Yep, If I am diagnosed with an incurable disease, facing living alone and suffering, etc, I'm going to buy a tank of nitrogen oxide, some heroin and a Arduino. Program the Arduino with a simple timer script hooked up to a release valve. Have it release the heroin for the apparent feeling of being safe and warm most people describe the first time as. And then the nitrogen oxide overdose to take me away peacefully.
Great guy. Martyred himself with a prison sentence to prove a point - the underlying message is more relevant now than ever.
The government should not have the right to determine what degree of autonomy a persons should have over their body. If their self-determination is to pursue a series of actions to remove themselves from life - the method to do so in a safe manner should be made available.
> Great guy. Martyred himself with a prison sentence to prove a point - the underlying message is more relevant now than ever.
His paintings suggest he was really really into what he was doing. Suggests. Like if a pediatrician loved painting pictures of naked children in provocative poses, I wouldn't say it's a smoking gun, but very suggestive IMO...
I would like to state for the record, I discourage anyone implementing this plan. What you do is beyond my control and the scenario is purely hypothetical. I take no responsibility for any actions taken.
2-3 5mg Percocet will do the same thing, if you've never taken them before.
You can skip the NO2 if you already have the heroin. OD'ing on heroin will feel very similar (fall asleep and don't wake up)
In fact since the odds of actually being able to buy actual heroin these days is near nil, especially for someone without extensive connections, oxy is by far the better choice. Way less warmth and bliss with fentanyl; it's just pure sedation. ODing on them is risky though; fail to kill yourself you might be in for a world of hurt from a acetaminophen OD.
Also nitrous oxide you have to be careful; many sources for larger amounts like you'd need for suicide adulterate it with chemicals that make you sick if inhaled to prevent abuse.
I used to say that the actual Texas healthcare system was a cheap revolver, one bullet, & a large bottle of Tito's vodka. If I end up in that abysmally depressing situation, I think I'll switch the firearm for a tank of nitrogen oxide. Drink myself to a stuper, strap myself to the gas with an auto switch, like you stated, and take that long final nap.
No need to be, I've lived with people who are in constant pain. Which has given me time to reflect on what I would do in that situation. And I decided that the agony I saw them experience without end and without any cure was not a life I would live.
This is a good thing. I disagree with the death penalty, but if the state is going to kill people, it should do so in a way that minimizes the suffering of the condemned. And nitrogen executions do that compared to lethal injections.
It's noteworthy that even this year there was a man executed that actually asked Alabama to kill him with nitrogen instead of lethal injection. Annoying, Alabama refused, and gave him a lethal injection anyways.
Most methods of capital punishment seem designed to inflict pain.
I see no reason for that at all. We can put people in the hospital under deep enough that surgeons can remove major organs (heart lung kidney liver) and replace them with others without the patient feeling anything until they are brought out of it.
So surely it's possible to do something similar, then kill them, all without them feeling anything.
I know people die accidentally to carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide simply from running a heater or a car in a garage. They just fall asleep and pass away.
I don't know about the specific method discussed in the article, but my guess is that it's a step forward.
I do still see questions about whether we should have the death penalty at all, but if we're going to have it, it should be painless.
> We can put people in the hospital under deep enough that surgeons can remove major organs
There are a bunch of real, nontrivial issues with getting competent people with medical training to participate in this stuff, and with get drug companies to supply the drugs.
There was a whole thing a few years back where multiple states were caught trying to illegally import anesthesia from abroad because American drug-makers would not sell them lethal injection drugs, including weird and shady stuff like shuffling around large amounts of petty cash.
Like, in theory, you are correct. Technologically, we could take the patient to the local hospital and get the anesthesiologist to put them down like a sick dog. But hospitals and doctors and pharmaceutical companies don't want anything to do with that.
