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.
