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.
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.
Many of us have a problem with all executions. And capital punishment was illegal in America from 1962-1976 until the Supreme Court reversed their original decision.
The only people I’m ok with killing are the ones we have undeniable poof for. Like the Uvalde school shooter. They have footage of him in the school with the gun and know he killed the kids. In my book he’s OK to execute. if there’s even a shred of doubt in anyone’s case then execution should be off the books period.
There is a room with a candy bar in it, a biometric scan to enter, and a camera outside the only door.
You scan your retina to go in, you come out a few moments later, and after 5 minutes a security guard goes in, finds the room intact, and also sees the candy bar gone.
By deductive reasoning, you took the candy bar beyond a reasonable doubt.
There is a remote possibility that after you left and before the guard arrived, a mission impossible crew came in from the ceiling and took the candy bar specifically to frame you. Or perhaps the entire candy bar quantum tunnelled or was teleported by aliens in an event that denies conventional understanding.
The guy you replied to is making this point. If it is in any way theoretically possible that guilt is in question, no execution. Reasonable doubt as a standard assumes the natural order of the universe and logic are preserved such that inferences are possible.
Reasonable doubt as a standard assumes the natural order of the universe and logic are preserved such that inferences are possible.
But that also seems like a foundation that "undeniable proof" would rest on. If the only way for a proof to be denied is for the "natural order of the universe and logic" to not apply, then there's simply no such thing.
A reasonable doubt is less strict than undeniable proof. If I go outside and see that the lawn and road is wet then I can beyond a reasonable doubt ascertain that it has rained, but that’s not undeniable proof. If I go outside and get rained on and measure that rainfall in a scientific way then that is undeniable proof. Blackstone’s ratio is irrelevant; too many people are wrongfully imprisoned and executed on dubious evidence. We seem to fucking agree about that, so calm down.
I downvote comments that are obtuse or don’t actually contribute to the conversation and I don’t see anything wrong with that.
I don’t support the execution of the Uvalde shooter.
What does killing him accomplish?
Justice? Not really.
Restitution? Not at all.
Vengeance? Not really.
Deterrence? Not really.
Closure for the families of the victims? I suppose.
I don’t know about this case, but some families of victims oppose the death penalty, even in the case of the murder of their children.
Some reasons for this view could be religious beliefs, or the view that death is the easy way out, or the deterrence value of being able to point at a person in jail, or the potential for the person to do some good in the world.
These people would object to closure for them being used as justification for killing their child’s murderer.
It’s not fair to victim families to make them choose life or death for a murderer. It would be a decision they’d have to live with forever. We can’t do that to them.
My opinion is that capital punishment should only be used where a person guilty of a ‘capital crime’ can’t be reliably imprisoned.
Ie I’m not sure Iraqis were wrong to execute Saddam Hussein. I don’t think it would be wrong for countries that struggle with corruption in their penal system to execute cartel leaders (that have been convicted of ‘capital crimes’). War crimes, insurrection leaders, that sort of thing.
Nope. The math has been done on this many times, and death sentence is more expensive than life without parole. And that’s according to the State’s own numbers.
As someone who gets nitrogen at the dentist office with a mask I have a theory that it was just him consciously fighting it. It’s positive pressure nitrogen that you just breath in at normal breath rate. If you breath really hard you can displace the nitrogen and suck in some regular air. It sounds like he fought it which caused it to take longer. It is the standard human reaction to fight against one’s own death and I’m guessing he thought that if they held out long enough they would stop. If they are going to use a mask like that as opposed to a hood or chamber they really should sedate the person first.
As someone who gets nitrogen at the dentist office with a mask I have a theory that it was just him consciously fighting it.
No shit Sherlock. Someone who likes having their breathing restricted during sexual escapades would also fight it and suffer if someone was actively trying to kill them.
You do not get 'nitrogen' at the dentist's office.
You are given a solution of normal air with a small amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) to relax you. You are never deprived of oxygen, since the dentist isn't trying to asphyxiate you.
The rest of the comment is perfectly valid, though. If I have a mask on my face and I know that it's feeding me a gas that will kill me, I'd do everything I could to dislodge it and hold my breath and whatnot that I could. A far better approach would have been to fill the chamber with nitrogen, ideally without any sort of obvious hissing noise or other tell.
And a far far better approach would have been to not kill the guy in the first place, but I guess there's no stopping that particular bloodlust right now.
If this is the case I wonder if it was his attempt to it fail like the first attempt. After that he may have had a good case to go life without parole rather than face another attempt at execution.
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.
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.
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.
Rising CO2 (via blood acidity)
Water in the airways.
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.
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.
That’s a conscious choice people are capable of making in that scenario.
I guess the person being put to death should have just made a decision to die then. That's what you are saying right, that they suffered because they didn't choose to just roll over and die?
