“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
I’m curious how they implemented this. The air completely has to be replaced with nitrogen, no breathing in a mix of nitrogen and outside air, no oxygen at all. People that enter confined spaces with no oxygen pretty much just drop and are dead quickly, so this doesn’t sound like they did it right.
They used a mask rather than the more appropriate method which would be to use a sealed chamber that was forcefully evacuated of oxygen and replaced by nitrogen the way the suicide pods are supposed to function.
The problem with a mask is it can’t be a perfectly sealed system. The issue with the execution from a logistical standpoint was the redneck engineering they employed and not the actual science behind nitrogen hypoxia.
Please don’t come at me, I’m not making a value judgment about the use of the death penalty, I’m just explaining the issue with their shoddy ass methodology.
Edit: accidentally a word.
Edit #2 (YouTube Link): Here is some additional information about why a gas mask is an ineffective and dangerous way to conduct an execution via nitrogen hypoxia from Dr. Philip Nitschke, a leading advocate of the right to die movement and an expert in the field of voluntary euthanasia. He personally examined the execution method being used in Alabama, and told them he felt it would be ineffective for many of the same reasons stated above.
FTR I’m generally against the death penalty, so same, don’t give me grief. I’m of the opinion that if it’s gonna be done, don’t fuck it up.
Ok. So regarding the implementation it sounds like they fucked it up. As you said (and I previously implied) it sounds like they didn’t properly exclude oxygen/remove waste CO2. Kinda hard to believe they fucked up something so simple considering the ton of evidence on hypoxic accidents.
Precisely. They apparently either felt it was fine to cut corners, do not fully understand how nitrogen hypoxia actually works, or a little bit of suffering was intentionally part of the process because it still is Alabama after all…
The big, really big issue, and I hate to say it. Is that, depending on the jurisdiction and laws in place, executions cannot be done by professionals. Most of the people who would know how to do it properly, medics, nurses, engineers, are ethically banned from participating or facilitating executions. Not that this stops them all from participating, and in some contexts some do, but on the general, executions on the USA are performed by completely incompetent individuals.
The more reason to just not fucking do them in the first place. How did they botched it using a mask when almost every single expert on medically assisted death recommends at least a sealed hood.
Very good point.
The people with the most experience with nitrogen suffocation are scientists working with animals. It’s the current best ethical euthanasia method.
Was gonna say, in Alabama you could give them a step by step guide and they’d take shortcuts.
You’re assuming they could read the steps in the first place. That guide better include pictures!
little bit of suffering was intentionally part of the process
Of course it was. They also didn’t want to use nitrogen, as there is no awareness at all if done correctly. The drugs they use with lethal injection likely induce panic and pain because they do not induce unconsciousness before it.
Executions have never been intended to be humane. They are punishment, vindication for the wronged. A childish obsession with a horrible misunderstanding of justice.
The exit bag uses nitrogen suffocation as a suicide method. It’s a bag that encloses the person’s head. If they felt a mask could have been used, they would have
Hot take, they don’t care because they are killing someone. The humanity part of it is completely removed. They care that they did the deed and it didn’t work. It should have been immediate. Someone should be losing their job. An Internet search could have prevented this.
Plus it’s Alabama. The cruelty has always been the point for as long as they have been a state
Surely they ought to care simply because if they continue to fuck it up they will lose public support for executions?
Well you and I would think that is obvious. I am not so sure what they are thinking.
I’m willing to bet my left testicle they thought in their lead-addled brain that it would work like a diver’s mask. Pumping in gas pushes out the water, so it must also push out the air, I tell you hwat! I don’t consider myself to be a very bright person, but even I know that water and air work differently.
I think the bigger issue is that he was aware of when the nitrogen started, so tried holding his breath for as long as possible.
If he had the mask on and it was pumping breathable air, and then at some point switched to pure nitrogen without any warning that would be more humane because he wouldn’t know what was happening or when.
Lol at calling any of that humane. There’s nothing humane about suffocating a man against his will.
It sounds like your real issue is with the act of executing criminals rather than the method used.
