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.
breathtaking
Heh
I used to fully pro death penalty, especially for some of the sick fucks…
But then I learned about all the false convictions, some COERCED by the fucking police, and since then I’m 100% against the death penalty.
The satisfaction I get from a heinous killer getting killed, does not outweigh the horror I feel for even one innocent life being taken by the state.
It’s also cheaper to keep people in jail forever than put them to death because of all the appeals. And despite being more careful, we still get it wrong.
Also, in my mind, death is a release. Keep those fuckers stuck in their filty meat suits while they rot in prison for the rest of their lives with no hope for escape. The especially heinous ones will get extra comeuppance from the other inmates
Right. Even a life sentence can very much be reversed if exculpatory evidence appears.
This is what changed my mind on the death penalty. I have no problem putting a murderer or pedo to death, but we keep freeing people when new evidence is found that proves their innocents. Until we can get it right 100% of the time, we should just lock them up until death.
Yeah this is one reason why I generally don’t support the death penalty. There’s no way to undo it. At least if evidence exonerates someone 50 years later, they’re still alive.
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.
It’s wild you disagree with life sentences and desire rehab, but also advocate for the death penalty.
Prisons (at least in the US) have never been about prisoners and their reform. It’s about how much money they can bring in from the state and practically free labor. Like most things in the US it is driving by profit margins.
…yay capitalism
Eh, no. We had prisons before we used prisons as a stand-in for chattel slavery. OTOH, we used to kill a lot more people for much less severe offenses, so people didn’t usually end up in jails for very long. And there was a period of time where we believed in reform, but that was well over 100 years ago now.
Not to give anyone ideas but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bag
Yep, NO. I’ve tried it. You can’t get a breath and you feel like you’re suffocating.
Nitrogen hypoxia is a risk wherever liquid nitrogen is used. If too much boils too fast, it will displace the oxygen in the room. People in the room won’t even realize what happened until they pass out and die shortly thereafter.
There are reports of people rushing in to rescue those who passed out, and suddenly passing out themselves and needing to be rescued as well. That’s how insidious it is. And that’s why MRI scanners (which use liquid nitrogen) have oxygen sensors in the room. You can’t trust your own body to tell you that all the oxygen is gone.
MRI machines are cooled by liquid helium. Nitrogen is not cold enough. I’d imagine as a noble gas it has a similar effect though.
They are cooled by liquid helium, but also have a liquid nitrogen outer dewar as well with a vacuum insulator in between. The N2 takes the brunt of the ambient heat so you don’t have to top off the (much more expensive) helium as often.
Can you please share more of your experience? What was the occasion and the set-up? What was it like?
Definitely doesn’t seem terribly traumatic - https://youtu.be/176eog7mZjc?si=B4TPpWw7CJb-IGXl
(CW - shows pig putting its head into a box filled with inert gas to eat food. The pig falls over, regains consciousness, then immediately places its head back into the box to continue eating)
That’s not the case with nitrogen asphyxiation.
I’m willing to bet what you inhaled was carbon dioxide – that gives an instant feeling of suffocation. Which ironically makes it one of the safer asphyxiant gasses, as it’s heavier than air and you can detect it’s presence instantly. Inert (“noble”) gasses like helium, argon, and nitrogen don’t have that effect.
CO2 is also cheap, readily available, non-toxic, and doesn’t cause physical damage. This makes CO2 asphyxiation somewhat popular for “stunning” or killing in places like slaughterhouses, labs working with smaller animals, or “feeder” animals for reptiles.
Pro Life™️
Yeah, that’s a lie, always has been.
They wouldn’t know “pro-life” if it bit them on the ass. They’re simply pro-birth. Literally everything else about the GOP platform is anti-life.
Pro birth so they can supply meat to the industrial grinder and dead solders for the war machine.
And here I am on Life Lite like a pleb.
Small government folks sure are horny about giving their government the power to murder them.
Actually the (small L) libertarians are a little split on this issue, with most seeming to agree with me that the death penalty is a stupid fucking idea from multiple standpoints. Can’t trust the govt to get a damn thing right and that is no-take-backsies so no room for fuck ups (which they definitely have fucked up and killed innocent people, only to learn someone lied after it is too latw.)
OH you meant the republicans, who say “small government” but then through their actions prove they are just “the other side” of “big government” from the dems. Well, they’re “lying” in order to manipulate people into voting for them (tbf, I know that’s how they all get votes).
Yep. Which is how we end up building FUCKING concentration camps in the country and pave that road for a dictatorship to take over one of, if not the, leading super powers of the world.
This shit needs to stop and we need to address what is happening in the south before we start having some repeats that end in mass death. Enough is enough.
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.
Let’s tighten this up a bit.
