Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney Thursday and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method.
The Alabama attorney general’s office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” But what exactly Smith, 58, will feel after the warden switches on the gas is unknown, some doctors and critics say.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
Keller, who was not involved in developing the Alabama protocol, said the plan is to “eliminate all of the oxygen from the air” that Smith is breathing by replacing it with nitrogen.
How about stop murdering people
I don’t know why this is still a controversial concept. Just don’t kill prisoners. Horrific crimes are not assuaged by more death. It’s never worked in history and it doesn’t work now.
It’s arguably controversial because the human brain has a cognitive bias toward vengeance. There are lot of really interesting psych studies on this topic. It feels right to take an eye for an eye, and we often try to justify that urge, even if we don’t benefit from it.
The human brain has a lot of cognitive biases that we have collectively decided to legislate against.
This is one of the easiest to move on from. It takes significantly more effort to justify and carry out judicial murder than it does to ban it.
We banned dueling to the death over honor centuries ago, and that’s a very similar cognitive bias. Arguably a lot less impactful on society at large too, since a duel requires 2 willing participants and by definition has no collateral consequences, but it was still deemed wrong ages ago. There is no clear argument killing someone for their alleged crimes.
Agreed. The problem is that voters and politician have that same damn DNA and those same biases.
We can totally use higher level reasoning to think through that old ass amygdala wiring. But doing that often takes work, or showing people that some other low level need is being threatened by giving into the feels of vengeance.
Some people are just beyond saving man
It’s pretty arbitrary, too. A guy in a town I lived in killed his wife with a knife in front of their kids, and was sentenced to 40 years. This guy helped kill someone, served 35 years, and they still want execute him on top of it.
We actually do know the effect of breathing nitrogen gas. It’s a hell of a lot better than injecting someone with a drug cocktail. I don’t agree with the death penalty but this is about as humane as the death penalty gets.
Exactly. They make it sound as if nobody ever got exposed to low oxygen atmospheres. Absurd. Just the stories of divers is so so much. You feel absolutely nothing and then it goes black. Real simple.
Yeah, it’s really similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s not like suffocating because our bodies specifically react to the buildup of CO2, which triggers that pain and fear response. CO poisoning is incredibly dangerous because it’s so imperceptible and effective. When given the choice between O2 and CO our bodies will actually choose the latter because it bonds better to hemoglobin.
If ever there was a painless way to die, this is it.
My uneducated self was wondering how suffocation could be considered “humane”, but now I see that’s not what is happening. Thanks to your post, I have a better understanding of the process. I’m still against the death penalty, but I appreciate the info nonetheless. Thanks!
Yeah, I’m sick of the media drama about this dude. I don’t think they should execute him but there’s nothing that novel or cruel about the method.
It would be novel in that it’s the first time it’s ever been done.
The meat industry kills animals this way regularly. Also, plenty of people have died like this accidentally, so it’s not a mystery what will happen.
I know what you’re saying, but generally I wouldn’t look up too much on how “the meat industry” treats animals, including killing them - much less so if we’re using it to compare it to executing human beings.
My point was some of these articles act like it’s a mystery what might happen medically.
Yes, apoxia is the way to go if you have to.
Do you know that your body behaves differently when voluntarily being underwater while holding your breath and being held underwater while holding your breath knowing the person isn’t going to let you breath again?
The negative side effects of the latter kick in way before you start to run out of oxygen.
That’s not how it works. Your body can’t detect a lack of oxygen but only build up of CO2. If you replace the air you breath with pure Helium, N2, CO, etc. you will just painlessly black out and die.
The difference is that nitrogen is odorless and colorless and we breath it in constantly. You won’t notice it, you’ll just start panting, get loopy, then lose consciousness.
You don’t even start panting, because that is a response to CO2 buildup
That is relevant when the person doesn’t know. Someone being executed will know that getting loopy means they are dying, and trigger a distress response.
CO2 isn’t necessary to let your body know it is suffocating when you already know you are suffocating.
Except part of that response is because suffocating is uncomfortable. If I had to die id rather drift off to sleep. Your grandstanding here isn’t going to get rid of the death penalty in Alabama. It may as well be more humane. Unless you are for more discomfort to make a point.
