COLUMBUS, Ohio (NEWSnet/AP) — Ohio’s attorney general supported a legislative effort Tuesday to bring nitrogen gas executions to the state, following up on Alabama’s first use of the method last week.

Three states — Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma — have already authorized nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method.

Other states are looking for options on carrying out executions because the drugs typically used for lethal injections have become difficult to acquire.

Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, said adding nitrogen gas as an execution alternative in Ohio could end an unofficial moratorium that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine declared in 2020. The reason was the state's inability to obtain the necessary drugs to change a lethal injection protocol declared to cause “severe pain and needless suffering” by a federal judge.

“Saying that the law of Ohio should be thwarted because pharmaceutical companies don’t want to sell the chemicals is an abdication of the sovereignty of the state of Ohio, which still has this law on the books,” Yost said.

He was joined at a Tuesday news conference by Republican state Reps. Brian Stewart and Phil Plummer, who introduced a bill Tuesday to add the new method.

Alabama used it for the first time Thursday, when convicted murderer Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, was put to death with nitrogen gas administered through a face mask to deprive him of oxygen. State officials in Alabama said the process was humane and effective, while critics called it cruel and experimental.

The Ohio bill would give condemned inmates a choice between lethal injection and nitrogen gas; but would require their executions to take place with nitrogen gas if lethal injection drugs are not available, Stewart said.

Ohio's last execution was on July 18, 2018, when Robert Van Hook was put to death by lethal injection for killing a man he met in a Cincinnati bar in 1985.

Amid the unofficial moratorium, bipartisan groups of lawmakers have repeatedly pushed bills to eliminate the state's death penalty.

Ohio currently has 118 men and one woman on death row, according to the most recent state report.

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