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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.
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.
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.
Tom Scott did a video on this as well.
25 minutes does seem like an awfully long time.
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 gas mixture clearly had oxygen still in it. If he's gasping for air for 22 minutes, he was still receiving low amounts of O2.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
This was discussed in another thread. Apparently they did not scrub the CO2 he expelled (which presumably under high anxiety and adrenaline would be way higher) and he simply rebreathed that CO2 back in, mixed with the nitrogen.
For those unaware, CO2 buildup in our blood is what triggers our brainstem to go crazy and gasp for air and convulse and generally have that terrible sense of asphyxiation/drowning. Lack of oxygen does not.
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.
personally i think we should start doing a slightly modified version of the traditional british canon execution.
For those who aren't familar, you strap a dude to the front of a canon, with a dud charge (i don't believe there is a projectile) and then set it off and run. Apparently it's pretty "spectacular" I say we do the same thing but delete the head in the process. Or perhaps add a canon ball because why not.
If we're executing people theres no need to pretend what we're doing is "good"
When is America going to learn that you can't punish murder with murder? You are literally saying "rules for thee but not for me."
Iran's hanging people in public, America gasses them with private viewing.
For your consideration.
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.
Come on, isn't this america? Why don't they just shoot prisoners?! It's quick, cheap and they love shooting, don't they? Coming up with so many twisted ways to kill a person just to do it differently than the Nazis. If even Belarus is still officially shooting their people, why isn"t the greatest country in the world?
/s because I can't handle this
I don't know anything about this other than the guy most have been pretty terrible to be on death row but even a brutal killer should have some rights nobody deserves to die like that