There was a dude who used to sell kits for people to kill themselves with helium. Random people can manage it with a hood they put on themselves. Its less prone to error than other forms such as lethal injection where they have to be able to hit a vein and not blow it.
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…and there you go. I was reading attentively, but welp. Any seriousness of whatever argument you were trying to make going down the drain with three simple words.
Yours went down with two so I guess you won. Congrats!
Starting to sound like your opinion to be honest. By the time he notices he’s loopy, it is over.
How is that fixed by using a drug cocktail? Seems like any method of execution will scare the person being executed.
A drug cocktail, the electric chair, lethal injection, and any form of execution is going to cause distress. Distress is worse than just being scared because distress actually causes the body to feel as if it is being harmed whether it is or isn’t. The longer the process takes, the worse the distress.
The electric chair is probably the worst because you get the distress and ridiculous levels of pain. Same with the gas chamber. Lethal injection, if done right, reduces the pain but still has the distress. But they fuck that up so it ends up being both as well.
This new thing will be fucked up like lethal injection because the people doing the executions are incompetent. But even if they did it perfectly the person knows they will be dying and it isn’t significantly different from suffocation because they will still have the same distress.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
We do, in fact, know what a person feels from nitrogen suffocation, and we know because nitrogen suffocation happens accidentally with some degree of regularity from workers that don’t follow proper safety protocols.
At first you feel out of breath, but you don’t feel panic from it; it’s like exhaling everything in your lungs, and then breathing in solely from a helium filled balloon (which I’m guessing most people have tried). You feel slightly high and light headed because the oxygen in your bloodstream is rapidly depleted; you are hypoxic. As you take a second and third breath, your vision tunnels, and you pass out. Your body has a mechanism to detect a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, but since you’re expelling the CO2 with every breath out, and breathing nitrogen back in, that panic response doesn’t get tripped.
Nitrogen suffocation has been a preferred choice for right-to-die advocates.
We can argue about how the death penalty is applied, and whether it should exist at all (I believe it should, but is almost always inappropriate), but there’s no serious argument about whether nitrogen suffocation is a good or bad way to die. The people continuously fighting against this execution are fighting the method because they’ve lost all their other avenues to prevent the execution; attempting to call this process ‘untested’–when it’s been tested by a large number of people using it to end their own lives, and tested via industrial accidents–is the only option that they have left to prevent this execution.
Thank you, I’ve been wondering why we’re suddenly seeing all this hub bub around nitrogen execution when it’s 100% obviously a better method than the barbaric injected cocktail that regularly fails. Thought I was taking crazy pills.
Lethal injection performs as it was designed to: it’s agony. You’re paralyzed, then given a heart attack.
Done correctly, lethal injection is quite humane. We do it with pets; you administer a strong sedative, and then you use an overdose of a barbiturate to stop the heart (which is not the same as a heart attack). But that’s **not **how lethal injections are typically done in the US, esp. since pharmaceutical companies don’t want to sell their medications to prisons to be used to execute prisoners; that was because anti-death penalty advocates found ways to put pressure on drug companies. But how do you stop the sale of nitrogen to a prison? I can literally go buy a tank from any welding supply company.
Edit: the sedative is used to prevent feelings of fear or panic when the heart stops.
Wrong.
The method used in human execution uses Potassium Chloride to stop the heart, not Pentobarbital. It literally causes a heart attack.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, and a quick search what have shown you that.
“If the person being executed were not already completely unconscious, the injection of a highly concentrated solution of potassium chloride could cause severe pain at the site of the IV line, as well as along the punctured vein; it interrupts the electrical activity of the heart muscle and causes it to stop beating, bringing about the death of the person being executed.”
Based on this thread, it sounds like the new method should be getting the death row inmate crazy high on something, AND THEN you give them the nitrogen mask.
I think the point was that killing someone by injection doesn’t have to be inhumane. If we have a protocol to kill a dog gently we could do the same to a human, we just choose not to.
Agreed. But most of the people who support the death penalty are also the kind of people who enjoy hurting others. They want it to hurt.
I’m not pro death penalty, mostly because we suck at not convicting innocent people, but if we’re going to execute someone this is probably the best way, and have thought this is how it should be done for a while. I’m not suicidal but if I was going to do it it would be with nitrogen.
