Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t ‘people killing other people’ include the state killing people? I don’t see how vengeance for a murder solves anything.
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.
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/
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.
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.
First off, I am against the death penalty. I suppose there are hypothetical scenarios were there may be some remorseless person who committed horrific crimes and for whom there is absolutely no doubt of guilt, and maybe then we can justify removing them from the world permanently. But in the real world, the death penalty is not limited to such scenarios. Innocents have been and continue to be executed. This is unacceptable.
But, if we aren’t going to eliminate it, at the very least we can avoid unneeded suffering during it. As I understand it, nitrogen asphyxiation is a comparatively peaceful way to go. So this headline smells of bullshit to me.
It’s experimental. No institutional review board in the country could ethically ask this guy to volunteer for such an experiment, simply because of the coercive power dynamics inherent in asking such a thing of a prisoner. But the government can, by fiat, decide to experiment on him, and you’re ok with that? Even if “nitrogen asphyxiation is a comparatively peaceful way to go,” human medical experimentation qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment; otherwise, what’s the point of banning cruel and unusual punishment?
The only experiment is doing it to humans. It’s used to kill chickens by the thousands. Because it causes them less stress, leading to better tasting meat.
Right. So it’s human medical experimentation on a prisoner. Which, ask any social scientist, is some seriously fucked up, unethical shit.
It isn’t experimental is the way the word is normally used. We know what the effects of nitrogen asphyxiation are. People are accidentally killed by it all the time. If were going to have a death penalty (and I would argue we shouldn’t) then we should seek less cruel ways to do it, which nitrogen asphyxiation is.
It says the method is rejected even by vets. But it only says the nitrogen atmosphere can induce a stressful environment “in some species”. Do these other species have stress triggers when low on oxygen? Is there any further explanation?
It also mentioned this method has been adopted by 3 states. Have there been any successful attempts?
I’m against the death penalty but that’s no excuse to skimp on reporting. Those seem like obvious questions that would have easily found answers. That they aren’t in the article, begs the question if they were asked, answered, and excluded? Or just not asked?
Yes, there are other species that react negatively to hypoxic environments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
But the idea with using it on humans is that we don’t react negatively. We don’t even feel like we’re suffocating, like with excessive CO2. Nitrogen is plentiful and is already being used for legal suicide elsewhere, which is why they’re wanting to use it.
Just posting this as an addendum to the information from the comment above. There is a 3D printed device called a Sarco Pod that has been developed for assisted suicides. As far as I know, it has yet to be deployed. However, it seems likely that it will be in the near future.
The prevailing objections to the death penalty appear to stem from the nature of the methods that have been utilized. I wonder if the sentiment would change if receiving the death penalty was effectively painless, and nearly instantaneous via one of these pods?
At that point you could certainly make an argument for life in prison being a significantly harsher, elongated, and cruel sentence. Just some food for thought.
Didn’t he ask for that method himself? I’m sure he doesn’t want to try injection again.
I hate the death penalty - its barbaric, it kills innocent people etc.
But if people are going to do it I can think of no better metaphor for a state sanctioned death penalty than an enourmous hydraulic press.
All these injections and ethical guidelines are misguided. The cruelty is the point so they might as well just make it quick and lean into it.
“Crushed by the weight of the system.”
Maybe “torn apart by the gears of justice?”
I’m pro-death penalty in theory but against it in practice. There’s definitely some people who forfeit their right to exist with the rest of us. But we can never apply it fairly or even guarantee we aren’t executing actually innocent people. And the ugliness and evil of that is more than enough to make me against capital punishment.
It’s sometimes wrong is my #1 reason.
Om top of that, it’s not fairly distributed sometimes and it’s also more expensive than just life in prison. With all that, what’s the purpose? It’s clearly to make other people feel good, not about justice. People love revenge porn, and I think that says a lot about us as people that we’re willing to deal with all the negatives to bring us joy about ending another person’s life.
