024. His statement about “validation“ relies on sleight of hand common to the death penalty argument: that courts don’t intervene is proof enough that the methods in question are humane. Lower courts, however, are bound to the Supreme Court’s egregiously state-biased test for execution methods—it’s not enough that a method is likely to be torture, it must “superadd“ that suffering in comparison to a method chosen by the person facing execution that the state is readily available to administer. Whether they’re actually humane according to a definition a human might actually use doesn’t, and legally can’t, matter to the judiciary.
In practice, the Supreme Court’s permissive balancing test—it has never in its history ruled a method constitutes cruel and unusual punishment—leads to nitrogen executions like these:
Attorneys for future nitrogen hypoxia subject Carey Dale Grayson got a copy of the autopsy during litigation against the state, and had anesthesiologist Brian MacAlary evaluate it. According to MacAlary, Smith’s autopsy showed negative pressure pulmonary edema, or fluid buildup in the lungs. Essentially, when you try to take a breath against a blocked airway, the pressure within your system eventually pulls fluid out of your blood and into the lungs, causing you to feel that you’re drowning in yourself. McAlary theorized that the panic caused by a lack of oxygen, dubbed “air hunger,” caused his airway to narrow, producing signs similar to an obstruction.4
Notably, the autopsy also showed a small amount of “frothy fluid“ in Smith’s tracheobronchial tree (an umbrella term for the parts comprising the end of the airway and the beginning of the lungs). As anesthesiologist Joel Zivot noted in his study of botched lethal injections, froth in the airways “requires the active mixing of fluid, proteins, and surfactant5” and suggests that he was still struggling to breathe throughout the execution.
A recent firing squad execution didn’t fare much better:
When Mr. Mahdi faced the firing squad on April 11, 2025, it appears he was shot with only two bullets, not three. Both entered just above his abdomen, shattering into metal splinters that destroyed his liver and pancreas, but that largely missed his heart. Mr. Mahdi remained conscious while his heart pumped blood from his wounds into his chest cavity. These facts, drawn from the autopsy commissioned by the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC), explain why witnesses 2 to Mr. Mahdi’s execution heard him scream and groan both when he was shot and nearly a minute afterward.
If They Can’t Be Better, At Least Indiana Executions Might Be More Honest
To their credit, the bill’s sponsors seem determined to strip away the culture of deception that has characterized the lethal injection era. Others have responded to outside unwillingness to collaborate with killing with back-alley end-arounds or bizarre cauterwauling that not being able to buy drugs for homicide amounts to “assaults on [their] sovereignty;“ Mike Young, who authored a corresponding Senate bill, admits “we can’t force them to sell it to us…[or] force them to manufacture it.” Lucas’s bill also abolishes the traditional blank round used at random by one member of the firing squad; all three individuals would bear the weight of their involvement in killing a shackled and subdued person (Young’s bill does not).
Young’s Senate colleagues have so far elected not to advance his bill, leaving the future of Indiana executions as opaque as its present.