You still have to take at least 3 breaths knowing you are killing yourself as you do so, and if you so choose can make the moment more awkward by holding your breath and struggling and/or screaming.
Surely the actual best way is completely instant and unavoidable like being crushed by a giant weight that moves faster than the human reaction speed and completely obliterates the body, or having your head exploded by a cannon ball or being completely instantly atomized by a massive explosion?
Doesnt carbon-monoxide do this too?
Yes, even faster as CO will displace oxygen from your blood.
Really any inert gas will do it. Nitrogen is just the most plentiful and thus easiest and cheapest.
Well. Yes, but also no. CO poisoning will make you feel sick. That might be because it’s not enough CO.
As someone who has been a bit too close to a leaky nitrogen tank, it just felt like I had stood up too quickly. There was nothing painful about the experience, and if I had been hit with a higher dose I imagine I would have been unconscious before feeling anything.
Don’t get me wrong, capital punishment is bad, but this feels like one of the least bad ways to go.
thank you. the number of incorrect statements by people who just don’t get the physiology in this article was driving me nuts. As long as no CO2 buildup happens, you have no feeling of air starvation. That’s why certain types of re-breather accidents can get out of hand so quickly.
Many divers have also died from nitrogen narcosis and apparently it’s like being drunk / off your tits from N20 / ket.
Nitrogen narcosis is caused by the high pressure exposure to nitrogen in the air divers breathe underwater. Its different to hypoxia, which is a lack of oxygen. It can cause a euphoria and can be dangerous if the diver loses focus and makes a mistake. The effects are completely reversed by ascending and have no long term effect.
Source: I’m a scuba diving instructor
Have you ever said hello to an octopus?
Also an instructor, and I have never said hello, but I have waved 8 times as he passed.
IMHO, executions don’t make sense given the amount of innocent people that we keep finding on death row.
It makes even less sense given that we need to have a long expensive, and highly imperfect, appellate process to double check that we’re not killing innocent people.
Also, we don’t really have any good data to support the claim that the death penalty deters people from committing terrible crimes. People that are going to do something -that- bad are usually going to do it.
I don’t see it as intended as a deterrent so much as a statement of values. A way of saying some things are not games or forgivable.
But in order to make that statement of values, are you willing to execute innocent people and to divert money away from other public programs that uphold other important values?
A way of saying some things are not games or forgivable
Whats the point of saying that if its not meant as a deterrent? Who are we telling this to? Is it all to show upstanding citizens that “look, we’re the good guys, we’re killing the bad guys!”?
Is that really worth peoples lives, especially with the chance that those people aren’t actually bad guys?
Life without parole would have the same effect though.
I don’t want absolute human garbage to be given food and accomodations paid by taxes for the rest of their lives.
The death penalty uses significantly more tax money.
That’s why you lock them up forever. Unless of course later evidence vindicates them, since the justice system is imperfect and innocent people do occasionally get wrongly convicted. Y’know what totally prevents later vindication if someone was wrongly convicted?
Whether or not some crimes deserve the death penalty, so long as it’s possible for innocent people to be convicted, the death penalty is morally unjustifiable.
A statement of values held by society that sometimes you have to kill people in cold blood.
Like murdering an innocent person?
You wrote a contradiction in which it’s not a deterrent but is one too.
a statement of values.
Is that statement “killing is bad, and if you do it we’ll kill you”?
Nah, the statement is “murder is fine sometimes”.
We know exactly what happens when people experience nitrogen hypoxia. They get confused, then they lose consciousness, then die only if deprived of oxygen for quite some time.
We know because many people have experienced it and survived (because the oxygen was switched back on). I personally know someone who experienced this in a controlled test with the military.
Voluntarily having that happen is confusing at best.
Knowing it is going to happen is terrifying, because the person knows why they are slipping away.
Like the difference between choosing to be underwater and someone forcing you underwater. The latter is going to feel like drowning immediately because of anticipation.
Sure but that’s because of execution itself rather than the method of execution. This is physically painless even though obviously the emotional impact is bound to be intense.
Not really - not being able to breathe is pretty unique here. It’s very slow, and even if you don’t feel pain directly, you can feel oxygen deprivation indirectly - if you’ve ever gone way up in altitude you’d know the feeling
At this point, why not just give them an elephant’s dose of fentanyl?
