Move follows Alabama’s recent killing of death row inmate Kenneth Smith using previously untested method
Three of the largest manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas in the US have barred their products from being used in executions, following Alabama’s recent killing of the death row inmate Kenneth Smith using a previously untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia.
The three companies have confirmed to the Guardian that they have put in place mechanisms that will prevent their nitrogen cylinders falling into the hands of departments of correction in death penalty states. The move by the trio marks the first signs of corporate action to stop medical nitrogen, which is designed to preserve life, being used for the exact opposite – killing people.
The green shoots of a corporate blockade for nitrogen echoes the almost total boycott that is now in place for medical drugs used in lethal injections. That boycott has made it so difficult for death penalty states to procure drugs such as pentobarbital and midazolam that a growing number are turning to nitrogen as an alternative killing technique.
Now, nitrogen producers are engaging in their own efforts to prevent the abuse of their products. The march has been led by Airgas, which is owned by the French multinational Air Liquide.
Nitrogen hypoxia sounds like one of the best ways to die, without pain or panic, but I completely understand why no company wants to be the supplier of the means of executing people. Small volume, small profits, extreme controversy. What’s to want there?
Sure. If it was done correctly and we could trust the justice system to not kill innocent people. However they figured out the cruelest way to do it and SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they’re innocent because it might hurt the court’s reputation of they back down.
SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they’re innocent because it might hurt the court’s reputation of they back down.
I’m not familiar with this. Is this something that actually happened?
I believe they’re referencing this:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that state prisoners have no constitutional right to present new evidence in federal court to support their claims that they were represented at trial and on appeal in state courts by unqualified or otherwise deficient lawyers. The vote was 6-to-3, along ideological lines.
. . .
On Monday Thomas wrote the majority decision hollowing out that 2012 ruling on behalf of the court’s new six-justice conservative super majority.
He said that federal courts may not hear “new evidence” obtained after conviction to show how deficient the trial or appellate lawyer in state court was. To allow such evidence to be presented in federal court, he said, “encourages prisoners to sandbag state courts,” depriving the states of “the finality that is essential to both the retributive and deterrent function of criminal law.”
. . .
Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision “perverse,” and “illogical.” The Sixth Amendment “guarantees criminal defendants the right to effective assistance of counsel at trial,” she said. “Today, however, the court hamstrings the federal courts’ authority to safeguard that right.”
This is so from 2022.
yes more then once. Most recently the supreme court ruled you can’t bring new evidence to an areal. Why? because it would undermine the state right to be sure of their decision. Also note that the most successful way to win an appeal on a criminal case was to bring new evidence that showed your defense did not do their job or the prosecution withheld evidence that showed your innocence.
It’s called “finality”.
The idea that it’s more Important that the process is followed and then stops at some point than that justice is achieved.
Same reason they barred introduction of new evidence when appealing from state court to federal, giving potentially corrupt state courts full power to block exculpatory evidence to deny someone justice because the federal courts must uphold the verdict if the evidence which was accepted indicates guilt under the state law. Same thing if the prosecutor knows of evidence of innocence and withholds or, or if the evidence only turns up after the trial. You get only one chance and then you’re screwed.
Shinn V Ramirez, 2022.
They were arguing ineffective counsel post conviction because evidence wasn’t submitted that could have shown Ramirez was innocent. Lower courts agreed, citing previous SCOTUS rulings. SCOTUS decided federal courts must be bound by the original evidence only.
Money Quote -
Two of those costs are particularly relevant here. First, a federal order to retry or release a state prisoner overrides the State’s sovereign power to enforce “societal norms through criminal law.” Calderon v. Thompson, 523 U. S. 538, 556.
Second, federal intervention imposes significant costs on state criminal justice systems. See, e.g., Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72, 90. Pp. 6–8.
