this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney Thursday and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method.

The Alabama attorney general’s office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” But what exactly Smith, 58, will feel after the warden switches on the gas is unknown, some doctors and critics say.

“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”

Keller, who was not involved in developing the Alabama protocol, said the plan is to “eliminate all of the oxygen from the air” that Smith is breathing by replacing it with nitrogen.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How about stop murdering people

[–] [email protected] 60 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't know why this is still a controversial concept. Just don't kill prisoners. Horrific crimes are not assuaged by more death. It's never worked in history and it doesn't work now.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It’s arguably controversial because the human brain has a cognitive bias toward vengeance. There are lot of really interesting psych studies on this topic. It feels right to take an eye for an eye, and we often try to justify that urge, even if we don’t benefit from it.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The human brain has a lot of cognitive biases that we have collectively decided to legislate against.

This is one of the easiest to move on from. It takes significantly more effort to justify and carry out judicial murder than it does to ban it.

We banned dueling to the death over honor centuries ago, and that's a very similar cognitive bias. Arguably a lot less impactful on society at large too, since a duel requires 2 willing participants and by definition has no collateral consequences, but it was still deemed wrong ages ago. There is no clear argument killing someone for their alleged crimes.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

It’s pretty arbitrary, too. A guy in a town I lived in killed his wife with a knife in front of their kids, and was sentenced to 40 years. This guy helped kill someone, served 35 years, and they still want execute him on top of it.

[–] [email protected] 87 points 9 months ago (16 children)

We actually do know the effect of breathing nitrogen gas. It's a hell of a lot better than injecting someone with a drug cocktail. I don't agree with the death penalty but this is about as humane as the death penalty gets.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 9 months ago

Exactly. They make it sound as if nobody ever got exposed to low oxygen atmospheres. Absurd. Just the stories of divers is so so much. You feel absolutely nothing and then it goes black. Real simple.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I’m sick of the media drama about this dude. I don’t think they should execute him but there’s nothing that novel or cruel about the method.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Yes, apoxia is the way to go if you have to.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 9 months ago (13 children)

“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”

We do, in fact, know what a person feels from nitrogen suffocation, and we know because nitrogen suffocation happens accidentally with some degree of regularity from workers that don't follow proper safety protocols.

At first you feel out of breath, but you don't feel panic from it; it's like exhaling everything in your lungs, and then breathing in solely from a helium filled balloon (which I'm guessing most people have tried). You feel slightly high and light headed because the oxygen in your bloodstream is rapidly depleted; you are hypoxic. As you take a second and third breath, your vision tunnels, and you pass out. Your body has a mechanism to detect a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, but since you're expelling the CO2 with every breath out, and breathing nitrogen back in, that panic response doesn't get tripped.

Nitrogen suffocation has been a preferred choice for right-to-die advocates.

We can argue about how the death penalty is applied, and whether it should exist at all (I believe it should, but is almost always inappropriate), but there's no serious argument about whether nitrogen suffocation is a good or bad way to die. The people continuously fighting against this execution are fighting the method because they've lost all their other avenues to prevent the execution; attempting to call this process 'untested'--when it's been tested by a large number of people using it to end their own lives, and tested via industrial accidents--is the only option that they have left to prevent this execution.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you, I've been wondering why we're suddenly seeing all this hub bub around nitrogen execution when it's 100% obviously a better method than the barbaric injected cocktail that regularly fails. Thought I was taking crazy pills.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lethal injection performs as it was designed to: it's agony. You're paralyzed, then given a heart attack.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Done correctly, lethal injection is quite humane. We do it with pets; you administer a strong sedative, and then you use an overdose of a barbiturate to stop the heart (which is not the same as a heart attack). But that's **not **how lethal injections are typically done in the US, esp. since pharmaceutical companies don't want to sell their medications to prisons to be used to execute prisoners; that was because anti-death penalty advocates found ways to put pressure on drug companies. But how do you stop the sale of nitrogen to a prison? I can literally go buy a tank from any welding supply company.

Edit: the sedative is used to prevent feelings of fear or panic when the heart stops.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago

IMHO, executions don’t make sense given the amount of innocent people that we keep finding on death row.

It makes even less sense given that we need to have a long expensive, and highly imperfect, appellate process to double check that we’re not killing innocent people.

Also, we don’t really have any good data to support the claim that the death penalty deters people from committing terrible crimes. People that are going to do something -that- bad are usually going to do it.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (21 children)

We know exactly what happens when people experience nitrogen hypoxia. They get confused, then they lose consciousness, then die only if deprived of oxygen for quite some time.

We know because many people have experienced it and survived (because the oxygen was switched back on). I personally know someone who experienced this in a controlled test with the military.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You know what would be more humane?