That’s not what the science says. It turns out humans can’t detect oxygen deprivation, they can only detect either increased CO2 concentration or reduced pressure. (Interestingly isn’t necessarily true for other mammals, such as rats, who can detect oxygen deprivation directly.)
Since this is inert gas asphyxiation (nitrogen), it does not trigger the same suffocation response. Additionally, at volumes of O2 less than 6%, it only takes one or two breaths to cause unconsciousness, making it quite different than the effect you’d feel at altitude.
Not the “I can’t breathe” feeling, the dreamy, detached state your mind goes into. The heaviness of your body.
Now imagine yourself slipping away like that, where it rapidly comes on.
Not a good way to go.
It’s easy enough to miss that people can die without noticing they’re in a cloud of nitrogen, but if you know it’s coming?
Also, are you sure the DIY system they’re building, without any help from experts, is going to be that fast
I strongly disagree, the brief, euphoric confusion of hypoxia is likely one of the most ideal ways to go.
The supposed “DIY” nature of the system in question is another matter entirely that sidesteps the only point I’ve argued here - is inert gas hypoxia a painless, quick death? Science still says yes.
The emotional response leads to a physical response…
I mean, its the same response knowing you are going to be executed. No method of execution is going to prevent what you propose is a problem with the new method. Same thing when you set up the lethal injection and then slowly go through the stages of the cocktail.
Finding out in court has a different response than being strapped down to a table while they start the process.
The whole thing is just a big torture process and we should stop doing it.
This wasn’t the discussion about whether or not we should perform executions. But whether using this gas is better if its going to be done. And it is obviously if compared to what is used now. And the argument that executing people with this gas would be traumatic is a moot point when you know what the alternative is.
An example of said training given to the untrained.
https://youtu.be/kUfF2MTnqAw?feature=shared
I wouldn’t want to die that way.
The pain might not be there but the realisation is.
He’s able to state that he doesn’t want to die, but needs help putting the mask on.
It’s a slow mental death, even if not a physically painful one, it’s slow.
The humane way to kill someone is quick and painless. Not slow and painless. This is better than the injection which is slow and painful but still not humane.
Your video shows exactly how painless it is, and in fact how it can cause euphoria instead. Besides, this execution method is fundamentally different because it removes oxygen completely while maintaining normal pressure, causing unconsciousness to happen much faster with fewer physiological responses.
Obviously execution is heinous at its very core, but your criticisms don’t seem to line up with the scientific facts.
Only when he knows he’s not meant to die.
If he was told he was going to die he’d be crying at the moment he realised he was dying. Which as you can see from the first time he said “I don’t want to die” would be several minutes.
“Scientific facts” are studies. We’re just people on the internet giving opinions.
YOU are giving opinions, I am giving facts. Here are a few peer reviewed studies that support my statements:
- Nitrogen Hypoxia in mice reduces stress instead of increases it like CO2
- Unconsciousness happens within 5-10 seconds when inhaling inert gases like helium or nitrogen, and does not trigger “suffocation” reflexes like with CO2 asphyxiation
- Nitrogen causes unconsciousness in seconds, but can cause “severe” convulsions unlike other types of gas such as propane or helium. This obviously wouldn’t bother the one dying, but it is upsetting in general.
Really, inert gas hypoxia is quite painless and fast, it’s a decent way to go. That being said, execution is barbaric practice we have no need of.
Well one of those is disputed by evidence directly. 5-10 seconds is clearly in a context irrelevant to the discussion.
But I’m glad you got a hit on your Google scholar search.
Care to read the papers too?
I don’t, you’re not displaying any reason at all.
I did read the papers and this process is extraordinarily similar to the process that is going to be used in the execution (immediate removal of all oxygen). Quote from the article:
The state of Alabama has predicted in federal court filings that the nitrogen gas will “cause unconsciousness within seconds, and cause death within minutes.”
This is exactly the context that is relevant to the discussion. Did you possibly have something else in mind?
That’s simply not how breathing works.
This is stating unconsciousness “within seconds”. How many.
120 is a normal range to pass out from complete oxygen deprivation… That’s also countable in minutes. It ranges from 30-180 seconds.
