1y ago

Three top nitrogen gas manufacturers in US bar products from use in executions

www.theguardian.com

Move follows Alabama’s recent killing of death row inmate Kenneth Smith using previously untested method

Three of the largest manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas in the US have barred their products from being used in executions, following Alabama’s recent killing of the death row inmate Kenneth Smith using a previously untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia.

The three companies have confirmed to the Guardian that they have put in place mechanisms that will prevent their nitrogen cylinders falling into the hands of departments of correction in death penalty states. The move by the trio marks the first signs of corporate action to stop medical nitrogen, which is designed to preserve life, being used for the exact opposite – killing people.

The green shoots of a corporate blockade for nitrogen echoes the almost total boycott that is now in place for medical drugs used in lethal injections. That boycott has made it so difficult for death penalty states to procure drugs such as pentobarbital and midazolam that a growing number are turning to nitrogen as an alternative killing technique.

Now, nitrogen producers are engaging in their own efforts to prevent the abuse of their products. The march has been led by Airgas, which is owned by the French multinational Air Liquide.

130 comments

Nitrogen hypoxia sounds like one of the best ways to die, without pain or panic, but I completely understand why no company wants to be the supplier of the means of executing people. Small volume, small profits, extreme controversy. What’s to want there?
- Sure. If it was done correctly and we could trust the justice system to not kill innocent people. However they figured out the cruelest way to do it and SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they're innocent because it might hurt the court's reputation of they back down.
  
  SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they're innocent because it might hurt the court's reputation of they back down.
  I'm not familiar with this. Is this something that actually happened?
- Media witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for about ten minutes. He shook and writhed for about two minutes on the gurney, followed by about five minutes of heavy breathing.
  https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226936713/alabama-execution-kenneth-smith
  
  Because they did in the worst way possible. All Alabama had to do was flood a sealed room with nitrogen and the execution would have been fairly "unremarkable". Instead they forced a has mask on Smith that required his cooperation to function properly, didn't have a one-way valve to remove exhaled gas, causing CO2 to build up in the tiny mask.
  A haircut is also a painless and quick procedure, but that doesn't mean your barber can't be incompetent and totally fuck up your scalp.
- It sounds like a reasonable way to die when the individual doesn't know what's going on or is accepting/willing. As an execution method it's shit.
  
  Well, disregarding the normal fear of death that would be there regardless of the method, I think the issue is the mask. It would be much better to just fill the room with N2. You can do this easilly enough by evaporating liquid N2. Of course, this would not be "medical grade" so people would complain just to complain.
- If "right to die" laws become more of a thing, this would be the most compassionate way of doing a home suicide kit. I wonder if the manufacturers would oppose that as well, or only executions.
  Like you said, there's not much in it for them either way.
  
  How is this more compassionate that loading someone up with an OD of morphine or something similar?
AirGas, Air Products, and Matheson are the manufacturers, for anyone interested.
My job's vendor is also mentioned:
Other manufacturers of medical nitrogen in the US were more circumspect. Linde, a global multinational founded in Germany and headquartered in the UK, would not say whether it was willing to sell its product for use in US death chambers and declined to comment.
- That's a yes from Linde then
  
  Just got the optics I would really avoid "execution gas chambers" being on my product applications sheet if I were a German company.
I wonder which tactic Republicans will take when it inevitably turns out they're buying it from China- lie that they're doing it or insist that they have to due to the evil liberal elite?
- Ahhh, right, because only republicans execute people... Way to make this political.
  
  2016 Democratic Party platform:
  We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. It has no place in the United States of America. The application of the death penalty is arbitrary and unjust. The cost to taxpayers far exceeds those of life imprisonment. It does not deter crime. And, exonerations show a dangerous lack of reliability for what is an irreversible punishment.
  (They reiterated this in 2020.)
  2016 Republican party platform:
  The constitutionality of the death penalty is firmly settled by its explicit mention in the Fifth Amendment. With the murder rate soaring in our great cities, we condemn the Supreme Court’s erosion of the right of the people to enact capital punishment in their states.
  (They re-adopted the 2016 platform in 2020.)
  https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/public-opinion-polls/political-party-platforms-and-the-death-penalty
  Sorry, it's political whether you like it or not.
This is an honest question. In the US we probably put down thousands of household pets each month. Many of them have their owners right there beside them holding their paw. It isn't tramatic for the pet or the owner.
How can it be this difficult for us to humanely execute a human?
- Because we're kill our pets out of love, and we kill inmates out of hate. Humane treatment isn't difficult, the cruelty is intentional.
  So long as were still using the barbaric practice of state-sanctioned murder, the practice itself will remain barbaric. The only solution is to eliminate the death penalty like the rest of the civilized western world.
- There are plenty of options to 'put down' a human as well, but most of those require medical expertise to administer.
  Medical personnel generally frown upon the whole idea of putting people down, so they're not really an option
- That was explained in the post: drug manufacturers are careful who they sell to and they do their best to prevent their products from being used in executions.
- The answer is that anyone with a medical degree will not participate in any way, even in an advisory capacity.
Nitrogen is almost 80% of air so it’s hardly in short supply. Also why would you need medical grade? This is like alcohol swabs at the IV insertion site for lethal injection. They just don’t want the bad publicity of being associated, but it’s not going to stop anything.
- Yeah. It is one thing when the state needs a controlled substance like execution drugs. In that case, there are only a handfull of places to get it, and they are all required to vet their purchasers anyway.
  For Nitrogen, anyone who wants some can just order a canister off of Amazon and get it delivered no questions asked. Or, for a few thousand, have their own N2 generator.
  Would defense lawyers raise hell about non-medical N2 being used? Sure, but they raise hell about everything; its their job. You would delay all executions for a few years while the appeals process plays out. Then end up with a final ruling saying that consumer grade N2 is good enough.
- You don't need medical grade for any practical reason. It is just something people who are against death penalty to complain about and there may be legal technicalities that would require it.
I think the death penalty should just go away but if you're going to have it I don't understand why prisons are so gong-ho about all these complicated execution methods.
Why don't they just shoot people? That would work. It simple, it's quick, and it involves cool guns, which shouldn't really be a consideration but it's the US so it is.
I mean, I'm glad, but at the same time, I can't help but wonder why these corporations care, when they're killing people in so many other ways outside of prisons.
- They care about the image, not about the death.
  
