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.
Abolish capital punishment. The US is such a freakin’ primitive country in so many ways.
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.
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.
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.
That’s what supermax prisons are for. Do you think they’re pleasant places to spend the rest of your life?
You lock em up and just leave them there. Current estimates put the faction of innocent death row inmates at about 2%. That’s completely unacceptable. Is killing a bad person out of revenge worth innocent lives when you can just lock them up for life instead?
For most of human history we didn’t have the option of keeping someone imprisoned for life, so killing evil people was really the only permanent solution. It’s understandable that that desire would be engrained in us. But if we don’t have to kill them, shouldn’t we avoid doing so so that we don’t get innocent people killed?
That is not how the law works.
So did the US army.