Alabama condemned for nitrogen gas execution: ‘They intended to torture him’
Alabama condemned for nitrogen gas execution: ‘They intended to torture him’
Alabama condemned for nitrogen gas execution: ‘They intended to torture him’
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/14097254
Smith’s execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” took around 22 minutes, according to media witnesses, who were led into a viewing room at the William C Holman correctional facility in Atmore shortly before 8 pm local time.
After the nitrogen gas began flowing, Smith convulsed on the gurney for several minutes. The state had previously said the nitrogen gas would cause Smith to lose consciousness in seconds and die within minutes, according to the Associated Press.
“I’ve been to four previous executions and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist who witnessed the execution, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
Why on earth is nitrogen being treated as worse than the gas chamber, electric chair, or lethal injection? All of those are way more painful, akin to torture. Nitrogen suffocation is literally the method that was selected for suicide pods because it doesn't involve any discomfort (aside from, obviously, the knowledge that you're going to die.)
It turns out there is discomfort involved when the mechanism for delivery doesn't account for the CO2 being exhaled. Nitrogen isn't the problem, but the way they did it was completely asinine.
So what you're saying is they didn't scrub the CO2 that he expelled and so he basically rebreathed that, triggering the brainstem signal of hypercapnia?
Wouldn't this be resolved by having a tube with a slight negative pressure (like reverse cpap) linked to his nose for exhalation while the nitrogen was pumped via the mouth upon inhalation?
I mean, they're prison officials in Alabama. I wouldn't expect them to do anything at all in a humane or intelligent way.
Oh shit. Yeah, that's a real problem. And yeah, if that's true that's totally asinine; they eliminated the one obvious advantage that this method has over all others when it would have been trivial to make sure it was a non-issue.
Maybe deliberately inflicting suffering was a design goal they just couldn't let go of. 😥
Edit: After looking over some of the reasons people are saying he was suffering, I don't see much reason to think so or think CO2 was recirculating. I'm sure it was horrible knowing that he was going to die. I'm against the death penalty in general, and I think a lot of people are opposed to this just because it's horrible to execute someone however you do it. But I'm pretty convinced that there's no real reason to think he suffered physically while he was dying.
Well that explains why he lived so long. He was living off the air HR started with in his lungs and as he slowly used the oxygen he started with he suffocated over 20 minutes
Do you have a source for this? I want to know more about it and I wasn't able to find a place that was saying it.
Setting aside the national shame that capital punishment is, regardless of the method used, they strapped his face with a mask. He wasn't in a pod as nitrogen levels rose. He was force fed the gas with a mask that prevented him from "breathing" normally.
And even if he was in a pod where the nitrogen level rose, making his death as physically painless as possible (or so we believe), he still knows he is going to die. That's torture. It should not be legal.
According to this article: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/us/alabama-execution-nitrogen-what-we-know/index.html
They started at 7:53. 22 minutes later they closed the curtain. 10 minutes later they pronounced him dead. I'm thinking that 22 minutes is the source of the 20+ minute claim.
People also don't consider the people carrying out the execution are individuals that flunked out of college and the military. As no actual person that knows what they are doing. This will be botched every time.
"All of those are way more painful, akin to torture."
And you know know this because you've experienced all of them and come back to tell us about it?
Here's a summary of some results from cyanide gas executions.
Here's for the electric chair.
Here's a short overview of lethal injection, not as heavy on gory details. But in short, the problem is that a paralyzing agent is one of the elements injected, and reports from people who survived botched executions are that it was excruciatingly painful and they were simply unable to indicate any distress.
It's absurd to say that because I haven't personally been executed I can't learn anything about it or have an opinion on it.
Just because you don't know shit about how executions work doesn't mean nobody else does.
Because if people actually cared about painless ways just go back to beheadings.