“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
I’m curious how they implemented this. The air completely has to be replaced with nitrogen, no breathing in a mix of nitrogen and outside air, no oxygen at all. People that enter confined spaces with no oxygen pretty much just drop and are dead quickly, so this doesn’t sound like they did it right.
They used a mask rather than the more appropriate method which would be to use a sealed chamber that was forcefully evacuated of oxygen and replaced by nitrogen the way the suicide pods are supposed to function.
The problem with a mask is it can’t be a perfectly sealed system. The issue with the execution from a logistical standpoint was the redneck engineering they employed and not the actual science behind nitrogen hypoxia.
Please don’t come at me, I’m not making a value judgment about the use of the death penalty, I’m just explaining the issue with their shoddy ass methodology.
Edit: accidentally a word.
Edit #2 (YouTube Link): Here is some additional information about why a gas mask is an ineffective and dangerous way to conduct an execution via nitrogen hypoxia from Dr. Philip Nitschke, a leading advocate of the right to die movement and an expert in the field of voluntary euthanasia. He personally examined the execution method being used in Alabama, and told them he felt it would be ineffective for many of the same reasons stated above.
FTR I’m generally against the death penalty, so same, don’t give me grief. I’m of the opinion that if it’s gonna be done, don’t fuck it up.
Ok. So regarding the implementation it sounds like they fucked it up. As you said (and I previously implied) it sounds like they didn’t properly exclude oxygen/remove waste CO2. Kinda hard to believe they fucked up something so simple considering the ton of evidence on hypoxic accidents.
Precisely. They apparently either felt it was fine to cut corners, do not fully understand how nitrogen hypoxia actually works, or a little bit of suffering was intentionally part of the process because it still is Alabama after all…
Hot take, they don’t care because they are killing someone. The humanity part of it is completely removed. They care that they did the deed and it didn’t work. It should have been immediate. Someone should be losing their job. An Internet search could have prevented this.
I’m willing to bet my left testicle they thought in their lead-addled brain that it would work like a diver’s mask. Pumping in gas pushes out the water, so it must also push out the air, I tell you hwat! I don’t consider myself to be a very bright person, but even I know that water and air work differently.
I think the bigger issue is that he was aware of when the nitrogen started, so tried holding his breath for as long as possible.
If he had the mask on and it was pumping breathable air, and then at some point switched to pure nitrogen without any warning that would be more humane because he wouldn’t know what was happening or when.
Lol at calling any of that humane. There’s nothing humane about suffocating a man against his will.
their shotty ass methodology.
In case you didn’t know, that should be “shoddy” as in “made or done poorly”
He could have held his breath in a chamber too. The problem is it being forced on someone instead of being voluntary or unnoticed.
He held his breath for 22min? No they fucked up the procedure. Even if he had held his breath at first he should have been unconsious the first time he took one. I’ve nearly been knocked out by nitrogen hypoxia before. It takes one lungfull of non oxygenated air to make you start to black out. He must have still been getting some oxygen somehow. It sounds like they were trying to use a mask (which is a dumb way to do it) so they probably didn’t use a high enough flow rate for the nitrogen and he was breathing in air from around the mask. They probably would have been better off forgetting about the mask entirely and just blowing nitrogen at his face at a much higher flow rate (that’s what almost did it for me).
They often don’t. There are moderate risks with lethal injections, and even if you seem unconscious, it’s still disputed whether you would really be unaware or not. As for the gas, suffocate in any manner is very painful and unpleasant.
Your suffocation reflex is driven by a buildup of carbon dioxide, not a lack of oxygen.
If you leave air composition the same but remove the oxygen, your body doesn’t notice and you feel fine until you suddenly black out.
https://youtu.be/UN3W4d-5RPo?si=3LKw5fe1wXfRDcrB
The Air Force does training on it, since it can happen if the aircraft loses pressure and pilots need to know how to notice and handle it. As you can see in the above video, the pilot is not suffering even though the oxygen level has been cut quite drastically.
If you hold your breath you still build up CO2. You know, as a reaction to being killed.
You are not being “suffocated” in the sense that you aren’t allowed to breathe. I suggest you do some looking around and check out events where people have entered spaces that can have no/limited oxygen such as mines or anchor chain lockers on ships. They often simply drop unconscious and are dead fairly quickly. The victim isn’t re-breathing CO2, which is what gives us that panicked lack of air feeling, or someone holding something over your face making it difficult to breathe.
If you’ve ever had a medical procedure that puts you under, I can assure you there’s nothing remembered to be aware of.
I personally experienced breathing nitrogen until loss of consciousness under controlled and supervised conditions for training purposes with the RCAF. I was in a room with seven other people who were all doing the same thing as well as instructors who were in here with us for safety.
The point of the exercise was to sit in a room with a mask on, recognize the symptoms of hypoxia when we experienced them and throw a lever that would resume normal air breathing once we had enough. We were given tablets with simple games to play to simulate having our minds occupied on accomplishing some tasks. We knew they were going to switch or air supplies with pure nitrogen at some point to cause hypoxia but we didn’t know when it was going to happen. The room was also a hypobaric chamber but it didn’t stimulate a high enough altitude to induce hypoxia by itself, it was only there to simulate the environmental signs of decompression ( fogging of the air, percieved drop in pressure, cooling sensation, etc)
We sat there for a few minutes accomplishing the tasks on the tablets (basically paying candy crush) with nothing special going on. Then I noticed that we all started breathing deeper and harder. When I looked around people were also red in the face but strangely did not feel any discomfort from it and some people were even still playing on their tablets without noticing. Some of them threw their personal lever immediately because the point of the exercise was to recognize the signs of hypoxia. But others including my competitive ass wanted to see how far I could take it and if I could outlast others so we kept going.