It’s slow.
Read the papers.
Fast and painless are not the only criteria. Looking at how america typically kills it’s citizens it also clear that it has to look peaceful and respectful. Thats why they put a bag over people getting electrocuted and why they don’t just fire a shotgun at your head from a close distance.
How it looks to others is not important in my view. If it looks horrible to kill someone that’s because it is.
Making it worse to make it appear better is actually pretty abhorrent as far as reasoning goes.
But looking at how America typically kills its citizens means looking at the police. Because deaths caused by the police far outnumber executions.
Those deaths often look pretty horrific.
You know what would be more humane?
Not killing people.
Agreed. I don’t know how you can consider yourself a modern civilization while still putting people to death. It’s barbaric.
Abolish capital punishment. The US is such a freakin’ primitive country in so many ways.
I don’t know man, some people really, really deserve to be removed from existence:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito
How can you reform someone who raped, tortured, killed and then raped again (while dead) more than 100 minors?
Put yourself in the position of a father who knows this guy raped his kid, then tortured him with mutilation, and then raped the corpse.
Imagine knowing that this person is in jail, probably getting decent food and watching TV… Probably jerking off to the memories of the mutilated body parts of your child… while you have to live knowing he is still there.
Revenge is not a good motive though. It doesn’t bring those children back. Removing people like him from society while not forgetting our humanity is all we can do.
I get that there are horrible people out there. No doubt. But the first thing societies like the US (and Colombia in this case) should do is to reform society to produce fewer of these people.
Much of Europe seems to have found a good recipe. Remove the desperation, especially economic desperation. Create equality. Promote health and community and less selfishness and greed. Focus on rehabilitation and productivity instead of punishment and passivity in prison systems.
Unfortunately, a lot of American leaders and voters see revenge as justice, many in the name of Christianity. Not exactly the Christian way from where I’m sitting, but that’s reality.
I don’t see it as revenge but instead as a means to let families move on. I think it is a burden to them knowing this person is still somewhere out there, even if they are locked.
These are pretty special cases. I think countries with capital punishment take those sentences very seriously, it’s not like they go around killing people for funsies.
I think that particular individual that I sent really should be killed. It’s just too much, his case is just too extreme. This is just an evil person… Raping, TORTURING, killing and raping again 300+ innocent minors in the span of 7 years.
He raped, tortured and killed one minor per week in average, for 7 years. Doing that a single time is INSANE. Doing that 300+ times just deserves death.
I get what you’re saying. I disagree, because I just find the concept of capital punishment ethically and morally wrong. Just because someone killed, no matter how and how many, doesn’t give us the right to kill. Not as individuals and not as a society. We have to be better than that.
That’s what supermax prisons are for. Do you think they’re pleasant places to spend the rest of your life?
You lock em up and just leave them there. Current estimates put the faction of innocent death row inmates at about 2%. That’s completely unacceptable. Is killing a bad person out of revenge worth innocent lives when you can just lock them up for life instead?
For most of human history we didn’t have the option of keeping someone imprisoned for life, so killing evil people was really the only permanent solution. It’s understandable that that desire would be engrained in us. But if we don’t have to kill them, shouldn’t we avoid doing so so that we don’t get innocent people killed?
Put yourself in the position of…
That is not how the law works. if the law worked based on how you would feel if you put yourself in the place of a person, you’d get “it would feel bad to be stolen from, but it would feel good to steal, therefore they are the same.” If you could only place yourself in the place of the victim, no one would be innocent because it would feel bad, and thus they must be guilty. It’s a ridiculous concept. What if I imagine myself as the father and I also imagine I don’t care, should murder be legal?
He killed and raped x many people
So did the US army. Rape isn’t punishable by death, for good reason. It’s only added here as an appeal to emotion with no reflection on how it would impact legal process. Rape is very hard to prove, and also way more common than murder. Based on the average number of rape cases and the average length of a death penalty case you’d have half a million 20-year-long cases a year every year forever in the US alone.
Then when it comes to killing lots of people - obviously I’m not defending it, but lots of people kill lots of people. Tobacco manufacturers, car manufacturers, armies, secret services, the police, doctors when things go wrong - or even when things go right but the person can’t be saved…
It’s all well and good to look at one guy and say “this person should die,” but the problem is the law has to be administered fairly and for everyone or there’ll be no law, so when you look at 16,000 people per year every year, it looks very different .
