Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Right. So it’s human medical experimentation on a prisoner. Which, ask any social scientist, is some seriously fucked up, unethical shit.
So the method has passed animal testing… What are the next steps in your opinion?
Someone who meets euthanasia standards in a state volunteers to do it.
If I was terminal, it’s something I’d consider. For science.
But I don’t think I’d do it so they can kill people with less remorse.
Talked myself into a corner there. But a bloodless, mess-less, painless way to die could be useful to people who want to die with dignity.
In my opinion, the only morally acceptable next step is abolishing the death penalty. But, if I objected solely on the basis of the medical experimentation angle, an extensive formal review of the body of evidence by a panel of actual medical experts, plus not using as a subject a guy who already underwent one botched execution, at the very least?
It’s only experimental in that it’s never been done before, everyone knows exactly what’s going to happen and it’s been closen because it’s more humane than exciting options.
“It’s only experimental in that it’s never been done before…”
Why yes, that’s right. Which is what “experimental” means. Assuming you know what will happen before trying something is deeply unscientific.
It’s not like it’s unstudied new science, experiments on prisoners are such a well known bad thing because people did cruel experiments which treated the subjects as objects - this is choosing what’s known to be an effective way to painlessly die over a more painful and less effective method.
And yes we know what’s going to happen, nitrogen isn’t a new thing and people have asphyxiated due to it before (over a hundred people in the US in the last thirty years), just not when it’s been purposefully administered in a prison.