My breathing naturally got deeper and harder but strangely I wasn’t feeling like I was suffocating. I started feeling pins and needles in my extremities. Concentrating on the tasks in the tablet became increasingly difficult and slower. A few moments later I got tunnel vision and my hearing started to sound muffled. These two effects progressively got worse until I could almost not see or hear anything anymore at which point I finally threw the lever just before passing out due to a phenomenon called oxygen paradox where when oxygen supply is resumed the hypoxia symptoms briefly get worse before going away. I didn’t even notice passing out. I woke up a few moments later and from my perspective it seemed that time had skipped forward a minute. Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.
All of this took less than 5 minutes and I never experienced anything worse than mild discomfort throughout. I don’t know how they managed to make it last 25 minutes other than maybe the brain stem running on fumes and keeping the heart beating but there is no consciousness at that point. If I ever had to pick a way to be executed this would be it, provided that it is done correctly.
Sounds like they didn’t remove the CO2, just gave him a mask that forced him to breathe nitrogen. Like a standard medical respirator, so he spent half an hour rebreathing his CO2 and whatever oxygen slipped in around the mask.
You did that in a safe situation where nobody was trying to kill you. I don’t suffer when holding my breath underwater, but the moment someone holds me down I am going to panic.
Try to hold your breath for as much as you can, and you will feel an very strong urge to breathe. This doesn’t happen with nitrogen.
Sure, the person is mad scared, but he’s not suffering because of the nitrogen.
“Waterboarding doesn’t cause suffering because it isn’t literally drowning.”
That’s what you sound like.
It is not fair to liken this to being held underwater. When forced to hold your breathyour lungs fill with CO2 which will cause pain, an urge to breathe and a primal urge to panic because your body has evolved the ability to sense this excess of CO2 to force you to breathe. But when breathing pure nitrogen your body doesn’t have an evolved way to detect it besides minor symptoms that you may or may not notice until you pass out.
Yes, the very idea that you will die can be emotionally distressing but this will be common to all methods of execution.
A lot of people are focused on this quote:
Witness Reverend Jeff Hood told reporters he saw a man ‘struggling for their life’ for 22 minutes as Smith became the first US death row inmate executed by nitrogen asphyxia
Which says to me that from the time they brought him in and strapped him down until he died lasted about 22 minutes and the murderer struggled physically against the restraints the entire time.
This quote farther down suggests from the time they started administering the gas until he died only took a couple of minutes:
But, witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for several minutes, shaking and writhing on the gurney.
Several could be 25, and he could have been shaking from pain and agony, but it seems more likely he was holding his breath and shaking out of fear while trying to fight and get free.
Keep in mind that the first quote is from his anti-death penalty spiritual advisor and this entire article is brought to us by a magazine with an “end the death penalty campaign”.
I’m generally anti-death penalty myself, but nitrogen asphyxiation seems way better than electrocution, lethal injection, or hanging. They could probably do it better by using some kind of general anesthesia to render him unconscious and then flood the room with pure nitrogen, or even just get rid if the death penalty all together. Unfortunately this is the world we live in and so fae this is the least bad option we’ve seen.
Tom Scott did a video on this as well.
25 minutes does seem like an awfully long time.
The point of the exercise was to sit in a room with a mask on, recognize the symptoms of hypoxia when we experienced them and throw a lever that would resume normal air breathing once we had enough.
So you weren’t fighting for your life.
So they fucked it up and then there’s a real gem in the article. The jury voted to give him life without parole. A judge overruled that jury to give him the death penalty anyways.
There are no more laws. Only the whims of judges.
Was this based on sentencing guidelines at the time?
But yeah… Brought to you by the same people who convince juries that nullification is not a real thing for malum-prohibitum crimes.
The American system of elected judges is bonkers to me. Here in Canada even your basic judge has to be a lawyer in good standing for a decade before being reviewed by a panel of seniors judges and recommended to the position. Their job isn’t to play “tough on crime” to the crowd and do everything possible to obtain convictions so that people will like them. Until they retire up here their whole job is to uphold and defend the presumption of innocence so a defendant gets the full benefit of the law and an innocent person is not unjustly punished. Their job is to put into practice the ethics and design of the law as written to afford the humane treatment to other humans by the state and defer the ultimate judgement of guilt or innocence to a jury of peers.
Elections in a system like law create natural conflicts of interest and once someone is convicted once on shitty practice by a judge with no prior qualifications getting that person out of the system is like trying to swim against a riptide. The American system seems primed to create victims of the state, not to uphold justice.
There are many accounts of workers accidentally entering confined spaces that have been purged with nitrogen and they were all unconscious in seconds. (OSHA records). If it took the prison 22 MINUTES to execute this guy, then they totally botched that execution.
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it. You can’t expect people to follow, “do what I say, not what I do.”
It’s cruel, it’s a reflection of our morals. The death penalty is not a deterrent for murder. The death penalty is hypocrisy. The death penalty is for an unserious society.
But the death penalty is just a symptom of a greater chronic illness we suffer from. We’ll just continue to kill ourselves until we find a cure for the disease.
Edit: I see many do not like my wording for state sanctioned murder. If you are reading this and don’t understand, imagine if listening to George Bush (can’t remember which) tell the tv America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. He’s drawing a moral line in the sand with terrorism. That’s my point. We need to figure out where our moral line in the sand is with the death penalty, because right now it’s all over the place. Do I think outlawing the death penalty will solve our societal woes? No, I do not. The people will demand it until it is reinstated. For me I ask what is the purpose of the death penalty? Does it serve a greater good for a society? Obviously it does not. Americans are murdered all the time, so it serves no purpose.
