Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Kenneth Smith is one of two living Americans who can describe what it is like to survive an execution, having endured an aborted lethal injection last November during which he was subjected to excruciating pain tantamount, his lawyers claim, to torture.
If the state of Alabama has its way, he will become the test dummy for an execution method that has never before been used in judicial killings and which veterinarians consider unacceptable as a form of euthanasia for animals – death by nitrogen gas.
The choice of Smith as the first candidate for the technique, less than a year after he experienced a failed execution, has also been criticized as a double violation of the eighth amendment protection against “cruel and unusual punishments”.
Earlier that year, the state took more than three hours to kill Joe Nathan James and later abandoned the execution of Alan Miller after also failing to find a vein.
“The mask will be placed and adjusted on the condemned inmate’s face”, it says, and then after the prisoner has been allowed to make a final statement “the Warden will activate the nitrogen hypoxia system”.
Like many death penalty states, Oklahoma was looking for an alternative to lethal injection, having struggled to procure the necessary drugs as a result of an international boycott by pharmaceutical companies.
The original article contains 1,116 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Didn’t he ask for that method himself? I’m sure he doesn’t want to try injection again.
Cruel? Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably one of the most painless, gentle ways to go.
Your trigger that you can’t breathe is a buildup of carbon dioxide. But as you can still exhale, you feel no panic. You just slowly drift unconscious and die. I’d take it over most causes of death.
It’s people’s that want to ban the death penalty. They have already have succeeded in getting pharmaceutical companies to stop providing the drugs traditionally used.
Nitrogen, though, would be hard to ban. There is plenty of it, and it is cheap and easy to isolate. So they are arguing hard that it shouldn’t be accepted before they can prove how painlessly effective it can be.
There’s a BBC documentary about it, I think this one:
It’s been a long time since I watched it, but I think the inert gas route is very pleasant. He even gets slightly high/happy from it.
Key takeaways:
- there are surprisingly easy ways to kill people humanely.
- many in the US doesn’t want to kill prisoners humanely, they want it to hurt and be a punishment, not die in a euphoric high
edit: found it:
https://www.documentarytube.com/videos/how-to-kill-a-human-being-2/
Rendered unconcious within 15 seconds, dead within a minute.
In testing pigs would happily stick their heads in a space with pure nitrogen and munch on apples till they lost consciousness, fell over, then stick their heads back in the space with nitrogen to eat some more apples.
Well yeah if we wanted it to be happy and comfortable we’ve had morphine for over a century
Medical companies will not sell if they suspect it will be used to kill human beings. If they do, they might get banned in Europe
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/lethal-injection-pharma-kill-death-penalty/
Opinion 👆.
Fact: it’s necessary to remove certain people who are prone to violence and incapable of rehabilitation. If you have such a problem with execution, then volunteer your time, money, and home to accommodate a violent psychopath with you forever.
Fact: when we sentence people to death we get it wrong one time in three
Fact: executing someone is more expensive than keeping them in prison for life
Opinion 👆.
Fact: punishments can be reversed, if the punished stays alive. Any percentage of unjust executions is irredeemable. Also, there is a lot of evidence that abolishing the death penalty either does not affect the crime rate, or it has a positive effect (see link below).
More opinion: executions have no place in a society that highly values human rights because killing people is the exact opposite of humane. If you think prisoners are monsters and you could never end up in there, watch a documentary about it. If you see what some ppl went through, you know how easy anyone can end up there.
That’s as silly a comment as “if you think Native Americans were wronged, give your house to one,” something else I’ve heard people say. Societal wrongs are not solved by individuals.
Somehow all the countries that don’t allow capital punishment find ways to deal with extremely violent people and don’t have murderers running amok.
You know what else is cruel? People killing other people. And the former continuing to live despite their cruelty.
The only rub against execution to me is the risk of executing the innocent. But that is not the concern here. There is no dispute this guy is guilty.
The only rub against execution to me is the risk of executing the innocent.
Right, so why is that not a total disqualifier then? Even if the risk is fleeting small, there is no taking it back. If it came out later on, dead is dead. Combining that with the fact that executions are obv a psychological cluster fuck for everyone who deals with it, especially the one executed, and the fact that it takes a lot of resources every trial because it’s such an unusually cruel punishment, the arguments for it are dwindling.
Also
You know what else is cruel? People killing other people.
Right but we’re not voting someone in office who can eliminate all homicides in the United States. Things are different for execution.
We could also talk about how this “well tough shit” opinion always fucks over positive and healthy change, but that’s probably the least impactful argument for the folks who still bank on executions as some sort of greater good.
Doesn’t ‘people killing other people’ include the state killing people? I don’t see how vengeance for a murder solves anything.
You know what else is cruel? People killing other people.
Then why aren’t you advocating for executing those that execute killers? After all, they kill people. But I’m going to assume that you think those killers are okay.
Capital punishment is government sanctioned killing. Outside of war, the government should not have the power to kill anyone.
Let them rot in prison. It’s cheaper anyway.
Abolish capital punishment.
It’s human medical experimentation as a punishment that’s cruel and unusual.
It’s not experimentation. People have already died, even accidentally, from inert gas asphyxiation.
If we didn’t study it for this purpose in human subjects before him, it’s experimentation. Reproducing something that has occurred organically in a new context is absolutely experimentation. I don’t know how I can make this simpler.
I’d take a firing squad or an enormous hydraulic press tbh. If I were to be an innocent stuck with a death penalty I’d be happy to know somebody will have to clean up a messy pile of guts after my quick death.
The whole point of using gas or chemicals for the death isnt to make the punishment humane - the death penalty is not humane in any way - its to make it easier on the people doing the killing. No mess, no fuss.
Is there a citation on the necessity of citations? Surely someone in the academic world has written such a work, if not several.
Of all the gases why Nitrogen? Argon is more commonly used for kill bags, I think.
Argon is the third-most abundant gas in Earth’s atmosphere, at 0.934%.
Argon is used in welding and costs slightly more than oxygen.
Because nitrogen is already the dominant gas in breathable air. Because it is plentiful and readily available. Because lungs don’t detect it as anything different than regular air. It has no side effects and no toxicity. It isn’t the nitrogen that kills, it’s the lack of oxygen. What humans detect when suffocating is excess carbon dioxide, so as long as that’a removed from the nitrogen enviroment, people will just blissfully slip into unconsciousness and then experience brain death from oxygen deprivation - while in a euphoric state the entire time it happens.
The article title is sensationalist clickbait at best, and outright disinformation at worst.
Idk I looked it up (the claim that vets don’t use it) and what I read was that it can cause feelings of suffocation. The vet claim here was a little challenging for since I doubt that pets would like a mask on their face regardless of what is coming out of it.
and what I read was that it can cause feelings of suffocation
That is contrary to everything I have found (including veterinary use for euthanasia).
It’s not much of a guinea pig if you’re just asphyxiating him, its pretty understood how that kills people. By the logic of calling him a guinea pig does that mean anytime anything is done to someone for the first time they’re a guinea pig?
There are lots of ways to asphyxiate someone, and not all of them are fast and easy. And yes, guinea pigs having been used in lab experiments, that’s exactly the logic.