Which is fine, but it’s a different discussion.
their shotty ass methodology.
In case you didn’t know, that should be “shoddy” as in “made or done poorly”
Yes, that is what I was going for, thank you. I have now corrected my shoddy spelling 🙃😉
You shouldn’t really need a seal if you have positive pressure. Agree that this was half-assed, though
He could have held his breath in a chamber too. The problem is it being forced on someone instead of being voluntary or unnoticed.
He held his breath for 22min? No they fucked up the procedure. Even if he had held his breath at first he should have been unconsious the first time he took one. I’ve nearly been knocked out by nitrogen hypoxia before. It takes one lungfull of non oxygenated air to make you start to black out. He must have still been getting some oxygen somehow. It sounds like they were trying to use a mask (which is a dumb way to do it) so they probably didn’t use a high enough flow rate for the nitrogen and he was breathing in air from around the mask. They probably would have been better off forgetting about the mask entirely and just blowing nitrogen at his face at a much higher flow rate (that’s what almost did it for me).
He held his breath for 22min? No they fucked up the procedure.
It was both.
Make the switch from regular air to nitrogen at a random point and he’ll be dead before he realizes it.
Why not use like a scuba mask with a tank of nitrogen instead of oxygen? Scuba masks are seemingly airtight.
Or even a collar with a helmet like an astronaut suit. A lot easier to evacuate oxygen from a suit than an entire room.
Also the guillotine is right there… it’s not pretty but the only method that “just works”.
They often don’t. There are moderate risks with lethal injections, and even if you seem unconscious, it’s still disputed whether you would really be unaware or not. As for the gas, suffocate in any manner is very painful and unpleasant.
Your suffocation reflex is driven by a buildup of carbon dioxide, not a lack of oxygen.
If you leave air composition the same but remove the oxygen, your body doesn’t notice and you feel fine until you suddenly black out.
https://youtu.be/UN3W4d-5RPo?si=3LKw5fe1wXfRDcrB
The Air Force does training on it, since it can happen if the aircraft loses pressure and pilots need to know how to notice and handle it. As you can see in the above video, the pilot is not suffering even though the oxygen level has been cut quite drastically.
If you hold your breath you still build up CO2. You know, as a reaction to being killed.
So don’t announce “alright, now!” to the victim. Wait until they’re breathing normally and then silently switch over to nitrogen, he’ll be unconscious before he realizes it.
And after a couple minutes at most you will reflexively take a breath or pass out and start breathing. In an inert atmosphere that first breath will knock you out almost immediately. After that you won’t feel anything. After the individual is unconsious you just need to keep them in an inert gas for a few more minutes for them to actually die.
“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Even with a portion of that being ‘just to make sure’ his vital signs had stopped, it was certainly longer than a couple of minutes.
Because clearly they fucked something up. He was still getting oxygen somehow. I’m guessing they didn’t have the nitrogen flow high enough so he was still getting some oxygen.
It could have also just been agonal gasping which can last over an hour even after the person is already dead. It’s fairly common for people to see that and say the person is still breathing even though that person has already been dead for a while. It also happens with heart attacks and it frequently leads to ems having to explain to family members why there is no hope of resuscitation even though to them it looks like the person is still “breathing”.
That’s the crux of the whole “this was done very, very wrong” thing people have been saying.
You are not being “suffocated” in the sense that you aren’t allowed to breathe. I suggest you do some looking around and check out events where people have entered spaces that can have no/limited oxygen such as mines or anchor chain lockers on ships. They often simply drop unconscious and are dead fairly quickly. The victim isn’t re-breathing CO2, which is what gives us that panicked lack of air feeling, or someone holding something over your face making it difficult to breathe.
If you’ve ever had a medical procedure that puts you under, I can assure you there’s nothing remembered to be aware of.
Just like with anesthesia, all of the examples of people losing consciousness peacefully were either doing it voluntarily or unknowingly.