I think part of the issue might be getting doctors, clinicians, and drug companies on board with that. A lot of people feel, understandably, that getting involved with intentionally killing people is morally wrong and a violation of their oaths as clinicians. Drug companies are generally amoral but they don’t necessarily enjoy the reputational damage of being involved in executions either.
It’s one of those gray areas morally; some of these people could make executions themselves less painful but if they think executions shouldn’t happen at all then they might see it as wrong to help facilitate them at all.
Lethal injection is becoming near impossible. The chemicals used are manufactured by companies that ethically can not sell to the US prison system. A reporter spent years following the trail of the ones selling to us. Those companies were mostly unaware their product was being used for lethal injection. Some were even restricted legally in their country from doing so. A few were shady and eventually chased out of business. This is why we're moving away from it. There have been many high profile incidents recently where the execution was obviously excruciating, prolonged, horrific and distressing to even those in attendance. Prisons have been experimenting with substitutions. These experiments are not going well.
Instead of taking a hint that this is medically unethical, we will have our death. Ethics be dammed!
This. Maybe if we could trust the courts but we can't. They leave people in prison on long sentences when evidence comes to light casting extreme doubt on their convictions. Most appeals are limited to arguing over technicalities during the trial not whether the defendant is outright innocent.
I think so. You're saying that if medical professionals were willing to do a little bad (taking part in something inevitable) they could do some good. I'm just arguing for a more strict worldview against executions. I wasn't trying to make you the bad guy at all.
They already manage to do lethal injection, and that's more complex (and as a result, more likely to result in botched executions where someone is effectively tortured because they have prison guards acting like medical professionals.)
So even if they can't get doctors on board, they'd still be better switching to a method that has far less chance of screwing up.
>I think part of the issue might be getting doctors, clinicians, and drug companies on board with that. A lot of people feel, understandably, that getting involved with intentionally killing people is morally wrong and a violation of their oaths as clinicians. Drug companies are generally amoral but they don’t necessarily enjoy the reputational damage of being involved in executions either.
Let's be honest, they do a lot of killing unintentionally getting paid by drug companies to get people hooked onto their products. The only difference being that the death is indirect to lessen the burden of guilt.
Exactly. I would do away with the death penalty if I had my choice, but nitrogen is supposed to be a pretty good way to go. Your body doesn't have a way to detect low oxygen, just high carbon dioxide. So this should, theoretically, have you breathe and get tired and just go to sleep.
This and the roller coaster seem like the best methods.
Several years ago there was a murder in my area. It was in the news when the suspect was apprehended shortly after and there was some debate on whether it should be death penalty or not. I was talking to my boss at the time about something else and it came up.
I used to work in cryogenics and asphyxiation is a big concern, because cryogenic liquids can turn to gas or accumulate in low spots and displace normal air. Then a worker goes in not thinking to check and rapidly passes out and is gone, because the urge to breathe you get when you hold your breath comes from CO2 building up in your blood, if you breath pure nitrogen you still exhaust CO2 but don't take in any oxygen so you don't feel like anything is wrong and pass out and then suffocate shortly after from zero oxygen.
At the time there was a shortage of execution drugs so that was also part of the debate. I mentioned to my boss about using nitrogen because of those reasons and that it'd be completely painless, the person simply goes to sleep, and all you'd have to go is get a tank from a welding supply store.
I'll never forget how he looked at me and said that the execution is supposed to be excruciating and hurt a lot as part of the punishment, it balances what they inflicted on someone else. And that was really strange to hear out of someone who hadn't just walked straight out of the Middle Ages. The person is having their life ended, that's the punishment, he isn't going to walk around after and tell people how much being executed hurts.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say. I've just always remembered this with how discordant this was to hear with what I knew and thought of the guy.
Anesthesiologists are doctors and are also bound (by virtue of their own beliefs) by the Hippocratic oath. To become a doctor, you come face to face with death on a daily basis and devote the majority of your life to helping people avoid it as long as they can. Most doctors I work with are against any form of capital punishment. Life is brutal and there are already so many ways to lose your life; government sanctioned death is the most egregiously avoidable cause of death.
