From [HERE] Arizona reportedly has “refurbished” its gas chamber and has spent more than $2,000 to acquire ingredients to execute prisoners with cyanide gas, the same gas used by the Nazis to murder more than one million men, women, and children during the Holocaust. 

Records obtained by The Guardian show that the Arizona Department of Corrections Rehabilitation and Reentry purchased a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530. The state also purchased supplies of additional ingredients for producing hydrogen cyanide gas, including sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid. Initially developed as an insecticide and known by the Nazis as “Zyklon B,” the gas was the signature method by which the Nazis carried out their genocide against European Jews, the Roma, and local populations at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and other concentration camps and killed Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters.

Executions in Arizona have been on hold since 2014, when the state botched the lethal-injection execution of Joseph Wood. As Arizona officials attempt to restart executions, they spent $1.5 million to obtain lethal injection drugs, even as the Department of Corrections faces a budget crisis.

In August, the state tested its gas chamber, built in 1949, to determine whether it can be used for executions. After initial tests found “slow drainage” and “overflowing,” corrections officials had the seals and gaskets replaced. Corrections staff then tested the chamber for airtightness by passing the flame of a candle slowly near the seals of the chamber. 

Arizona last used its gas chamber in 1999, for the execution of Walter LaGrand. Eleven people in five states were executed in the gas chamber since executions were permitted to resume in 1976. LaGrand’s was the last execution by lethal gas anywhere in the United States. The Tucson Citizen reported “agonizing choking and gasping” during the execution. “The witness room fell silent as a mist of gas rose, much like steam in a shower, and Walter LaGrand became enveloped in a cloud of cyanide vapor,” the Citizen reported. “He began coughing violently — three or four loud hacks — and made a gagging sound before falling forward.” LeGrand took 18 minutes to die.

“Despite Arizona's efforts to present their planned execution method as acceptable and reputable,” The Jerusalem Post reported, “the name Zyklon B is inextricably linked to the horrors of the past, when over a million Jews and others were murdered in Nazi gas chambers using the lethal gas between 1942 and 1945.” 

Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham told The Guardian: “You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?”