I personally experienced breathing nitrogen until loss of consciousness under controlled and supervised conditions for training purposes with the RCAF. I was in a room with seven other people who were all doing the same thing as well as instructors who were in here with us for safety.
The point of the exercise was to sit in a room with a mask on, recognize the symptoms of hypoxia when we experienced them and throw a lever that would resume normal air breathing once we had enough. We were given tablets with simple games to play to simulate having our minds occupied on accomplishing some tasks. We knew they were going to switch or air supplies with pure nitrogen at some point to cause hypoxia but we didn’t know when it was going to happen. The room was also a hypobaric chamber but it didn’t stimulate a high enough altitude to induce hypoxia by itself, it was only there to simulate the environmental signs of decompression ( fogging of the air, percieved drop in pressure, cooling sensation, etc)
We sat there for a few minutes accomplishing the tasks on the tablets (basically paying candy crush) with nothing special going on. Then I noticed that we all started breathing deeper and harder. When I looked around people were also red in the face but strangely did not feel any discomfort from it and some people were even still playing on their tablets without noticing. Some of them threw their personal lever immediately because the point of the exercise was to recognize the signs of hypoxia. But others including my competitive ass wanted to see how far I could take it and if I could outlast others so we kept going.
My breathing naturally got deeper and harder but strangely I wasn’t feeling like I was suffocating. I started feeling pins and needles in my extremities. Concentrating on the tasks in the tablet became increasingly difficult and slower. A few moments later I got tunnel vision and my hearing started to sound muffled. These two effects progressively got worse until I could almost not see or hear anything anymore at which point I finally threw the lever just before passing out due to a phenomenon called oxygen paradox where when oxygen supply is resumed the hypoxia symptoms briefly get worse before going away. I didn’t even notice passing out. I woke up a few moments later and from my perspective it seemed that time had skipped forward a minute. Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.
All of this took less than 5 minutes and I never experienced anything worse than mild discomfort throughout. I don’t know how they managed to make it last 25 minutes other than maybe the brain stem running on fumes and keeping the heart beating but there is no consciousness at that point. If I ever had to pick a way to be executed this would be it, provided that it is done correctly.
Sounds like they didn’t remove the CO2, just gave him a mask that forced him to breathe nitrogen. Like a standard medical respirator, so he spent half an hour rebreathing his CO2 and whatever oxygen slipped in around the mask.
I know that CO2 is what the body uses to push the sensation of “needing” air. So I wonder if that would have changed his CO2 content from what it would be in just nitrogen…
You did that in a safe situation where nobody was trying to kill you. I don’t suffer when holding my breath underwater, but the moment someone holds me down I am going to panic.
Try to hold your breath for as much as you can, and you will feel an very strong urge to breathe. This doesn’t happen with nitrogen.
Sure, the person is mad scared, but he’s not suffering because of the nitrogen.
“Waterboarding doesn’t cause suffering because it isn’t literally drowning.”
That’s what you sound like.
The body is weird when it comes to breathing. It doesn’t measure one of the critical gasses. 3 things particularly send the body into a breathing panic.
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Rising CO2 (via blood acidity)
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Water in the airways.
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Resistance to inflating the lungs.
Water boarding is particularly evil, since it creates just enough of the last 2 to trigger a full blown drowning reaction, but is light enough to not actually be dangerous. This lets the questioner hold the victim in that zone, without permanent physical harm (but massive psychological harm).
Nitrogen hypoxia doesn’t set off any of those triggers. This makes it particularly dangerous to some workers. They don’t realise anything is wrong until they pass out.
Also, to clarify. I am massively against the death penalty. It’s both cruel, and not particularly effective as a deterrent. It’s also no cheaper, in practice, than life imprisonment. However, if it is going to be used, it should be as humane as possible. Nitrogen hypoxia is about as humane as it can get.
They cannot do it humanely with a method that requires the person to breath normally to work. If they can hold their breath it will always be inhumane because they will still be struggling and have the same impending doom and physical reaction as waterboarding.
It does not matter if the chemical properties are different when the person has a working brain and doesn’t want to die. Or if it is being implemented by incompetent people who couldn’t even kill him with lethal injection in 2022.
