Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.
The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
Can someone enlighten me why it’s so hard to find an execution method?
I mean, tens of thousands of teens manage to execute themselves with the content of an average bathroom. How can it be that hard to find a fitting method?
Especially if there are things like carbon monoxide poisoning which has been used by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to accidentally kill themselves without them even noticeing.
And if you want a method that’s guaranteed to be painless, put someone’s head into a large fires cutter and drop a 10 ton weight onto it from 50 meters height. In an instance, there’s noting left that could feel weight.
Or ask Ocean Gate for advice. From what Youtube told me, submersible implosings happen within a few milliseconds and have so much speed and pressure that they effectively vaporize the people inside. Pretty sure that’s rather painless.
Without going on a whole dissertation, there are a lot of aspects that have to be figured out for a government sanctioned execution to occur.
You could in theory just have an officer whip out a shotgun and bang, problem solved, much like you mentioned with suicide. But when it’s sanctioned by the government you have to be very discerning with a lot of different details.
I am solidly against executions and quite aware of the moral dilemata.
I was just on about how easy it actually would be.
Tbh, I don’t think that’s an issue. Carbon monoxide is used in slaughterhouses worldwide. You’d think if it’s safe enough to handle for unskilled workers at industrial scale that a few highly paid executioners could use it without blowing up the complex.
Case in point: even the nazis managed to handle it at industrial scale 80 years ago. And their budget for an execution wasn’t remotely as high as the US has.
I mean, it’s probably not as sexy, because it directly shows how straight-up evil the practice of state-sponsored murder is (you know, using the same methods as literally the Nazis did), but then again, if you are a murder state, you are already past the point where you had a right to discuss ethics and morals.
you’re absolutely not past the point to discuss morals wtf?
you think just because people are executed the methods don’t matter?
Tbh, yes. If you like state-sponsored murder, there is no point not using a simple, foolproof, painless method that is executed tens of thousands of times per day (on animals), just because it’s the method the Nazis preferred and thus makes you look a little bad.
Mudering people already makes them look bad, and their mess with all these botched executions just makes them look bad AND incompetent.
“tens of thousands” isnt even remotely close. A few hundred is more accurate. It’s important to be realistic with these figures so people don’t convince themselves it is normal to do.
Correct, my estimate was an order of magnitude too low.
Worldwide, an estimated 700 000 people commit suicide per year. https://www.iasp.info/wspd/references/
That’s almost 16 million since 2000.
In the EU, that’s ~56 000 per year (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20180716-1).
In the US it was 49449 in 2022 (https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html), of which 6529 where <24 (can’t find data for <20).
I didn’t specify a country and I didn’t specify a time frame. But your estimate of “a few hundred” is a number that would fit for “number of teens that commit suicide in the EU or the US in a 1-2 week timeframe”, and that was certainly not the definition I was going for.
Brushing the issue under the table and trying to hide it will not help those who struggle with suicidal tendencies. Feeling like you are the only one going through this does not help. If you struggle with suicidal thoughts, you are seriously not alone. For everyone who does commit suicide, there are hundreds who struggle with the topic but manage to get past it. Please get help, you are worth it.
First, no licensed medical personnel can participate since it violates the Hippocratic oath, so you have to design the protocol without any input from anyone who understands the human body well enough or any scientific studies because human experimentation designed to end a life is illegal. And then also carry it out without people who know how to find a vein, much less understanding what to do when things go wrong.
And if it requires drugs or complex equipment whose sole use is executions, very few companies are going to want that contract. It’s not lucrative with no other uses, and you tarnish your reputation and possibly lose more lucrative contracts in less conservative states.
There are very few methods that are effective and painless for everyone and not messy since you want people to watch, including the victims’ friends and families. That way you can justify the act, pretend that you’re using it as a crime deterrent, and fewer people are likely to feel sorry for the person and stop future executions. And it has to be cheap because one of the justifications is that life in prison is so costly.
Honestly, the best bet for painlessness, ease of execution, and simplicity of the equipment and maintenance is the guilotine. But it’s messy and most people don’t want to see a headless body fall to the ground. And it’s hard to find workers to clean up after.
But, you don’t have to. You just get a butcher who knows how to do a carbon monoxide execution on animals and apply the same thing to humans.
All you need is to pipe the exhaust of an old gasoline engine into a room and be done with it.
Costs nothing, doesn’t require medical personell, not even medical equipment. There are tousands of people in the US who routinely do it and it’s as cheap as can be. All you need is an old car or a scrap engine, a hose and some gasoline.
But I guess, since it was the favourite form of execution of the Nazis, it would probably be pretty on-the-nose about how terrible the act of state-sponsored murder is.
The issue is this may be considered “cruel and unusual” punishment, and that is what lethal injection was designed to avoid. However, there are all sorts of problems with lethal injection in practice. Nitrogen would effectively be a better lethal injection without the complications (drug inventory, dosing amounts, etc).
The issue here isn’t killing people. It’s doing so in a way the defense lawyer can’t argue against to a judge.
Tbh, the lethal injection with all that regularly goes wrong with it is super cruel and unusual.
And isn’t murder in any instance cruel and unusual?