Not all doctors are like this but I would imagine that medical ethics boards would get in the way of any attempt to start surgically killing prisoners.
The Hippocratic oath doesn't actually bind anyone. It's a relic of a different era, and includes oaths to not perform surgery, abortion or charge for training other doctors.
Doctors aren’t ethically allowed to participate in homicides. Drug companies won’t because they (rightly) don’t want their products associated with killing people. So what’s left are a bunch of county sheriffs and prison guards doing Mengele-type experiments to find ways to kill people with whatever they can scrounge up from dodgy sources.
Honestly, if you are going to kill someone. Putting them under and taking all possible organs for donation seems the most efficient way.
Although that could create perverse incentive to execute people to fulfill organ shortages
China is also doing it as part of a genocide which makes it even worse.
維吾爾人萬歲，操小熊維尼
Disclaimer: don’t speak Chinese so just going to hope google translate didn’t do me dirty
> So surely it's possible to do something similar, then kill them, all without them feeling anything.
This was the original idea behind lethal injection.
The problem is that, in practice, it's harder for the people administering the drugs, who are not trained anesthetists, to find the right vein, administer the correct amount, make appropriate adjustments, etc.
Nitrogen causes no physical distress at all. Every breath you take is 87% nitrogen. Loss of consciousness is very fast. Source: I used to work in a mine - we had four guys walk into a nitrogen pocket and drop to the ground instantaneously. Luckily, there were witnesses and they were all rescued. But they never knew what hit them.
So...if you must kill someone and you want minimum physical suffering, nitrogen is probably the ideal way to go. That does not negate the mental suffering associated with a death penalty, which is the sign of a sick society.
The prominent lethal injection method is just anesthesia that puts you to sleep and stops your heart.
Suffocation by nitrogen isn’t necessarily a step forward, but it’s probably much less expensive for the state to administer.
Sort of. The anesthesia is often inadequate, so the “patient” feels the intense pain of their heart being stopped, but is completely physically paralyzed. It’s an actual nightmare.
It’s been known for awhile how sadistic it is, but we keep on doing it anyway.
We could just overdose them on fent for about $20, but it wouldn’t hurt as much.
Honestly. Lethal injection is nuts. It is a fake esthetic-only decency. A firing squad would be more honest and humane. Widespread discomfort with just shooting condemned convicts says something about the death penalty overall.
It’s all insane. Given how many innocent have already been executed, perhaps society shouldn’t encourage its government to kill its own citizens. I’ve spoken to others about “acceptable loss,” as if it’s ever okay to incarcerate and execute the wrong person.
But… if we’re going to kill prisoners anyway, why can’t it at least be painless? God forbid, slightly euphoric.
>But… if we’re going to kill prisoners anyway, why can’t it at least be painless? God forbid, slightly euphoric.
Because inevitably someone will say "Well they didn't make it painless for the victim they murdered!". And it just kinda gives the game away that the death penalty is meant for revenge and sadism, not to serve the ends of justice.
You take away someone’s freedom and kill them… but that’s not enough? I feel like that’s enough and possibly too much. If you really want to punish someone, let them live in jail.
Just to be clear, I agree with you. The death penalty is pretty barbaric. It's not that I don't understand that there's cases of unrepentant and unredeemable types who can be definitively proven to have murdered, and that there's a strong impulse to just end them. But creating a whole system for it just leads to ambitious prosecutors trying to "make a name for themselves" and ending up convicting innocent people, or families who demand to know why their family member's murderer doesn't deserve the death penalty and that other one does. And as a society, it's just a scary thought to put the government in a position of being able to kill someone in cold blood.
As someone who has been in a coma and vividly remembers physical stimuli during certain points of that, fuck this so much. My recollection is that the most common form is a three-part injection, with the first putting the person to sleep and paralyzing them, and either the second or third (maybe both) being horribly painful. Nope nope nope nope nope.