  And they care about selling product in Canada and maybe Europe, and they would probably not be able to if they complied with the request to aid in executions.
- ES&G (Environmental, Social, & Governance) policies are starting to become a common thing. They seem to have started at large corporations and they, in turn, drive their smaller partners to adopt similar policies. They want to present a face of sustainable and accountable practices, free from corruption, blah blah blah.
  I work for a medium to small company and it has become part of my job to ask awkward questions of our vendors. Our corporate customers are pressing us on our practices, and we press our vendors as part of a "sustainable and ethical supply chain". Not all companies are well prepared to answer these questions, but some are. In general, the US lags behind Asia and Europe when it comes to this. At least in my industry. So that's a big caveat.
  How do we know they're not lying? One tool is that independent third party auditors can assess a company and gauge its strengths and weaknesses. (Ecovadis is a name I've seen many times during these discussions, but there are others.) These auditors live or die by their reputations, so they have an interest in staying honest.
  In the case of these nitrogen vendors (one of which is used by my employer), this is an easy ES&G win. The amount of nitrogen sold to executioners is vanishingly small, whereas we buy it by the tanker. It's definitely on the short list of awkward questions I would ask them.
  The term 'greenwashing' will come up. And trust me, because I'm a cynical bitch with a hair-trigger bullshit meter, I've used it myself. But I'm cautiously optimistic that questions like this can move companies in a better direction. Part of that has to do with the look of confusion and horror when I visit vendors in deep red states and start asking questions about labor, safety, and the environmental impact of their operations. They don't want to do waste or emissions remediation, but they also don't want to lose our business. (I'm honestly enjoying this new direction my work is taking.)
  
  How do you get a job asking awkward questions? It sounds like my calling, and I'd prefer not to live in constant fear of being fired!
Seems sensible enough. Even if you agreed that there should be a death penalty and nitrogen is a humane way to do it the tiny amount of money you could potentially make supplying it would not be worth the potential PR hit.
"Okay folks, it's execution day and you know what that means... Everybody pass around the Fart Bag.
Nitrogen generators are relatively cheap and compact these days, so I don't see this having a huge impact if a prison really wants to go this route
I hate headlines.
Spent many long seconds trying to figure out which US bar would have nitrogen manufacturers.
- I thought they spoiled the punchline a bit too much by using the word "bar" to describe tanks of compressed gas.
- Weird considering it is clarified in the first sentence of the article, which OP even included for you.
  
  The only reason I opened this past the title was because I put that comment in there. The headline didn't interest me even after I figured out what the garden path sentence meant, lol
  Nobody reads every post and every link that pops up in their feed.
How about two deathrow inmates are put together in a room with a whole bunch of things that look like door knobs but are actually one way gas knobs. You open and they don't close. The gas part is easy just go to a welding shop. Tell them it's for "welding". They'll understand.
- The detail about having two inmates in the same chamber... I don't know, I think one would help the other think about escaping by trying the next knob cuz the previous one didn't do anything. You probably want some loud music or a mixing fan to mask gas hissing.
Is it their say though? It's not a lease, once someone else owns it they can do what they want with it.
- For a fun example to talk about look at Deadmau5's Purrari.
  The Nyan cat wrapped Ferrari.
  Legally Ferrari had little they could do. There was some things to do with putting a modified badge they could stop. While on finance they could recall the loan due to the modifications affecting the equity in the car.
  But any seller of any product has the backstop that they can ban further purchases and refuse future services. Or even potentially be required to buy their home nation.
  Why would Nitrogen gas suppliers not want this?
  As a global company, do you want to risk losing a major market by supplying a product for executions.
  If you sell your product for executions you are officially selling a poison.
  Do you want the regulation involved to have to background check every customer to ensure they are not using it for lethal purposes?
  Do you want the additional import and export controls on your product?
  Are you held liable in any way if someone deliberately uses your product for euthanasia or suicide? Potentially. That's why several countries have limits on the volume of paracetamol an individual can purchase.
  The Terms of Service is a sticking plaster, probably not even enforceable, but the bare minimum to avoid further regulations on the industry. But it's certainly worth nitrogen gas suppliers trying to avoid themselves being dragged into a hornets nest of politics, morality, and costly regulation.
  Banning a small customer, in prisons, from buying your product could save you a lot of money in the long run.
- Only for direct sales. Prisons could still just go buy through an intermediary, unless the first party sale contract also forbids that. Even then, it's questionably not enforceable. It'd be like me selling my car, but doing so with a contract stipulating that the buyer can't re-sell the car to someone that may use it for a particular (and legal) purpose.
- But they can put in efforts and contracts to prevent it.
  
  What will happen if these states violate these contracts? The companies will sue them in the very same courts that ruled the death penalties?

130 comments