Inert gas asphyxiation is very much a great way to go, but it’s basically symptomless until after you lose consciousness.
You don’t get high. The “high” people get is when they are choked out. I’m not really sure on the mechanism of that, though. You don’t get lightheaded. The lightheadedness is from the blood oxygen levels increasing.
This is why it’s very dangerous to enter enclosed spaces. You simply don’t know you’re about to die until it’s too late. Plus, people come in to try to rescue you and succumb as well.
Anyway, lots of people have this experience. It’s a common part of training for rebreathers for use in scuba diving.
As far as good ways to die, inert gas asphyxiation is up there with “proper” lethal injection (i.e. with a commercial euthanasia drug), opiate overdose, or just anesthetizing the being and doing whatever gets the job done.
Nitrogen can cause a “high” (aka nitrogen narcosis), but this effect only occurs at high pressures. So it is only a practical concern for divers, because they have to breathe high pressure air. Some divers replace the nitrogen in their tanks with other gases to avoid it.
It is unrelated to asphyxiation, and can occur even when the lungs are properly exchanging oxygen and CO2. It is a poorly understood direct interaction between high pressure nitrogen and the brain that does not occur at atmospheric pressure.
When I did my deep diving certification one of the things they got us to do was try and do maths of varying complexity (compared to previously doing it on the surface). I didn’t feel high at all, but most of us had slower response times and more errors at depth, apparently as a side effect of the increased nitrogen. Pretty wild.
IIRC the hypoxia
“high”panic reaction is from an elevated level of CO2 - that’s the evolved mechanism by which humans detect they’re in a bad place for breathing. Not absence of O2.Edit: Correction: Hypoxia alone gets you high just before you keel over. It’s the CO2 buildup that activates your body’s panic reactions.
If ever I would need to be killed, this would be my preferred method of leaving the earth.
Happy to see them try it, even though I am against executing people.
With hypoxia, you get euphoria prior to death. No suffering, no pain, just a little high to send you off this earth.
Should do it to animals too.
Indeed. I have read that the reason we don’t is because it takes too long.
That’s why they use CO2 asphyxiation, but in my opinion, that’s torture.
CO2 asphyxiation is extremely unpleasant. That is absolutely torture, and it is not in any way shape or form an ethical way to euthanize anything.
This is how I would want to go. Look up BBC Horizon 2008 How to Kill a Human Being. Explains everything you need to know. Seems like states don’t want to do it because people wouldn’t suffer during execution. Maybe things have changed since then.
Is it really an execution if there is no suffering? /s
Seems like states don’t want to do it because people wouldn’t suffer during execution
To me it seems like they’re trying to make the process more acceptable to the public so they can delight in more of them.
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yes, they paralyze you then inject you with poison
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Here’s an article about it: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reveal-troubling-effects-of-lethal-injection
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Because the cruelty is the point. Nitrogen asphyxiation has been known for a long time. The Sarco suicide pod uses it because it’s a peaceful death. The whole reason it hasn’t been adopted is because they want the condemned to suffer.
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Folks who are confused by this, your body doesn’t detect when you’re low on oxygen, only when you have too much carbon dioxide. That’s why exhaling while holding your breath helps you hold your breath longer (to an extent). Nitrogen doesn’t caused the sensation of suffocating while still depriving you of oxygen.
I disagree with capital punishment but have always wondered about this for stuff like assisted suicide.
Over this summer I’ve been trying to break my record for holding breath underwater. 2:13 was best I could muster but in my experimentation, after slow and steady initial breathing and reduced muscle usage, inhaling one giant breath at the end and holding definitely let’s me stay under longer. This is better until the CO2 saturation of my lungs equals the saturation in the blood. Then, for whatever reason, slowly trickling the air out buys a little more time. This probably helps calm and fool the brain into thinking you’re desaturating.
That’s the thing, we all have to compromise. I don’t support it either, but if something unethical happens, and people still want to keep supporting it, we have to at least convince them to use the “best version” of said thing so it’s at least as humane as we can make it possibly be. I’m shocked we still continue to use these complicated and ancient methods of execution that have questionable reliability or ethics when it comes to suffering.
It’d be interesting to see how it would be used for AS for sure!
Unless you have COPD. That’s why’s it’s dangerous to give high flow O2 to people with COPD.
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Have you been to America lately?
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Born and raised in Indiana. Live in Terre Haute, where the federal prison where they execute inmates is located.
It’s Alabama…
Well, in Alabama and in in some states (cough, Texas) they probably are I’m afraid.
They are, that’s just the truth.
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.
Content warning >!linking to a method of suicide!<
Not going out on a morphine high?
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Because the cretins that believe in the death penalty, and they are cretins if they believe in the death penalty, want the process to be as horrific as it can be while not shattering the illusion (for them) that it isn’t barbaric. They don’t want it to be quick and they definitely don’t want it to be painless.