So what method would you suggest, assuming you must choose a method?
I’m completely against the death penalty. It’s no longer an option over here in the UK. However, if it must be done, do it as humanely as possible.
Locked in a box, with a cat, a flask of poison, a radioactive source, and a Geiger counter.
Except when the Geiger counter gets a hit, it sets off a nuclear bomb inside the box so I’m instantly vaporized.
I reject your premise. Alabama’s government could have just said “we can’t get the drugs for lethal injection, so we’re not doing the death penalty any more.” Instead they said “we’re going through hell and high water to kill this guy.” Fuck them. The death penalty is morally wrong because it puts every member of a democratic society in the position of being a killer.
I will not choose a method because all options require a trained an licensed medical professional to implement humanely, and nobody who qualifies will participate because they have ethics that prohibit causing harm to be licensed medical professionals. That includes putting someone to death against their will.
Picking a method is agreeing with the assumption that we have to put people to death.
The thing is, all of the humane ways to kill someone require the person to be a willing participant in the process. Nitrogen works when the person is relaxed and breathing normally for example.
Your first sentence is simply false.
this is like arguing that suicide is inhumane and should be illegal
A person who is doing it voluntarily for suicide would not be struggling against impending doom and would be breathing normally. The context here is execution against someone’s will.
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you are conflating waterboarding with non consensual, but expected waterboarding.
He isn’t going to get out of it, but it’s also not like he has no idea whats going to happen.
How to deal with waterboarding? Don’t breath.
How to deal with waterboarding? Don’t breath.
The people waterboarding you will just keep pouring water until you start breathing.
you are conflating waterboarding with non consensual, but expected waterboarding.
What?
if you’re a prisoner on death row, it’s not exactly like you have zero advanced notice of whats going to happen.
Given that bureaucracy exists, i think it might be prudent to say that you might even have ALL of the advanced notice one could possibly want in that scenario.
It is not fair to liken this to being held underwater. When forced to hold your breathyour lungs fill with CO2 which will cause pain, an urge to breathe and a primal urge to panic because your body has evolved the ability to sense this excess of CO2 to force you to breathe. But when breathing pure nitrogen your body doesn’t have an evolved way to detect it besides minor symptoms that you may or may not notice until you pass out.
Yes, the very idea that you will die can be emotionally distressing but this will be common to all methods of execution.
When I’m held down I get turned on.
A lot of people are focused on this quote:
Witness Reverend Jeff Hood told reporters he saw a man ‘struggling for their life’ for 22 minutes as Smith became the first US death row inmate executed by nitrogen asphyxia
Which says to me that from the time they brought him in and strapped him down until he died lasted about 22 minutes and the murderer struggled physically against the restraints the entire time.
This quote farther down suggests from the time they started administering the gas until he died only took a couple of minutes:
But, witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for several minutes, shaking and writhing on the gurney.
Several could be 25, and he could have been shaking from pain and agony, but it seems more likely he was holding his breath and shaking out of fear while trying to fight and get free.
Keep in mind that the first quote is from his anti-death penalty spiritual advisor and this entire article is brought to us by a magazine with an “end the death penalty campaign”.
I’m generally anti-death penalty myself, but nitrogen asphyxiation seems way better than electrocution, lethal injection, or hanging. They could probably do it better by using some kind of general anesthesia to render him unconscious and then flood the room with pure nitrogen, or even just get rid if the death penalty all together. Unfortunately this is the world we live in and so fae this is the least bad option we’ve seen.
The death penalty is barbaric.
How dare you actually read the story!?
I do have some reservations about the idea of a compassionate execution method. It’s kinda like tasers. Yes, they are a huge improvement on the alternative, but that also means they get used a lot more frequently.
Tom Scott did a video on this as well.
25 minutes does seem like an awfully long time.
State fucked it up …dude it’s Alabama.
The point of the exercise was to sit in a room with a mask on, recognize the symptoms of hypoxia when we experienced them and throw a lever that would resume normal air breathing once we had enough.