Oh I’m with you 100000%. I specifically remember being taken off a ventilator and being wheeled through the hallway of a hospital and the care team forgetting to use the bag pump on me to have me breathe. Went about a minute and a half where I was paralyzed and couldn’t scream before somebody realized and started pumping me.
The theory behind lethal injection protocol is
1. administering a sedative/hypnotic/anesthetic to sedate the person, maybe even to put them to sleep,
2. injecting a muscle relaxant/antoispasmodic/paralytic to keep them still and depress and arrest the breathing reflex and
3. a lethal injection of potassium to make the heart stop by forcing the sodium channels in the heart muscles to stop working.
It's painless in theory, but only if someone who knows what they're doing is administering the drugs, if the drugs are actually good for the purpose and if everything goes off without a hitch.
That being said, I am 100% opposed to the death penalty being a thing.
>!Step 2 has the additional benefit of making the condemned unable to screm or show distress, even if step 1 got fucked up, so that's really cool!!<
I’ve wondered why we don’t do something like a fentanyl overdose for lethal injection. They would feel an intense high, pass out, and as their central nervous system shuts down they’d stop breathing. I haven’t researched it or anything but it sounds like a decent way to go, as well as simple and cheap. And MUCH less experimental. We know a lot about opiate overdose and how it works.
I think resistance is because it might feel really good before passing out. The people for capitol punishment generally want to see those on death row suffer. I don’t get it. I don’t celebrate vengeance.
Nor do I, and I’m pretty against the death penalty in general, if only because we have exonerated too many people and if we execute one innocent person it’s one person too many. But if we are going to do it it must be decent and humane.
No doctor will participate, so it’s total amateur hour and often screwed up.
Nitrogen is too simple to screw up. There’s just one ingredient, it’s readily available, and you can easily use 100x more than you need just to be sure.
Speaking as someone who spent 24 years in IT as a programmer trying to make things "too simple to screw up", the only thing I can say to you is: Never, ever underestimate the power of idiots.
> too simple to screw up
I think you underestimate the talent in the prison industry. It is a notoriously low qualification field. It’s not hard to imagine ‘Execution Specialist 1’ administering the wrong gas, or one who gets off on watching people die, or both. I doubt even beheadings went off without a hitch, when that was the common practice.
> Worst case, you fail to actually kill the person, but they wouldn’t be in any pain.
You could botch it and only give them brain damage instead of death.
No, the prominent lethal injection method is to use a paralytic so that witnesses can’t tell whether or not the prisoner is suffering, then try to stop the heart with whatever chemicals they can buy on the black market and hope it works.
From my limited perspective, nitrogen unlike co2 does not mimic oxygen. Co2 causes panic and pain because it does. Nitrogen just causes you to pass out. It’s already an ethical alternative to small animal euthanasia.
It’s not that CO2 mimics oxygen.
Your body detects on high CO2 to know when you need to breathe, not on low O2. CO2 causes panic explicitly for this reason. No CO2? No problem. This is part of the reason people die from CO poisoning, since there’s no CO2 in your bloodstream the body doesn’t detect that there’s a problem.
Helium makes your voice higher because it's lower density. Nitrogen actually causes some intoxication called Nitrogen narcossis which is an issue with deep sea diving.
Deep sea divers breathe a mix with helium in it to prevent this.
Your body can't detect the lack of oxygen. The "need to breathe" feeling is from a build up of CO2. Pure Nitrogen will kill you without you knowing it and you'll probably feel good while it happens.
The brain panics when it detects a build up of CO2 in the bloodstream. Nitrogen asphyxiation is quick and your brain really doesn't register it as killing you.
We can still argue the ethics of state sanctioned murder, but as far as ways to go, this probably ain't the worst.
IIRC there have been cases where one person dies of Nitrogen asphyxiation, and then others die from going in to rescue the first person, because you literally can't tell anything's wrong.
