What happened at the nation's first nitrogen gas execution: An AP eyewitness account
What happened at the nation's first nitrogen gas execution: An AP eyewitness account
Witnesses watched through a window at an Alabama prison as Kenneth Eugene Smith became the nation's first person to be put to death using nitrogen gas.
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.
I'm just an armchair medic, but wouldn't a second tube to evacuate exhaled CO2 prevent this? This feels like monumental stupidity on the side of the prison, not necessarily a flaw with nitrogen as an execution method.
If you are going to execute someone with nitrogen, would it add that much cost to anesthetize them to sleep first?
I’m not for capital punishment but realize that it’s the system we have. But slowly suffocating someone to death is surely demonstrative of the fact that it’s supposed to be torture.
$5 worth of fentanyl would do the job…
Dude was unconscious almost immediately. His brain was dead but the body takes longer to go. The violent spasms was the unconscious and uninhabited body using the last of its energy, mechanically.
This has been so dramatized it's disgusting. The execution? Humane. The media around it? Must clearly want more suffering.
Anesthesizing someone is difficult and you need the right drugs. No licensed doctor is allowed nor willing to do it, and no company making the drugs agrees to its use for killing people.
That website is poison aids. That's the fucking official AP site? We're doomed.
Holy fuck you're not kidding. I assumed when you said that it was going to be just shit all over the place. The ads weren't super intrusive? It was easy to read? But when I got down to the bottom there was shit about a homeopathy treatment for neuropathy that has left scientists speechless.
How the fuck was that on AP
They also block the Tor network.
Wow, that used to be a nice, clean site
Just use a guillotine. Almost zero chance of fuck up. Dead within seconds.
while I agree that guillotine is a more humane method of execution, we could also consider ending the death penalty completely.
Oh my. I didn't realise that it's actually horrible for the person. Imagine grasping for air for 15 minutes! It must be horrible! That guy had a good reason to be scared of going away like that!
... And it's totally not an act made to stop this type of execution. It's not like hypoxia is undetectable by the body, as the gasping reflex is driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the lungs, not the lack of oxygen. Nor is it like the subject had any beef against the type of execution.
Come on. This is just fear mongering at this point
Executions are barbaric period
I don’t know. The older I get the more I feel that locking someone a confined space with a bunch of other unintegratables, essentially indefinitely, is less humane. I keep thinking society needs to have some skin in the game making these decisions. Seems like there’s more of that with something decisive like capital punishment than locking someone in an out of the way cage and forgetting about them.
Maybe this was more of an !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world post tho.
From the Wikipedia article on Inert Gas Asphyxiation:
When humans breathe in an asphyxiant gas, such as pure nitrogen, helium, neon, argon, methane, or any other physiologically inert gas, they exhale carbon dioxide without re-supplying oxygen.
This leads to asphyxiation (death from lack of oxygen) without the painful and traumatic feeling of suffocation (the hypercapnic alarm response, which in humans arises mostly from carbon dioxide levels rising)
Unconsciousness in cases of accidental asphyxia can occur within one minute.
Loss of consciousness may be accompanied by convulsions[9] and is followed by cyanosis and cardiac arrest.
tl;dr - literally everything that happened in the execution was precisely as expected. Smith did not suffer and was not conscious after the first few minutes of the procedure.
asphyxiation (death from lack of oxygen) without the painful and traumatic feeling of suffocation (the hypercapnic alarm response
So this would be fine, but he did have symptoms consistent with hypercapnia, as described in the link you provided
In severe hypercapnia (generally greater than 10 kPa or 75 mmHg), symptomatology progresses to disorientation, panic, hyperventilation, convulsions, unconsciousness, and eventually death.[8][9]
They needed a larger breathable volume to diffuse the carbon dioxide present to keep the man from suffering.
They botched it.