So you weren’t fighting for your life.
That will be true for any method of execution.
True. Maybe we should outlaw them all.
Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.
You did that shit for a job? I hope they paid you well, sounds like you could have easily died if something went wrong…
I can’t say that I’d be giggly about having my brain cells oxygen deprived for going on 5 minutes.
So they fucked it up and then there’s a real gem in the article. The jury voted to give him life without parole. A judge overruled that jury to give him the death penalty anyways.
There are no more laws. Only the whims of judges.
There are many accounts of workers accidentally entering confined spaces that have been purged with nitrogen and they were all unconscious in seconds. (OSHA records). If it took the prison 22 MINUTES to execute this guy, then they totally botched that execution.
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it. You can’t expect people to follow, “do what I say, not what I do.”
It’s cruel, it’s a reflection of our morals. The death penalty is not a deterrent for murder. The death penalty is hypocrisy. The death penalty is for an unserious society.
But the death penalty is just a symptom of a greater chronic illness we suffer from. We’ll just continue to kill ourselves until we find a cure for the disease.
Edit: I see many do not like my wording for state sanctioned murder. If you are reading this and don’t understand, imagine if listening to George Bush (can’t remember which) tell the tv America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. He’s drawing a moral line in the sand with terrorism. That’s my point. We need to figure out where our moral line in the sand is with the death penalty, because right now it’s all over the place. Do I think outlawing the death penalty will solve our societal woes? No, I do not. The people will demand it until it is reinstated. For me I ask what is the purpose of the death penalty? Does it serve a greater good for a society? Obviously it does not. Americans are murdered all the time, so it serves no purpose.
Stop executions.
Every day you wake up and think, “There’s no way America can get even more fucked up than it was yesterday”.
And every day some asshole says “wanna bet…watch this.”
USA, USA, USA!
Fuckin Merica fuck yea.
Ah yes, state sanctioned… murder… great…
Very Christian of them…
You’re right brother. At times like this, I remember Exodus 21:17, Deuteronomy 22:24 and Genesis 9:5-6.
That’s old testament and old covenant. You should listen to Jesus and the new covenant instead. E.g. Matthew 5, 38-42.
While you’re at it, read though verse 48. Would suit a lot of Christians better if they didn’t conveniently skip over those verses on a regular basis.
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
Matthew 5:17-18
That’s Jesus speaking, by the way.
Seems very clear to me, guy.
I like that you reference Matthew 5, yet seem to completely ignore a big part of the chapter.
Sucks right? You can’t be a Christian and still distance yourself from the horrific things that occurred in the Old Testament. Your god is a petty, jealous, slavery-promoting, genocidal piece of shit.
Sorry, I forgot. Give me a list of the parts of the Bible I’m supposed to ignore. I want to make sure I’m paying attention only to the parts of the Lord’s written word that are correct.
It’s funny (“funny”) because they ignored the part of Matthew 5 where Jesus explicitly says that he didn’t come to abolish the law, and that not a thing about it will be changed until the end of time essentially (verses 17 & 18)
Tells you to read parts of Matthew 5, but skips the part of the chapter that directly contradicts their point.
Typical Christian rationalization.
As far as I know, you’re not supposed to ignore anything. But there is a new covenant and an old covenant. For example, that’s why you probably know Christian women with short hair. Same thing with capital punishment.
For example, that’s why you probably know Christian women with short hair.
I know Jews that eat shrimp… doesn’t make it any more kosher.
No fan of Christianity, but it is pretty consistently stated that the old testament is basically the old religions book.
Kinda like how Islam and Christianity have a common origin, but don’t follow the same religious text.The story being that the deity of the abrahamic faiths has issued a series of different holy books and prophets for different eras, with the new one obsoleting the previous one.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism. Each says the previous was valid, but they get the new word of God and the old ones were true, but now the old rules are gone.So it’s actually internally consistent for a Christian to say the Torah doesn’t apply, which is basically what the old testament is. Similar to how we don’t latch onto Islam saying the old and new testament are obsolete, and only the Quran is true now.
