News

23014 readers

7 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

750

Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

593 comments fedilink hide all child comments

“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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago

I am a pilot, I have training and some lungs-on experience with hypoxia. It is my opinion that this execution was botched; some combination of they did not sufficiently empty the atmosphere of oxygen and did not sufficiently remove CO2. The (rather shitty) article (or disorganized collections of opinions with nearly no structure and light on facts) mentions "a fitted mask" was used, which...yeah there's your problem. This probably did not provide enough isolation from the atmosphere and so he died of barely not enough oxygen.

Imagine instead walking into a classroom sized space that is full of 100% nitrogen. It's possible you wouldn't notice. In a space that large, your exhaled CO2 has enough room to diffuse away and not bother you. The fun part is, in this scenario you exhale O2 as well; breathing in this environment will kill you faster than holding your breath; being in that environment actually removes oxygen from your bloodstream. You're unconscious in less than a minute and dead in three or four. You don't struggle to breathe, nothing feels wrong, you get lightheaded, your vision narrows, the beginnings of a headache are probably your last earthly experience.

As the volume of air gets smaller, the O2 and CO2 exhaled by the condemned is more likely to be rebreathed, CO2 causes that "air is bad, need to breathe fresh air" feeling we're all familiar with, and O2 keeps you alive and conscious. One of those coffin-sized pods requires a good bit of gas flow to keep the atmosphere around the condemned's face pure.

If they put one of those medical masks they give you nitrous oxide or oxygen at the hospital with, just hooked up to a tank of N2...they probably weren't even completely excluding oxygen from the room.