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.
Abolish capital punishment. The US is such a freakin’ primitive country in so many ways.
How about stop murdering people
“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.
Ever since watching the Jacob Gellar video about capital punishment, I truly think there is no form of “humane” way of killing someone.
there isn’t. There is no good argument for killing anyone. Even a child can grasp “who watches the watchmen.”
Sometimes violent people need to be secured from society to prevent pain/suffering/death — we have non lethal methods. And they are cheaper, more accurate, slightly less racist-influenced, and more effective than murder.
A large percentage of death row executions are later exonerated. A large percentage of executions are botched causing undue suffering to victim, executioner, staff and witnesses. The death penalty does nothing to dissuade any crimes from happening.
All it does is give people an excuse to talk tough, “Yeah well I’d kill him with my bare hands.”
Sure, Jan.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