(Separated for clarity)
Personally I love how they say we need to respect a state’s right to enforce social norms. With the death penalty. Because those are equivalent things. Betty doesn’t like to mow her lawn. She likes to let her neighbor Lucy do it. Off to the chair for her! Okay jokes aside what they mean is their power to make laws, enforce laws, and have a court system.
And then it’s too expensive? Really? I’m not going to be surprised when we end up with the purge only instead of being everywhere it’s actually when the air raid siren goes off during yard time at the prison.
Media witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for about ten minutes. He shook and writhed for about two minutes on the gurney, followed by about five minutes of heavy breathing.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226936713/alabama-execution-kenneth-smith
Because they did in the worst way possible. All Alabama had to do was flood a sealed room with nitrogen and the execution would have been fairly “unremarkable”. Instead they forced a has mask on Smith that required his cooperation to function properly, didn’t have a one-way valve to remove exhaled gas, causing CO2 to build up in the tiny mask.
A haircut is also a painless and quick procedure, but that doesn’t mean your barber can’t be incompetent and totally fuck up your scalp.
Especially if the American Barber Association has a rule that none of its members may participate in the haircut; and scissor manufacturers all refuse to sell to you. So you end up having it done by a random person who doesn’t mind ignoring what every barber says, using a pair of rusty scissors the sherrif was able to find at a garage sale.
Is there some reasoning behind that? As far as I know, there are at least some gas chambers in the US. And even if Alabama happens not to have one, it doesn’t seem too complicated to build one.
Why do people be such a hard on for asphyxiation executions. This is the same shit the said about the first gas chamber. What about the added adrenaline from the body and mind knowing the are in a death situation? What is the person beings to hyperventilate? Even the persons level of muscle mass can effect how fast it takes or when the body switches over to known O2 sources of energy to contract muscles in an attempt to keep the heart pumping. Probably the Cedar like conversions we saw from the first person they tried this on. This will inevitably be found to be an on sound way execute people and outlaw, the only question is how many people will be tortured to death before people wake up!
If “right to die” laws become more of a thing, this would be the most compassionate way of doing a home suicide kit. I wonder if the manufacturers would oppose that as well, or only executions.
Like you said, there’s not much in it for them either way.
How is this more compassionate that loading someone up with an OD of morphine or something similar?
Because ODing can be a rough way to die. With nitrogen hypoxia you just go to sleep and never wake up.
It sounds like a reasonable way to die when the individual doesn’t know what’s going on or is accepting/willing. As an execution method it’s shit.
Well, disregarding the normal fear of death that would be there regardless of the method, I think the issue is the mask. It would be much better to just fill the room with N2. You can do this easilly enough by evaporating liquid N2. Of course, this would not be “medical grade” so people would complain just to complain.
We could also just not kill people. Kinda seems to be at the root of this problem.
Yeah the mask and timing is what caused that one prisoner to be in so much suffering since he knew it was going to happen imminently so he held his breath.
If it were done gradually over a period of like 30 minutes, he likely wouldn’t have noticed and just drifted into unconsciousness.
Just not true! The execution method requires a willing or unconscious victim. Why do people think any type of asphyxiation will be nice and peaceful regardless of the gas used? (yes I understand the “science” behind using this gas.) but what if the person holds their breath, or account for the added adrenaline, or the person hyperventilating. I can go on. It’s not medically sound way to execute people. Honestly, this is the same lies they pushed about previous humane execution methods. “it’s painless, the science is sound.” I promise you, after about 5 more “botched” executions using this N2 method it’ll be abandoned.
Maybe also the moral and ethical questions that come with it, you know, besides just money?
Haha yeah, I’m sure that got an entire slide in the PowerPoint at the board meeting. I’m sure plenty of people there morally object. I also think that a steady and sizeable stream of income would instantly cure those objections though. But as the person above said already there is only a trickle of pennies in it for them.
AirGas, Air Products, and Matheson are the manufacturers, for anyone interested.