Don’t critics always and only raise doubts? How about making the article about what experts say instead of critics?
While I abhor the death penalty, the science is pretty solid on nitrogen being more humane from a medical perspective. What gives someone the feeling of suffocation is excessive CO2, not the lack of oxygen.
It’s actually a problem with closed-circuit rebreathers. If the CO2 scrubber keeps working but the Oxygen tank runs empty, the person on the rebreather will feel fine until they pass out.
The worst thing for the victim in the execution will be the psychological horror from wearing the mask and knowledge of what’s happening. If they’re goikg to do this, they should just change out the air in a sealed chamber while the victim sleeps.
The problem is that we don’t have a good way to measure if something is humane. They observe, they see the victim not doing anything like thrashing about or screaming, they assume everything is okay.
But all that tells us is that the person is unable to show any suffering. Not that they’re not suffering.
What we really need is to study where people get mostly suffocated by nitrogen, but then brought back, and ask them how it felt.
That’s essentially what the rebreather problem demonstrates.
And we’ve known forever that it’s CO2 that gives the sensation of suffocation.
It’s why hyperventilating before freediving is so dangerous. People expel all the CO2 in their system to reduce the feeling of air starvation and pass out underwater without realizing they’re about to drown.
Well thanks. That’s a new horrifying fear to have.
Don’t hyperventilate before freediving and it’s not a problem.
There’s actually a bunch of information on it from industrial accidents and workers not following protocols. Critics tend to ignore it because their goal is to sway public opinion against execution in general.
TBH, in theory I wouldn’t be against execution but our justice system is SO fallible I don’t trust it ever.
Uh, this has been done to a certain extent? Any person who almost suffocated by stupidly inhaling helium out of a balloon can tell you about their experience. It’s usually them asking “What did just happen? Did I pass out?!”
Nitrogen isn’t helium ofc. But yes, let’s do that with nitrogen in a controlled setting.
It’s been done, in industrial accidents and other cases, but helium is probably more common for average people to experience. Both gasses are inert (have no effect on our biology) and displace oxygen.
P.S. I believe there’s even some companies that offer hypoxia training for pilots and mountain climbers using increased nitrogen instead of reduced pressure. (Such training helps pilots recognize the warning signs so they can activate supplementary oxygen.) This lets them do it without a special pressure chamber, and a quicker recovery to standard atmosphere if someone has a problem.
We breath in nitrogen 24/7. Air is about 78% nitrogen.
I think critics being negative, raising doubts and being vocal is important. Sure, they might not be the brightest or have a degree related to whatever they criticize but they raise concerns, give different points of view that experts could neglect and spark debate on such subjects. When it’s something as touchy and final as a death penalty, I’m glad they’re around.
The critics are by definition the people raising doubts though. It’s a non-statement. The state should not be trusted with the power to kill people, but if you absolutely must have a death penalty, this is the way to do it.
I’m not sure why people obsess over the method. It distracts from the act itself.
It kills innocent people, and the appeal process that we put in place, to try our best not to kill innocent people, costs a shit load of money. Money we could spend on other things we desperately need. Oh, and studies show that it doesn’t deter people.
The only thing it really does is satiate our amygdala’s ancient bias for vengeance. Our biology tells us that it feels right, but the data shows that individuals and societies don’t really benefit from it.
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The distraction is the point. By making the execution look less grotesque, they believe it will make it more palatable to their mouth-breathing constituents. They want the delusion of the condemned drifting off to sleep to slake their bloodlust without their pesky consciences feeling the guilt.
Er…I suspect that part of the point is that their previous method of execution was lethal injection, and there was a pretty well-documented shortage of the drugs for that. They got really expensive. I suspect that’s around the point where someone looked into alternatives and came up with this.
I think you’re probably right that the method seeming maybe more humane to some critics was part of the appeal of this particular method, but I think the main goal was probably cost reduction and ensuring that supply chain issues couldn’t interrupt their murdering any more.
The mouth-breathers would rather have public torture killings.
You see the same thing when carnists try to justify killing animals for food when they don’t need to.