There are plenty of examples in each of the chunks to point out the cruelty inherent in all of them without having to fall back to the “old canon”.
No it’s not internally consistent. Sure, that’s what many modern Christians who recognize just how problematic their god and religion are and want to selectively ignore the parts they don’t like, will try to tell you. But it’s bullshit.
As I said to another Christian in this thread…
Jesus himself stated:
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
That’s Matthew 5:17-18, and if you ask me it’s very clear
In context and less shit translations, it’s pretty clear that he’s saying he’s fulfilling the prophesies and the promise of the old covenant, not that literally he’s changing nothing.
In the same context, you have him saying that the entirety of the law is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.Or, more bluntly from the same story:
Before the coming of this faith,[a] we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. 24 So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. 25 Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.
I have now googled more Bible shit than I care to to cite my dim recollections of religious history studies.
Tldr, Jesus supposedly came to fullfil the promise of the old testament via a vis the relationship between man and God, and to replace that covenant with a new, more chill covenant with less shellfish and more love.And, this is important to your point, a lot of flaying people alive for failing to obey their slave masters or properly worship God. You don’t have to cite the old bit of the book, that they believe is obsolete, to find gnarly shit that makes it not look great.
It doesn’t feel too ridiculous to me that religions that came about in the same area would reference each others texts, but aren’t beholden to be responsible for their content. 1000 years of telephone was not kind to that translation.
Yeah, God would rather you bash their head against rocks as they’re still babies
It may not be Christ-like but it is very god-like. The Christian god made man in his own image, and god killed over 2 million people in the Bible.
These are more fans of the Old Testament stuff where God was metal.
Yeah nothing more “metal” than a supposedly all-powerful being that openly describes itself using such petty human emotions as jealously.
Nothing more metal than an insecure god that has a tantrum if people don’t worship him above all else.
He got more easy listening in the later years but lost his edge.
Yet these people are Jesus freaks but without the compassion and anti materialism. Good old “religion buffet”.
That ain’t just murder… that’s 25 minutes of panic and fear…
With a tiny bit of torture and inhumanity thrown in for good measure
That is the purpose of states and of nations, to hold the monopoly on legitimate violence.
That is a really bad idea
Okay. What do you believe the purpose of states and nations is?
To represent the interests of the people on an inter and intra national level. Not to have a monopoly on violence. If only the cops/military have the ability to enact force both legally and practically, it will be abused. We can see that all over the United States and the world.
Representing the interests of people is the purpose of governments, not nations.
Has there ever been a nation without a government?
Perhaps not, but there are governments without nations. The EU or the UN, for instance.
Welcome to government.
Gruesome.
I’m not convinced the death penalty is worthwhile except to feed someone’s wrath.
What if, (and hear me out,) we did for corrections the sort of thing that countries with low recidivism do? Like, not use for-profit prisons with incentive to turn out re-offenders, and not use prisons that turn out hardened criminals that aren’t equipped to function in the world without resorting to crime, and actually take the ‘corrections’ or ‘rehabilitation’ parts of their nomenclature seriously?
If all we do with our prisons is punish and humiliate (and squeeze slave labor out of) convicts, we’re just creating future crime and all that’s left at that point is killing convicts at industrial pace unless you can figure out that crime is more driven by poverty than anything else, and the USA just doesn’t want to figure that out because it just doesn’t want to solve poverty or crime, it wants to make money creating and punishing both.
How on earth did they fuck this up? The point is to starve the person of oxygen by replacing his air supply sith pure nitrogen. Either he’s an accomplished free-diver and held his breath for 21 minutes, or they bodged it.
Also, how about you stop giving the state the power to kill people? Especially when the victim’s family said they were forgiven “years ago”. Whole thing is disgusting
It sounds to me like they didn’t account for the oxygen in his lungs. They put a fucking mask on him and filled it with pure nitrogen, but it was probably a closed system so his own breath had nowhere to go. Most of the oxygen that goes to your lungs is not absorbed, and you have breathe in your own breath for a while before the CO2 content makes it poisonous.
