Alabama carries out nation's 3rd nitrogen gas execution on a man for a hitchhiker's killing

Atmore, Alabama
AP
 — 
A man convicted in the 1994 killing of a female hitchhiker in Alabama 
was put to death Thursday evening in the nation’s third execution using 
nitrogen gas.

Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m. at William C. 
Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama following the use of 
the new death penalty method. He was one of four teens convicted of 
killing Vickie Deblieux, 37, as she was hitchhiking through Alabama on 
the way to her mother’s home in Louisiana.

Alabama began using nitrogen gas earlier this year to carry out some 
executions. The method involves placing a respirator gas mask over the 
person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing 
death by lack of oxygen.

The execution was carried out hours after the US Supreme Court turned 
down Grayson’s request for a stay. His attorneys had argued that the 
method needed more scrutiny before being used again.

Deblieux’s mutilated body was found at the bottom of a bluff near 
Odenville, Alabama, on February 26, 1994. She was hitchhiking from 
Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana, 
when the four teens offered her a ride. Prosecutors said the teens took 
her to a wooded area and attacked and beat her. They threw her off a 
cliff and later returned to mutilate her body.

A medical examiner testified that Deblieux’s face was so fractured that 
she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Investigators said 
the teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend 
one of Deblieux’s severed fingers and boasted about the killing.

Grayson was the only one of the four teens who faced a death sentence 
since the other teens were under 18 at the time of the killing. Grayson 
was 19. Two of the teens were initially sentenced to death but those 
sentences were set aside when the Supreme Court banned the execution of 
offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crimes. Another 
teen involved in Deblieux’s killing was sentenced to life in prison.

Grayson’s final appeals had focused on a call for more scrutiny of the 
new execution method. His lawyers argued that the person experiences 
“conscious suffocation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did 
not result in swift unconsciousness and death as the state had 
promised. Lawyers for the Alabama attorney general’s office asked the 
justices to let the execution proceed, saying a lower court found 
Grayson’s claims speculative.

Alabama maintains the method is constitutional. But critics — citing 
how the first two people executed shook for several minutes — say the 
method needs more scrutiny, particularly if other states follow 
Alabama’s path.

“The normalization of gas suffocation as an execution method is deeply 
troubling,” said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty 
Action, a group seeking to abolish the death penalty.

So is murder of an innocent human being.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/us/carey-dale-grayson-alabama-
execution/index.html