My job’s vendor is also mentioned:
Other manufacturers of medical nitrogen in the US were more circumspect. Linde, a global multinational founded in Germany and headquartered in the UK, would not say whether it was willing to sell its product for use in US death chambers and declined to comment.
I wonder which tactic Republicans will take when it inevitably turns out they’re buying it from China- lie that they’re doing it or insist that they have to due to the evil liberal elite?
Ahhh, right, because only republicans execute people… Way to make this political.
2016 Democratic Party platform:
We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. It has no place in the United States of America. The application of the death penalty is arbitrary and unjust. The cost to taxpayers far exceeds those of life imprisonment. It does not deter crime. And, exonerations show a dangerous lack of reliability for what is an irreversible punishment.
(They reiterated this in 2020.)
2016 Republican party platform:
The constitutionality of the death penalty is firmly settled by its explicit mention in the Fifth Amendment. With the murder rate soaring in our great cities, we condemn the Supreme Court’s erosion of the right of the people to enact capital punishment in their states.
(They re-adopted the 2016 platform in 2020.)
Sorry, it’s political whether you like it or not.
This is an honest question. In the US we probably put down thousands of household pets each month. Many of them have their owners right there beside them holding their paw. It isn’t tramatic for the pet or the owner.
How can it be this difficult for us to humanely execute a human?
Because we’re kill our pets out of love, and we kill inmates out of hate. Humane treatment isn’t difficult, the cruelty is intentional.
So long as were still using the barbaric practice of state-sanctioned murder, the practice itself will remain barbaric. The only solution is to eliminate the death penalty like the rest of the civilized western world.
If a human chooses euthanasia because of endless and needless suffering, say stage 4 cancer, that sort of thing, I’ll sit right next to them, hold their hand too.
When we execute a human, it’s a different story and as I wrote this I wonder if I really have to explain the difference between euthanasia and an execution…?
You’re missing the point. The question was, “how is it medically different” rather than, “how is it morally different”
The moral question is still the issue, though. The original question was asking how is it so difficult to humanely execute a human.
It’s difficult only because of the difference between execution and euthanasia. The drug companies argue that execution is inhumane and euthanasia is humane.
As a result, they have made it harder to execute people while making the process of euthanasia as painless as possible.
I’m sorry I really don’t understand what your point is.
The question is why does execution have to be so awful, and your answer is because it’s an execution. But that doesn’t really answer the question, is execution of punishment or is it just a method to get rid of dangerous individuals? If it’s a method to get rid of dangerous individuals then there’s no reason for it to be unpleasant.
If it’s a punishment then wouldn’t the great a punishment be life in prison. Where they have to deal with it every day, rather than getting out early?
is execution of punishment or is it just a method to get rid of dangerous individuals?
It’s neither. The dangerous individuals have already been removed from society so killing them is unnecessary. And, as you’ve pointed out, a life sentence is a much better punishment so executions aren’t about punishment. It’s not a deterrent, as some advocates suggest, since the homicide rate is higher in states with the death penalty than those without.
Ultimately, the purpose of executions seems to be revenge. I think there’s more nuance than that but every time I attempt to express it I discover that I can’t do so succinctly. I sincerely apologize to anyone that might read this and feel like I’m misrepresenting their position.
Nitrogen is almost 80% of air so it’s hardly in short supply. Also why would you need medical grade? This is like alcohol swabs at the IV insertion site for lethal injection. They just don’t want the bad publicity of being associated, but it’s not going to stop anything.
Yeah. It is one thing when the state needs a controlled substance like execution drugs. In that case, there are only a handfull of places to get it, and they are all required to vet their purchasers anyway.
For Nitrogen, anyone who wants some can just order a canister off of Amazon and get it delivered no questions asked. Or, for a few thousand, have their own N2 generator.
Would defense lawyers raise hell about non-medical N2 being used? Sure, but they raise hell about everything; its their job. You would delay all executions for a few years while the appeals process plays out. Then end up with a final ruling saying that consumer grade N2 is good enough.