It only truly works if you can isolate the room completely. That’s quite hard to do with a nuke involved. You’ll definitely know when they are dead!
Unfortunately, I believe any use of nuclear weapons is prohibited by treaties. Might I suggest a giant acme hammer or anvil? Instant meat paste, assuming they aren’t a cartoon character in disguise.
I kinda want to be able to donate my organs, so maybe they could just make a bomb-helmet with shaped charges that would paste my head and leave the rest of my body intact for harvesting. 🤯
I’m actually curious whether nitrogen hypoxia would leave the organs viable. However, it’s not a point that should be pushed. Let’s not give the rich any more reasons to want to keep the death penalty.
Your method could be a bit messy. I’d imagine even the doctors involved in the organ harvesting would be squeamish when confronted by the results. Ironically, nitrogen hypoxia would be my preferred way to go.
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.
So you’d rather have someone die in agony, rather than make a decision?
I’m asking that if an evil must happen, should it be a different, lesser evil, or a normalised greater evil? The whether the evil should happen at all is a separate debate.
As I said, I agree with you on the latter. The death penalty shouldn’t be a thing. I’m asking about the situation until you (as a society) actually get that far.
Smith clearly died in agony from this method. Lethal injection was also promoted as painless, which it would be in theory and was not in practice for the same fundamental issue that the whole death penalty process involves incompetent people fucking up because competent people won't take part in it.
I can't pick a method when it is guaranteed to be horrible because of the context of the death penalty.
I will gladly pick a method or two for people who want to be euthanized and participate willingly. Those same methods will always be torture to someone who does not want to die as long as incompetent people are running the show.
All options do not require a medical professional to administer. It does not take someone with a doctor’s knowledge or skill to make an airproof chamber. It won’t take a doctor to set up a system to add air to the chamber. You don’t need to be a doctor to rig a way to flood the chamber with another gas and remove the oxygen. Non-doctors can wheel him in, strapped to a bed. Then the regular pre-PhD’s can operate the system. Now the scientists and engineers to design this death trap may have doctorates, but they don’t need medical licenses. Design it well enough and a chimp or small child can operate the chamber controls. You will need a medical professional to declare death, though.
Hard to design a system that can be operated by a chimp when the people actually designing and implementing the process are clearly incompetent.
If they don't have a medical professional monitoring the person's oxygen levels to ensure he is dying as fast as it is supposed to work, how will they know if their made up bullshit about it being humane when forced upon someone is accurate?
Imagine if they were putting a free diver or other person who has practiced holding their breath for extended periods of time, how would they know if it was even working without monitoring them?
The states that execute people have lied about every prior method being 'humane' and non of them ever were in practice on someone who did not want to die. The electric chair supposedly killed the person instantly, but that was a lie. Lethal injection was supposed to be putting someone to sleep and described in the same way as nitrogen, but that was clearly a lie in practice because the people that do it are incompetent.
Quoting an article about safe use of nitrogen, it is odorless, tasteless, and colorless. At extreme low levels of oxygen, nitrogen can cause unconsciousness and death in seconds and without warning.
I’m not talking about the chimps who executed this guy designing the system, I’m talking about qualified scientists designing it. The beauty is, you don’t need a medical doctor to monitor oxygen levels if you rapidly remove the oxygen and add nitrogen. Send in slightly chilled nitrogen and the air will rise above it. Relief valve up top spits out the oxygen. Homeboy is unconsciousness before he realizes why the air just got cold.
The freediver will hold his breath confidently for four minutes, exhale, suck in pure nitrogen, and be out in a breath or two.
I agree that the state does lie and incompetently kills people, but we can design a system that does it well. I just don’t agree they should ever use it.
Well you said you didn’t want to pick an execution method because they all needed medical doctors, so I proposed a situation that doesn’t require one except to declare death. But good point, we’ll only pick up this discussion after you break in and rip the mask off the next execution victim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t a firing squad machine be so much faster and more effective? Have 3 people push buttons only one button works. It’s all a horrible mess, regardless of the method.
Let’s say you hypothetically agree that the state should reserve the power to execute some people, in very very rare cases. Well cruel and unusual punishment is supposed to be unconstitutional. And all the chemical companies refuse to sell the injection chemical. And testing out new methods is obviously pretty cruel…
Focusing on the unpleasantness could actually get us closer to a place where effectively no capital punishment occurs due to these limiting factors. Without even getting the average American on board with the idea that executions should be banned entirely.
There are people who are in favor of capital punishment. Not all may be in favor of slow, drawn out executions. Focusing on the execution being performed poorly convinces them.
Obviously people are free to disagree, but toe that makes no sense that you think someone’s life and autonomy doesn’t matter but a little suffering is bad
IDK about you guys, but in raising our kids we believed it was important that they know where meat comes from. So when slaughtering poultry the kids help out. Maybe apply the same thing here?