That’s the wrong fucking way to do it.
CO2 poisoning is fucking brutal. Your brain recognizes that you can’t expell carbon dioxide, and your body panics. You’ll thrash about and struggle to breathe fresh air, even though you still have lots of oxygen in your lungs and in your blood stream.
The whole point of Nitrogen is that your body doesn’t realize it’s not getting Oxygen, and you slowly lose consciousness without any panic or reflex. To do that, you have to pump nitrogen into a chamber and then filter out oxygen and carbon dioxide. The chamber can be the size of a mask, but a sealed box would be less likely to leak. As you breathe, the oxygen and the carbon dioxide are continuously scrubbed from the air.
Basically, this guy was tortured to death. If you’ve ever had the sensation of being under water too long, and you have that shocking dull pain in your chest and a headache, it’s like that but for 23 minutes until you die.
Ah, I didn’t read in the article that they used a mask. What a cruel / incompetent thing to do
The obvious outcome is someone trying to fight against being killed in whatever way they can. If you know that you won’t get oxygen, the obvious response is to hold your breath.
This would work humanely for someone who wants to die, but as a method of execution is is torture like all the rest.
A CPAP mask could obtain a similar effect. It forms a perfect seal on the face with a one way valve for exhalation. As long as the mask is piped to a bottle of pure nitrogen you’d quickly remove all oxygen from your air supply and be out like a light in no time
But doesn’t that just go over the nose? I’m not sure. Plus, the seal would have to be air-tight. A cpap might be snug to the skin, but you could break the seal by moving your cheeks around.
You’re right, there are multiple types of CPAP mask. I was writing about full face ones like these. In the cheapo ones we stock on my ambulance the seal around the mask is a silicone-ish tubing that clings to the skin very well.
For CPAP or BiPAP to be effective (and not piss off your ventilator), the circuit needs to be leak free. I’ve had full conversations with people on BiPAP before without my vent throwing any alarms. They have an expiratory valve so you can breathe out, but no outside air gets in. You’re fed solely by the air getting pumped out of the vent. These masks would be very easy to set up for pure nitrogen by using trach mask tubing (the ports are the same size) and a tank of nitrogen set up to an O2 regulator. Ditch the dilutor for one that’s closed off. Couldn’t tell you what they’re called but I’ve used them before and know they exist. This whole setup could be had for less than $50 if you’re purchasing wholesale
This is almost exactly what a good friend of mine used to kill himself eight years ago this week. His thought process was that it would be a painless death. I hope he was right.
I’m sorry for your loss and if it’s any reassurance, that’s about as quick and painless he could’ve managed. It’s never easy to lose someone but hopefully knowing that will make* things a little easier. I wish you the best
Thanks, I appreciate it.
No US citizen should be surprised that Alabama of all places fucked this up, lol. My personal opinion is that it all started when religion got involved with the execution process
Gonna have to say that a botch job could have happened anywhere, because medical professionals aren’t involved in executions, flawed executions have happened in many states many times, geography doesn’t have much to do with that, it’s the nature of state sanctioned murder sadly.
They used a mask. Not a sealed chamber like the suicide pods. So presumably it wasn’t completely air tight.
Ah, I didn’t read in the article that they used a mask. What a cruel / incompetent thing to do
Need less nitrogen for a mask so it saves money!
-some jackass
Oh, they botched it alright.
Cruelty is the point in America.
2edgy4me
Look. Execution is inhumane. You can’t make it gentle, peaceful, or nice. All you can do is make it quick, which it sounds like they failed to do here. But if the good people of Alabama aren’t comfortable with someone struggling for half an hour and then dying, they shouldn’t execute people at all.
That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed’s spiritual advisor. If I was Smith’s spiritual advisor, I’d also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful. The reality is that it’s a lot more cruel that Smith went back into the execution chamber despite them botching the job the first time than that they half-assed the nitrogen asphyxiation. It was an untested method, but every method of execution has a first person to be executed with it.
