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.
That’s a pretty good way to go, apparently.
But there have been an absolutely breathtaking number of death row cases that have been overturned due to new evidence that had exonerated the condemned.
It seems pretty clear that the state is doing a very crappy job of determining guilt, and therefore shouldn’t be handing down such a permanent sentence.
Not to give anyone ideas but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bag
I would argue that we need the death penalty as a way to protect society from the absolutely most dangerous criminals but it’s very frequently misapplied. I would say, for instance, that people that are serial killers, or serial rapists (or serial child molesters), people for whom there is no significant doubt that they’re guilty, and people that will reoffend if they ever manage to get out of prison, should be executed. A simple murder for hire, or a robbery? No. Ed Kemper? Absolutely.
I think that even life sentences with no parole are overused; most people can be rehabilitated and returned to society safely, if we were willing to dramatically overhaul our criminal justice system to not be based on punishment and retribution. (But if we did that, then how would we get free prison labor…? /s)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country
All of western Europe has abolished the death oenalty completely. Many of these are countries with very low rates of serious crime.
Meanwhile countries with the death penalty, but usually also very long prison sentences and high rates of incarcerations like the US are pretty bad with crime.
It is impossible to justifiy the death penalty empirically. The statistics actually indicate that the death penalty is linked to more crime.
Also the problem is, that clear cut beyond a doubt is what every judge who sentences someone to death, will claim about the case. Yet there is hundreds of cases in the US alone, where people were later exonerated. Some only after they have been murdered by the state already. There is nothing to gain, but a lot to loose with an execution. It cannot be overruled anymore.
The statistics actually indicate that the death penalty is linked to more crime.
Correlation =/= causation. C’mon, you know better than this. It’s more probable that they have lower crime to begin with. Serial killers are not uniquely American by any stretch of the imagination, but they are quite uncommon relative to the population in other developed countries.
Read what I wrote again. I’m advocating for the death penalty in very, very limited cases, where there is no significant doubt at all, where there is no reasonable or even unreasonable belief that an offender can be rehabilitated, and the offender is extremely likely to harm more people if they ever have the opportunity.
Thats why i said indicate not “proof”. But again you say no significant doubt at all. But that is always the case of the people making the decision. For them there is no doubt, yet there is regularly wrong decisions.
Would you then claim that there was any significant doubt as to the guilt of John Gacy, Theodore Bundy, Edmund Kemper, Gary Ridgeway, John Geoghan, et al.? Would you agree that they would have all posed a significant risk of future harms had they managed to escape?
No proof is 100% absolute; there is always the possibility of some error. Video evidence? Could be tampered with. Eyewitnesses? Memory is fallible. DNA? Must be from someone with near identical DNA. Confession? Those are very frequently coerced (and, seriously, confessions are a pretty terrible way of determining guilt, esp. when there’s no forensic or corroborating evidence). 29 bodies or people you were last seen with found in the crawlspace of your home with your DNA and fingerprints on them? Pure coincidence, it’s too good to be true, must be planted.
Given that it’s impossible to know a thing with absolute certainty, how good does the evidence have to be before you would admit that there was not a significant chance of a false positive?
So thats why you dont kill the people but sentence them to life. If there should be new evidence coming up you can still alter the sentence. But you cannot revive a dead person.
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.
“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.
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.
Why are we ending this person’s life
Because we have deemed their actions excessively heinous and do not want them to drain further on society by being incarcerated
In ending their life should we be causing them pain?
Huge debate, but the main reason we use lethal injection or gas executions instead now is to end their life without pain or torture. Ideally a person would just be turned off like a light without them even noticing.
How can you be sure you got the right person
Big question, but we are talking execution
What if the execution fails or goes incorrectly, now we’ve maimed someone and caused undue suffering, which as a people we have decided we wouldn’t do.
Exactly. That’s why there are so many issues surrounding lethal injection chemicals and sources. How do you create these chemicals properly and precisely, without spending excess money or profiting off govt sanctioned murder.
Why not carbon monoxide?
Short answer, it’s flammable and dangerous to the people performing the executions. That’s why nitrogen is a decent possibility for something like this, it is inert, common, and can be acquired and vented away with little issue.
I am solidly against executions and quite aware of the moral dilemata.
I was just on about how easy it actually would be.
Why not carbon monoxide?
Short answer, it’s flammable and dangerous to the people performing the executions. That’s why nitrogen is a decent possibility for something like this, it is inert, common, and can be acquired and vented away with little issue.
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.
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?
FWIW, nitrogen asphyxiation is one of the methods that’s preferred by advocates of assisted suicide. Done correctly–by which I mean in a way that doesn’t allow a buildup of CO2 in your bloodstream–it’s not only painless but gives you a mild high. The proper way to do it is with something like a BiPAP, where the air that’s being piped in is pure nitrogen, and the CO2 is all being removed immediately so you aren’t breathing it back in. Without a buildup of CO2 in your bloodstream, your brain doesn’t recognize that you’re suffocating.
Have you ever breathed in helium from a balloon and gotten lightheaded? It’s about like that.
I’m in favor of the death penalty in very, very rare cases–and this is not one where I would support it–and this is one of the surest, least barbaric ways to execute someone.
When I was ~10 I attended a wedding. Me and the other kids where tasked to fill balloons with helium and we did so without supervision. Naturally, we breathed some helium in and talked in funny voices.
I then had the bright idea to try to breathe as many of these balloons without normal air in between.
After the third of these, I lost conciousness. To me it felt as if I was gone for maybe half an hour. I was basically dreaming weird stuff. Luckily I stayed in my seat during that time and didn’t fall over or something. Noone of the others noticed anything, so it couldn’t have been that long. Maybe a few seconds in reality.
Is it a moral alternative to provide the inmate with a choice of execution method?
6 million ways to die. Choose one.
I mean that’s fair, but I meant more like “hey you can test this new method of execution, or you can have the lethal injection.”
I’m definitely against the death penalty but if they’re gonna do it anyway this seems like one of the better options
theres actually a thing called nitrogen narcosis. while i still find states that use the death penalty abhorrent, its one of the nicer ways to go. while breathing a pure oxygen-defficient gas you also dont have a feeling that you are suffocating since you can breathe off carbon dioxide just fine. thats why exit bags are a thing in the first place
for diving it is quite different though.
Nitrogen high starts (with normal pressurized air) at around 40m depths which means 5bar pressure or roughly 4bar partial pressure for the nitrogen. It then starts getting into your synapses partly blocking them.
even with 100% pure nitrogen at normal pressure you just get 1bar. So you wont get high from it.
While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
Isn’t that how we’re doing the death penalty anyway? We’re trying to find a “painless” way to kill someone, but is there ever really a painless way to do this? I’d imagine even if I’m sitting in a massage chair with classical music playing it wouldn’t matter if I knew that half an hour from now I wouldn’t be leaving the room.
And we can’t really ask doctors because doctors have taken an oath to “do no harm.”
The death penalty is just a punishment no one wants to do (well, okay, I’m sure there are plenty of people that have no problem with it), but we’ve told ourselves that we have to do it.
Wether a country still has a death penalty ot not is a pretty good indicator for how civilised it is.
Most socially developed countries abolished it over the course of the past 100 years.
Another indicator is whether the people in a country still divide the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized” countries.
It is a spectrum.
But i hope you dont want to argue that falsely convicting and killing people, using botched methods involving a lot of pain and suffering can be considered civilised.