Of all the hot takes I’ve ever read, this is certainly among them. But like, on the cooler end.
Of all the hot takes I’ve ever read, this is certainly among them. But like, on the cooler end.
isn’t a cool/cold take one that’s obvious or commonly believed?
Because it distracts from the act itself.
“Nevermind the govt is literally a death panel for the poor and middle class only, just worry about HOW we kill you, k?”
Why obsess over the difference between prolonged suffering or painless death?
If it’s pure nitrogen it’s as painless as it can get. Make sure there is no O2 in there, get rid of exhaled CO2. Simple. But still, your country should think about death sentences in general. If you think nitrogen is too inhumane just shoot them im the head with a shotgun from a close distance, that too should do the trick.
As long as we continue to do this, we should be forced to pull “execution duty” like we can pull jury duty.
Make people come in to press the button that kills the person.
Let’s see how people vote concerning capital punishment after that.
I’d rather pay a professional sociopath a fraction of the cost it would take to jail the inmate for life, to push that button.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting but you don’t seem to have any concern for mistakes in the justice system that incorrectly convict people and subsequently kill them.
Do I have that right?
No I do have that concern too.
I simultaneously also think reprehensible criminals that have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt should still be executed.
?
As if before now we didn’t think we were killing people we’d proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?
I want to recap the long sequence of events that has led up to this point:
- In the beginning of this narrative, every death penalty state was doing lethal injections with a three drug protocol.
- Italy and maybe some other European nations start arresting pharmaceutical executives and charging them with murder, because their drugs are being used for these lethal injections in the United States.
- Drug companies stop selling their drugs to state penitentiaries. States are not able to perform executions.
- Death penalty states start amending their protocols to switch to different drugs and sometimes a single dose barbiturate protocol.
- Those drugs become harder and harder to source. Pharma companies become completely unwilling to dispense the drugs at all. State legislatures start allowing corrections officials to change the protocol without amending state law, in an effort to keep up.
- States resort to buying drugs from shady compounding pharmacies in secret. Having prison guards write dosage protocols turns out to have been a bad idea. Because, guess what, anesthesiologists are a highly compensated medical specialty, because what they do is highly complicated. So some exit l executions are botched, which delays things even more.
- It’s in this environment that this nitrogen idea migrates from internet boards into the state legislatures.
The big picture here is that if execution remains legal, but you take away all the options, death penalty states will go looking for alternative options.
This is super interesting and I’d love it if you had some sources I could follow. Trying to dig but Google is useless these days.
I think we need to go and get sharks with freaking lazer beams attached to their heads
Too many innocent people ending up on Death Row is a fault of how easily we condemn people to death.
That said, the death penalty should still exist.
We absolutely unequivocally know Dahmer did it. To death.
We 100% without question know Trump attempted to overthrow American law, prove it in court. To death.
We absolutely without question know Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin are pieces of shit and committed, in my opinion, crimes against humanity. Prove it in court. To death.
I see no problem with the death penalty or this method only what we consider justifiable for death.
I think life without parole is more evil than the death penalty, life without parole also encourages horrid behavior in prison because what more will they do to you?
Did they get the idea from the Sarco Pod (AKA the Swiss Suicide Booth)? I know inert gas deaths aren’t a new concept but it seems like an odd coincidence since the pod was just making news a couple years ago.
Nitrogen was talked about in the Oklahoma legislature a few years before this pod hit the news.
Thanks
There’s a great Jacob Geller video about how methods of execution have evolved and why they’ve evolved.
I wouldn’t do it justice but it points out how every time we make a ‘more humane’ way of killing it often just reduces the person’s ability to show suffering, rather than reducing the suffering itself. In many cases the suffering is increased as we say the method is less barbaric; a firing squad has the highest success rate and likely the fastest death.
I can’t recommend this enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirR4FHY2YY Piped bot do your thing
We should abolish the death penalty.
Pretending no one knows what happens when people breathe pure nitrogen until they die is absolutely ludicrous. Especially because what you’re breathing right now is mostly nitrogen.
We know what happens because it happens to mine workers and scuba divers and others by accident. It’s pretty pain/panic-less, which is normally why it’s such a big deal to try and avoid. It’s advocated for as a method by right-to-die proponents because it’s so painless. Pretending this is random human experimentation just gives leverage to dismiss the entire argument.