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AFAIK the execution protocols that use phenobarbitol also use other chemicals to actually cause fatality, which are reportedly very nasty to experience. They also use butt plugs. This is to reduce discomfort for the witnesses. As I said, the illusion of a civilised procedure is important for them.
the illusion of a civilized procedure
https://youtu.be/eirR4FHY2YY?si=EUtz57QxdB_QouXa
Jacob Geller is one of my favorite YouTubers, and he did a really insightful video about how the purpose of the death penalty has changed. It used to be pretty clearly about showing the public that if they fuck up they’ll be snatched up and killed horrifically. He supports this with both the innumerable variations people have come up with for the fairly simple task of killing someone else, and how both the execution itself and the body of the condemned were prominent in the public eye (think gibbets and things like that). He argues that now the death penalty is in this weird sort of limbo where it’s considered distasteful to make a gleeful spectacle of it but that proponents still think that the specter of being snatched up by the state and killed is important for maintaining a peaceful society so you have all these half measures and stutter steps that are ostensibly designed to be humane for the prisoner but are really there for the comfort and moral superiority of the audience. As an example he talks about the paralytic agent in the lethal injection cocktail that does nothing to relieve pain but prevents the condemned from visibly reacting to that pain. Knowingly or unknowingly, the death penalty is walking this weird line where everyone involved is allowed to pretend that they don’t want to do it but that they’re bound just as much as the executioner, there are still artifacts of the performative death penalty from days of yore left over in our processes and procedures for killing a condemned person but that proponents have recently made it soft, comfortable and hidden precisely because they recognize that continuing in the old ways will end with the abolition of the death penalty. We’ve changed as a society from “let’s pop on down to the town square after dinner to watch the hanging” to “let’s get this nasty business over with behind closed doors so as not to make people uncomfortable”.
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Biggest reason is probably that it will be a lot easier to administer. Injection when you can’t used a medical profession is kind of a pain for everyone involved.
I get that it is ‘humane,’ but I get scared when I see humans developing and organizing highly efficient ways to exterminate humans, such as gas chambers.
Suffocation cannot possibly be considered “humane.”
The US frankly terrifies me these days.
Nitrogen asphyxiation does not equal suffocation. It displaces the oxygen in your lungs. Discomfort from suffocation is from build up of carbon dioxide, not lack of oxygen. For the brief period of time that you are still conscious, you can still exhale that carbon dioxide.
That seems unlikely. As @protist@mander.xyz explains further down the thread, it would likely lead to generalized pain and terror before seizures and death.
@protist is talking about nitrogen narcosis, which is a completely different thing.
No, they’re not. Read the post.
Yes, I did. Read my post.
They said:
Nitrogen narcosis happens to deep sea divers breathing compressed air, this would be straight up hypoxia, aka oxygen deprivation. Here’s what it does to your brain:
Nitrogen narcosis happens because when you are under pressure, like when underwater, gases are more easily dissolved. The nitrogen that is in your body dissolves into your tissues and basically anesthetizes you to death.
Nitrogen asphyxiation, like what we’re talking about here, is when the nitrogen that you breathe displaces the oxygen in your lungs. This causes the oxygen levels in your blood to drop, which is what kills you.
You said:
@protist is talking about nitrogen narcosis
@protist@protist@mander.xyz said:
…this would be straight up hypoxia, aka oxygen deprivation
I have a scuba certification. I know what nitrogen narcosis is. @protist is clearly not talking about nitrogen narcosis. They’re describing what would actually happen in the case of being forced to breathe pure nitrogen, which is straight up suffocation.
suffocation
noun
death caused by not having enough oxygen, or the act of killing someone by not allowing them to have enough oxygen
–Cambridge Dictionary
Yes he is. Nitrogen narcosis is from breathing compressed air with a high nitrogen blend. That’s why you need trimix with helium beyond a couple hundred feet. Otherwise you end up like my buddy trying to give fish your regulator.
Read. the. damn. post!
I can confirm from personal experience that breathing pure nitrogen is painless and not at all like suffocating. If you want, you can check my profile to find the comment or look for it further up in a reply to a different thread in this post
I’m glad you’re here to share this insight. Hope things are better now.
Wait, you’re dead? I’m glad to hear it was painless.
Let him rot in prison.
ABOLISH CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
That’s how it should be. But as with most things, it comes down to money. It’s cheaper to execute.
It’s not cheaper to execute. It’s financially and morally very expensive.
It’s really not cheaper in practice, the legal hurdles for the death penalty are more expensive to overcome than just keeping someone locked up for life.
