Tucson Standard

An Arizona prisoner on death row has requested executing by nitrogen instead of cyanide gas, claiming that it would be less painful that the alternative.

Frank Atwood was sentenced to death in Pima County in 1987 for the kidnapping and murder of 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. Since the gas chamber was not outlawed in Arizona until 1992, Atwood was given the choice between gas and lethal injection. Atwood’s attorneys have argued that lethal injection or cyanide gas would both be more torturous to him than nitrogen. 

“The choice between one form of torture and another form of torture is no choice at all,” attorney Joseph Perkovich told the Tucson Standard.

“To be clear, locking a human being in a chamber and flooding it with gas to extinguish his life should be a barbarism banished to history, not a current mode of correctional administration,” Perkovich wrote in a letter to the Arizona Attorney General's Office and the Department of Corrections, which was published by AZ Central. “Nonetheless, numerous other gases instead of cyanide may be used to conduct a constitutional execution under Arizona law.”

Citing that, Perkovich requested that the corrections department “immediately implement a nitrogen lethal gas method” rather than cyanide, saying state law doesn’t specify.

“Arizona’s constitution and statute fail to designate a kind of gas for its lethal gas method, and historically that determination has fallen to the Department,” Perkovich wrote.

Atwood had a deadline until May 20 at 12:01 a.m., 20 days before his schedule execution, to make a choice.

Perkovich said a warden and deputy warden had “approached Mr. Atwood ... and exhorted him to elect one of the existing methods of execution, notwithstanding the unavailability of a legally valid choice.”

Because Atwood suffers from a spinal condition and is confined to a wheelchair, Perkovich wrote, strapping him to a gurney and injecting him with lethal chemicals would cause Atwood "the maximum level of pain the human brain can process.”

Atwood’s attorneys reviewed 14 previous lethal injection cases in Arizona and claimed the found the time it took to administer the lethal injection IV ranged from 7 to 54 minutes, with the median time being 23. Because of this, Perkovich wrote, lethal injection would be cruel and unusual punishment.