At least it was painless /s
I do agree the death penalty should be abolished, by the way
Remember when Edison electrocuted a bunch of animals to prove how dangerous AC was? Do you not believe AC can be used correctly?
Nitrogen is one of the methods advocated for by right-to-die advocates for a reason.
Botched execution of the execution are one of the reasons there shouldn’t be executions. A bunch of guys “playing it by ear” who want the accused to suffer are not going to do a good job.
I agree wholeheartedly. My point was more that if you’re making execution into a pseudo-medical event (For example with lethal injections) then you’re going to have more botched executions since the people performing them aren’t medical personnel.
While I don’t believe we should have executions a gun is designed to be used with little training, but syringes and medical gas supply masks (Don’t know the actual name for them) are meant to be used with training. If executions are going to happen surely we should consider the aptitude of those administering them?
We, as many other families before us at the Hillcrest palliative care hospital in San Diego, had to pull the plug on my Dad because the insurance company thought he wouldn’t recover so they used a psycho asshole to convince the family to just pull the plug. It’s not worth loosing your house over loosing the person who worked his ass off to buy it.
Now imagine how awesome one of us would feel if dying from oxygen deprivation was actually more painful than other means? Wouldn’t we then start asking for squad style send offs at the hospital?
I’ve been through pulling the plug and my dad didn’t speak English so he’s not gonna be mad if I joke about it…like you would go up to him and whisper some last words…“hey dad what’s the admin password to the router again? And he would say " I’m tired, I’ll tell you tomorrow. Then you would say, no you won’t dad, no you won’t, I’m so sorry”. He might ask what do you mean I won’t, you come back here you little shit and clarify that for me! But by that time you and your six siblings would each have cocked the guns already. One one of the guns would have the bullet and everyone would be blindfolded. Off they six pops go and then you grieve. Other things happen like the cleanup crew would have to do their job. The facial reconstructionist would come in with the hot glue gun and do his thing with spray paint and lipstick. I mean after they removed the gag.
But sure maybe lethal injection was the way to go. A little cleaner. You still gotta remove the gag later. I can’t imagine electrocution as a proper way. But maybe a last palliative sunset view with Dynamite on the bed and a dead man’s switch. That would be a real quick and painless way to go. Plus if you do it on a boat in Florida waters the circle of life would take care of it…and no awkward funeral!
Okay gotta go start the day 😁. This is all sarcasm and like I said, my dad doesn’t or didn’t speak English… with the gag and all…so anyway…
Is there a lemmy community for copypasta?
Did you enjoy my sarcasm? It’s unclear…hold on, I think it’s my phone.
Okay, can someone explain to me why states with capital punishment don’t just inject someone with a bunch of morphine and they just go to sleep and never wake up again? I hear all the time about the horrific shit they inject into people and the horrible deaths they suffer, while one easy drug can execute the person with no fuss? I just don’t understand.
Or just shoot them, or decapitate them. We’ve known how to kill people for centuries, but “humane” here usually just means what’s prettiest to look at, not what kills the quickest or cleanest.
Drug companies refuse to supply states with execution medications. Not sure if it’s liability, legality or ethics (probably not the latter). I’d think states could synthesize their own or use drugs they confiscated, though.
Also, the AMA and state medical boards punish doctors who agree to supervise executions, because to do so violates the Hippocratic oath.
Often doctors have travelled to the prison in secret, and go to great lengths to remain anonymous. Kinda like the hooded axe man of old.
Some of the drugs are not manufactured in the US. There has been an EU wide ban for selling drugs used in executions to the US without making sure they’re not used for executions. Which also is the reason why medical organizations were very unhappy few years ago when states lied to them in an attempt to get those drugs - as they risk getting cut off for legitimate medical use.
Reason for the EU ban is simple: We consider executions a human rights violation over here.
The appearance of having ethics matters for drug companies because of liability concerns.
The other thing that matters to big multinational pharma companies is when Italian prosecutors start charging their executives with murder. That’s definitely a “liability concern.”
Morphine is considered a ‘fun’ drug, and they wouldn’t want to be giving prisoners that.