It might get cheaper if you’re executing in volume, like thousands of people, but then we’d be looking at a whole other sort of problems (like “how did we turn into China?”)
Now assuming the person is truly guilty and did something severe enough to deserve a punishment where they should be locked up forever with no release. Why not just use the capital punishment? They’ll be forgotten whether in jail or in the grave.
The justice system isn’t perfect and you can’t roll back dying
Also I feel like a goverment that is allowed to kill their citizens is a government with too much power.
Sure sure, but the comment above wanted the person to rot in jail for the rest of their existence. Which is why I mentioned a very specified a situation where the crime is clear.
You’re arguing for cases where an innocent person may be found guilty - which is a very valid argument. I’m trying to figure out this crowd that wants people to suffer forever while they won’t even think of that person again in their life, besides maybe pay taxes to keep them alive.
assuming the person is truly guilty
That’s the part where it falls to bits for me.
Although you could allow people to choose euthanasia. Although even there it should be carried out privately rather than some ghoulish ceremony.
Bring back the gladiator fights! I want sand, blood, and tigers!
Capital punishment is government sanctioned killing. Outside of war, the government should not have the power to kill anyone.
For these people, death is also the easy way out. Prison time is harder.
Not to mention cost. The complexity, finality, and litigation drive cost through the roof and make it much more expensive than life in prison.
All you have to do is look at the times the government has got it wrong on convictions of people who turned out innocent to realize maybe the government shouldn’t make the decision to kill people.
Look up the innocence project.
“Smith was one of two men paid $1,000 each to murder Elizabeth Sennett on behalf of her preacher husband, Charles Sennett Sr., who was in debt and wanted to collect life insurance money.”
Hold on, so why is he being executed? He wasn’t the one who ordered the murder. It seems like lots of other people request murders but those people aren’t sentenced to death.
Because he accepted money in exchange to brutally beat and stabbed a person to death. “Just following orders,” has never been an acceptable excuse for an individual to commit a crime, but especially when it’s not an order in a military hierarchy, it’s payment and a voluntary agreement. Fuck him.
Sennet Sr. committed suicide the moment the police started to investigate him. That’s why he’s not about to be executed.
I don’t think that was the argument being made. The argument, to me, is why sentenced to death instead of some other sentence. And, were the others that are also part of this crime sentenced.
The article doesn’t seem to say anything about what happened to the others that are involved. Focused a lot on the execution method.
Sounds like the guy just did this for the money so I also don’t understand why he’s being sentenced to death. Should just be prison time. But, I don’t have all the facts here.
“Preacher.”
Right, bro is just caught up in the rat race same as the rest of us
To be very, very clear, I do not support the death penalty but the rat race isn’t an excuse to kill someone.
I don’t think he was trying to find excuses.
Ok, but bear with me here, because for real, this is how I want to go, and how I plan to put down my fowl when they get too old to live comfortably, because there’s no stress involved to taint the meat, and I can feel comfortable with myself for giving them a good life with free roam, and a good end.
It’s incredibly humane. You feel nothing and don’t know you are suffocating. If you’ve ever breathed helium, you know what nitrogen feels like - literally nothing. This happened to multiple individuals in space because nitrogen is not flammable, and is why they now use 6% co2 in non-oxygenated spaces.
The body does not care if it has oxygen, that’s hard to test for biologically because oxygen is highly reactive, what it does test for is buildup of co2. As long as you can breathe out the co2, your body knows nothing.
So if they are going to kill other humans, this is the way to go. I don’t agree with doing that non-voluntarily, but if it’s going to happen this is at least humane.
Something I’ve been thinking about: for the victim, does it actually matter if it’s nitrogen or a well-aimed bullet/axe/guillotine? For the onlookers, sure the nitrogen looks a lot cleaner, but instant death is painless too.
I’d argue, yes it matters.
Bullet might not be as well aimed as expected, considering some of the firing squad have blanks, and most of them probably don’t really want to be there.
Beheadings are reported to result in animated heads… and I would assume something like a waterfall of pain as the nerves from the body are severed but the brain, where consciousness lives, goes on for a bit yet. It might be quick, but it doesn’t seem pleasant.
Electric chairs, just look them up, same with lethal injection problems… any “justice death” is basically torture.
At least they can’t fuck up neutral gas asphyxiation. It’s either deadly or you sleep through it and wake up with a nasty headache.
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No, that’s not even remotely the same thing as inert gas asphyxiation.
When you get no oxygen at all, you pass out very quickly, you don’t suffer like you do with low levels of oxygen over extended periods.
Don’t fear monger please.
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Watching the murder states scramble for new ways to murder as they run out of unethical people willing to sell them murder supplies has been interesting.
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Pro death
Alabama:
we’re innovating! :D
Everyone else:
bro what the fuck