Not killing people.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Agreed. I don't know how you can consider yourself a modern civilization while still putting people to death. It's barbaric.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Abolish capital punishment. The US is such a freakin' primitive country in so many ways.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

I don't know man, some people really, really deserve to be removed from existence:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito

How can you reform someone who raped, tortured, killed and then raped again (while dead) more than 100 minors?

Put yourself in the position of a father who knows this guy raped his kid, then tortured him with mutilation, and then raped the corpse.

Imagine knowing that this person is in jail, probably getting decent food and watching TV... Probably jerking off to the memories of the mutilated body parts of your child... while you have to live knowing he is still there.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Revenge is not a good motive though. It doesn't bring those children back. Removing people like him from society while not forgetting our humanity is all we can do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I get that there are horrible people out there. No doubt. But the first thing societies like the US (and Colombia in this case) should do is to reform society to produce fewer of these people.

Much of Europe seems to have found a good recipe. Remove the desperation, especially economic desperation. Create equality. Promote health and community and less selfishness and greed. Focus on rehabilitation and productivity instead of punishment and passivity in prison systems.

Unfortunately, a lot of American leaders and voters see revenge as justice, many in the name of Christianity. Not exactly the Christian way from where I'm sitting, but that's reality.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Don't critics always and only raise doubts? How about making the article about what experts say instead of critics?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (9 children)

While I abhor the death penalty, the science is pretty solid on nitrogen being more humane from a medical perspective. What gives someone the feeling of suffocation is excessive CO2, not the lack of oxygen.

It's actually a problem with closed-circuit rebreathers. If the CO2 scrubber keeps working but the Oxygen tank runs empty, the person on the rebreather will feel fine until they pass out.

The worst thing for the victim in the execution will be the psychological horror from wearing the mask and knowledge of what's happening. If they're goikg to do this, they should just change out the air in a sealed chamber while the victim sleeps.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I want to recap the long sequence of events that has led up to this point:

  1. In the beginning of this narrative, every death penalty state was doing lethal injections with a three drug protocol.
  2. Italy and maybe some other European nations start arresting pharmaceutical executives and charging them with murder, because their drugs are being used for these lethal injections in the United States.
  3. Drug companies stop selling their drugs to state penitentiaries. States are not able to perform executions.
  4. Death penalty states start amending their protocols to switch to different drugs and sometimes a single dose barbiturate protocol.
  5. Those drugs become harder and harder to source. Pharma companies become completely unwilling to dispense the drugs at all. State legislatures start allowing corrections officials to change the protocol without amending state law, in an effort to keep up.
  6. States resort to buying drugs from shady compounding pharmacies in secret. Having prison guards write dosage protocols turns out to have been a bad idea. Because, guess what, anesthesiologists are a highly compensated medical specialty, because what they do is highly complicated. So some exit l executions are botched, which delays things even more.
  7. It's in this environment that this nitrogen idea migrates from internet boards into the state legislatures.

The big picture here is that if execution remains legal, but you take away all the options, death penalty states will go looking for alternative options.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (11 children)

I'm not sure why people obsess over the method. It distracts from the act itself.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It kills innocent people, and the appeal process that we put in place, to try our best not to kill innocent people, costs a shit load of money. Money we could spend on other things we desperately need. Oh, and studies show that it doesn’t deter people.

The only thing it really does is satiate our amygdala’s ancient bias for vengeance. Our biology tells us that it feels right, but the data shows that individuals and societies don’t really benefit from it.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (5 children)

The distraction is the point. By making the execution look less grotesque, they believe it will make it more palatable to their mouth-breathing constituents. They want the delusion of the condemned drifting off to sleep to slake their bloodlust without their pesky consciences feeling the guilt.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Too many innocent people ending up on Death Row is a fault of how easily we condemn people to death.

That said, the death penalty should still exist.

We absolutely unequivocally know Dahmer did it. To death.

We 100% without question know Trump attempted to overthrow American law, prove it in court. To death.

We absolutely without question know Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin are pieces of shit and committed, in my opinion, crimes against humanity. Prove it in court. To death.

I see no problem with the death penalty or this method only what we consider justifiable for death.

I think life without parole is more evil than the death penalty, life without parole also encourages horrid behavior in prison because what more will they do to you?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I think we need to go and get sharks with freaking lazer beams attached to their heads

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Did they get the idea from the Sarco Pod (AKA the Swiss Suicide Booth)? I know inert gas deaths aren't a new concept but it seems like an odd coincidence since the pod was just making news a couple years ago.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (7 children)

There's a great Jacob Geller video about how methods of execution have evolved and why they've evolved.

I wouldn't do it justice but it points out how every time we make a 'more humane' way of killing it often just reduces the person's ability to show suffering, rather than reducing the suffering itself. In many cases the suffering is increased as we say the method is less barbaric; a firing squad has the highest success rate and likely the fastest death.

I can't recommend this enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirR4FHY2YY Piped bot do your thing

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I'd die to get out of Alabama too.

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