If you support capital punishment, then you must sign up for firing squad duty. If less than 50% of voters sign up for firing squad duty, then the death penalty is abolished.
So. If 50% of people are not willing to point a gun at someone and kill them. We should abolish the military as well?
Will take a lot of killings before we can decide if we want a military or not. We don’t want people to only sign up. We need to make sure they actually do it too. Easy to sign up. Difficult to commit.
So. If 50% of people are not willing to point a gun at someone and kill them. We should abolish the military as well?
Sure? Like you don’t have to actually join but sign up for the draft. If 50% aren’t willing to die and or kill for their country then maybe they shouldn’t be at war.
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.
All they needed was an open circuit constantly flowing nitrogen into a breathing mask or a bag over his head. It’s so simple. I’m not surprised but incredibly disappointed they fucked it up.
With the kind of money I’m sure they spent, they could have just made a big airtight rubber room, flushed it with nitrogen, and just put him in for 10 minutes.
So,.like — was this guy in a relatively large volume chamber/booth and they just trickled the N2 gas in?
If there was enough volume, it could take a long time for the O2 levels to get low enough for him to pass out… BUT does a human body produce enough CO2 to fill that space to the point of triggering the suffocation response? Seems unlikely…
OR did they just strap a rebreather mask to his face and turn on a few l/min?
Were any specifics about the actual setup published?
I don’t have any details about the setup but a CO2 concentration of 0.3% would be noticeable. Humans are extremely sensitive to CO2 so it really doesn’t take that much to be a problem.
But if he was in something the size of a phone booth (does America have them) then the volume probably is small enough that the CO2 concentration would add up. A breather mask would actually have been better because it would have pulled the CO2 out (they are designed for diving), if they’re not going to pull the CO2 out then they need to increase the volume to something the size of a porta cabin.
Hemlock Society recommends an oven roaster bag (like for turkeys) and a bottle of inert gas (usually helium is easiest to get) and just flow enough in to keep the inert atmosphere in the bag “fresh”
Also, there is ‘gas stunning’ which is used in Europe for slaughter. There are some practices that use CO2 for this, but at a nearly 100% level it is pretty instantaneous, much like HS2 – which you can’t even smell at high concentration, because you’re dead already.
Point, there is some state of the art around using gas to kill; it’s not a brand new concept.
Many people do believe it was botched, because the dude struggled for almost 30 minutes. Nobody can stay awake without oxygen for that long under normal circumstances. Hell, the world record for breath holding is ~25 minutes. So he almost certainly had oxygen bleeding in from somewhere, which prolonged his death. Because we all know this dude wasn’t on a world record attempt as a lifelong free diver with years of experience and training.
There are people in literally advocating for it and their sycophants support it purely out of the sadistic urge to kill everyone they believe is unworthy of life. See Nick Fuentes, or even to a lesser extent people like Alex Jones who call their detractors traitors. They make it a point to call their opposition demonic and accuse them of witchcraft and blood libel.
I once saw a slogan on a button at a street vendor in Washington D.C. “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” It’s stuck with me after two decades.
I don’t know that we do it to make any such statement to the guilty party. I personally think we do it to 1. deter others from going down that path for fear of the consequences, and 2. remove an individual from society who has shown themselves incapable (in the most malicious and extreme way) of properly functioning in society. They are a danger to society, therefore they need to be removed. Obviously you could make the argument that we could simply banish them somewhere or lock them up for the remainder of their lives, but in my personal opinion that’s not definitive enough. They could escape, be let out early, and harm someone else.
That’s entirely possible, no system is perfect, but rather than countering my statement with something that happens the least, perhaps you could offer up an idea on how to handle what happens the most. How do you think we should handle maliciously evil (for lack of a better word) people who commit heinous crimes?
What should you punish murder with? Genuinely asking. I see many who want to do away with prisons and switch to rehabilitation. In some cases I can certainly understand that, and I am against for profit prisons, but I also know that a certain portion of society is just fundementally born with dysfunctional brains and no amount of rehabilitation will ever correct that. What do you do with the person who is sadistic and sociopathic in their disdain for other human life?
Death is the easy way out. Make them understand and regret their actions, then have to live with them. If that’s psychologically impossible then they belong in a mental hospital, where they should have been before committing heinous acts.
I’m against the death penalty but that’s a terrible argument against it. It’s not hypocritical to jail someone who was falsely imprisoning their victim. The state has a monopoly on violence, which means a monopoly on punishing wrongdoers, controlled by the will of the people.
The state is allowed to do all sorts of things individual people can’t. It has a different role. It taxes, it enforces justice, it regulates business, it provides services that the private sector won’t.
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