A death row killer who claimed a fear of needles has not been executed after officials ran out of time despite a last minute U-turn.
The go-ahead was given by the Supreme Court on Thursday evening in an 11th hour reversal with the execution having been blocked.
Despite efforts to carry out the execution of Alan Eugene Miller, it could not be completed before the death warrant expired at midnight.
Alabama's prisons commissioner reportedly has said that the execution didn't go ahead over issues in finding Miller's veins.
Media was driven to the the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, and called in for the execution but it was then seemingly called off with just minutes to spare.
Miller had requested to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia due to the fear of needles and as the method was not ready to be used in the state of Alabama, a judge blocked it from taking place for Thursday.
But a last minute Supreme Court decision led to its go-ahead. Prison officials said they had been given the go-ahead at 9.20pm to begin proceedings.
Family, lawyers and the media were told to go to the facility to witness the execution in the death chamber.
The former delivery driver, was convicted of killing three men in a workplace shooting, in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1999, and he was sentenced to death.
Nitrogen hypoxia was approved in the state of Alabama in 2018, as a method of execution, and was chosen by Miller, but it had yet to be tried out.
Miller said that he had submitted a form stating his choice and believes that state officials, who deny having seen it, had lost the paper.
And the Alabama Department of Corrections last week said that it was not yet ready to use the untried method, it is reported.
Last Tuesday, US District Judge R. Austin Huffaker issued a preliminary injunction blocking Alabama from putting Miller to death as previously scheduled due to this issue.
The judge wrote: "Miller will likely suffer irreparable injury if an injunction does not issue because he will be deprived of the ability to die by the method he chose and instead will be forced to die by a method he sought to avoid and which he asserts will be painful."
He added that the injury will be "the loss of his 'final dignity' —to choose how he will die".
Then a federal appeals court upheld the stay of execution but the Alabama Attorney General’s Office appealed to the US Supreme Court which cleared it to go ahead by lethal injection.
In response to the decision Miller's lawyers, reported the Montgomery Advertiser, wrote: "The State’s new, Kafkaesque argument in favour of forcing an illegal execution tonight is that the truth of whether Mr Miller timely submitted his nitrogen hypoxia election form does not matter."
Miller had been found guilty of murdering three men by a jury who recommended he be given the death penalty.
In his trial the prosecution claimed an employee entering Ferguson Enterprises, in Pelham, saw Miller leaving on August 5, 1999, before finding the bodies of Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy dead inside.
Then Miller drove to Post Airgas, nearby, where he had previously worked and killed employee Terry Jarvis, it was alleged.