If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you’ve already ceded the moral high ground. We have already solved execution, and we’ve had it solved for decades, even centuries arguably. Hanging, firing squad, electrocution, beheading, lethal injection–every method has its proponents and detractors, but every method is to the same end. If you’re too squeamish for what happened in Alabama, an alternative method of killing people isn’t going to fix that for you. The solution is staring you right in the face, and it’s life without parole.
If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you’ve already ceded the moral high ground.
Well said.
That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed’s spiritual advisor. If I was Smith’s spiritual advisor, I’d also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful.
Yes, the person who actually cares about the person being killed speaks up for the person being killed. Does that make their opinion less valid than all the liars who said he was going to just pass peacefully, which of course did not happen?
… Yes. Yes it does. It’s literally his job. It doesn’t make the opinion invalid, but it absolutely makes it less valid than the opinion of a neutral observer. That’s just what bias is.
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But if the good people of Alabama aren’t comfortable with
A lot of people want the US to stop supporting Israel killing Palestinians. Is that happening?
Governments often act against the wishes of the people. Did everyone in Alabama agree this man should die this way?
As someone well versed in inhaling Nitrous Oxide, why not not just use Nitrous Oxide? That’d be a quick way out, and it’s cheap, you can buy enough to kill a person on Amazon for like $30. Even if you fuck it up, they’re unconscious and feeling nothing.
Same reason they don’t just OD them on morphine: those are enjoyable drugs, and we can’t be giving our death row inmates that.
There’s functionally no difference. The way that they messed this up would have still created suffering because they weren’t letting carbon dioxide escape.
The suffocation feeling comes from CO2 buildup, not lack of oxygen. The same issue can happen with nitrous oxide if you don’t let the CO2 escape.
Also, and keep in mind I have never killed myself using this method, so I don’t know first hand, but, nitrogen is lighter than carbon dioxide, so if the person had 100% pure nitrogen to breathe, and no carbon dioxide, and is maintained with their head near the top of the pod, they would have died fast and allegedly without feeling it.
However, I am absolutely convinced that the people responsible for this execution did research on how to make this method as painful as possible (done right, it is apparently euphoric, and there is NO WAY they would even remotely take the risk of this happening), so they probably went out of their way to have a nitrogen-oxygen mix (like our atmosphere), but with lower amounts of oxygen, and forced the person to stay in a position that would guarantee they would die from CO2 asphyxiation rather than nitrogen.
It is even more inhumane than just using CO2 (as is done in meat “production”), because it prolongs the suffering quite a lot… The whole point of using CO2 on animals is to expedite the process… at the expense of their suffering.
CO2 is also cheap and safer for human workers.
Nitrogen is undetectable with human senses, whereas you’ll instantly know if you enter an area with a high CO2 concentration. CO2 is also heavier than air, so it tends to stay in the “pit” they lower the animals into.
So their problem was they didn’t vent his exhalation? And only let him breath in pure nitrogen?
I’m going to take a wild guess here and say no one knows. The folks who put the mask on the dude are probably not any sort of experts in masks, gas, or not being an ass, and everyone in this thread is speculating.
The liquid? It would be excruciating. Burning your insides with frostbite.
You’re thinking of liquid nitrogen. Nitrous oxide is commonly found in whip cream cannisters, and is actually quite pleasurable imo.
Drowning in whip cream? You could probably just eat your way out.
agustus gloop soundin’ ass
I don’t support capital punishment.
But hypoxia in humans is well studied. Unless they were using monumental stupid gas like CO2 (which triggers your breathing reflex) then the problem wasn’t the method, in principle.
I wouldn’t put it past a execution supporter to fuck it up somehow, though.
Use a bolt gun. It is good enough for the cows and pigs it is fast, it probably hurts but likely less time than even a needle.
I suggest starting by testing it out on the person that though slow suffocation for 25 minutes was humane.
another good one. Not quite as theatrical as a canon execution, but a funny idea nonetheless.
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I feel like I have heard someone say it tastes better that way. I’m sure that would make it justifiable.