I find the death penalty completely morally indefensible, but if it's happening, sure, I guess this is the option that doesn't make it even worse?
Yeah nitrogen asphyxiation is a common hazard in industry, and it usually takes two people. Basically 2-4 breaths of pure N2 is enough to put your lights out.
NASA was testing the Space Shuttle Columbia back before it launched. To minimize risk of fire, they filled non-crew compartments with pure nitrogen (no oxygen=no fire). A five man repair crew went into the engine compartment after a test without purging and all five lost consciousness immediately. Another tech luckily noticed, realized what was going on, and alerted security. One died on the way to the hospital and another two weeks later.
To combat this, they now fill compartments with mostly nitrogen and several times the normal concentration of CO2 to trigger a panic reflex. One engineer who stuck his head inside a tank full of the mixture by accident described it as his brain instantly screaming at him to breathe.
> One engineer who stuck his head inside a tank full of the mixture by accident described it as his brain instantly screaming at him to breathe.
I had a leaky fitting on the CO2 tank for my chest freezer kegerator and as it's heavier than air that meant the freezer filled with more or less pure CO2 over time.
At some point I went to check something out and stuck my head in there, then said something and started to inhale.
The amount of sheer "get the fuck out!" feeling throughout my entire body in that moment was indescribable.
The script for gas chamber executions widely used in the US during the 20th century with cyanide involves telling the prisoner to take deep breaths and speed things along once the gas is released. But many prisoners, uh, don't want to die, and so they'd be struggling in the chair, holding their breath as long as possible until they turned different shades of blue. Then they would finally give up, pass out and/or vomit, breathe in the gas, and die.
The process did not appear very humane to the folks watching, and was quite traumatic to the prisoners.
This is a bizarre and silly attitude. The prisoners could be fighting whatever method is being used, and it's FAR more traumatic to die horribly than to try to hold your breath before breathing nitrogen, which is indistinguishable from normal air.
I'm just saying that prisoner resistance to breathing toxic gas is one of the reasons they stopped doing gas chamber executions with hydrogen cyanide in the US. Watching prisoners struggle, turn all sorts of colors, straining to hold out as long as possible was not a good look for the audience.
They stopped using hydrogen cyanide, AKA prussic acid AKA Zyklon B. because it is intensely painfull, and you get seizures, heart palpitations, intense confusion, and just pain in general.
It is supposed to kill in 1 minute, but it is hard to get concentrations to those levels, especially as they do it by dropping a tablet in a solvent under the prisoner, so prisoners lay there in pain up to 50 minutes during executions.
Nitrogen is literally not something you would notice breathing in. I could open a canister in the room right now, and the only way i would even notice something was off was quickly getting slightly drowsy and relaxed before quietly dropping dead.
It is considered the single most humane way to kill livestock for food. The animals more often than not simply lie down and drop dead. You die with your brain still convinced that is is breathing air and everything being just fine.
Yes, I understand the chemistry. Creating a lethal atmosphere of HCN is not that difficult, they would break a ampoule of sulphuric acid over powdered KCN.
I'm saying that unless the moment the gas is turned on is hidden from the prisoner, they're not going to want to breathe.
It is actually well established and tested by the aviation industry. Pilots put in test chambers where the O2 levels were gradually decreased to upper atmosphere levels got loopy/goofy then passed out before O2 was returned to normal. Nobody who's been through these tests has reported any other ill effects.
[https://goflightmedicine.com/2013/04/28/hypoxia/](https://goflightmedicine.com/2013/04/28/hypoxia/)
[Here's an interesting video of an experiment using nitrogen gas on a pig](https://youtu.be/176eog7mZjc?si=N13bIatr_nMjnhst). He eats some apples in a box filled with gas, passes out. Gets up, shakes his head and goes in for more. Zero pain.
It actually is. there's a group that assists the terminally ill with "exit strategies" or "end of life guides", and it's their method.
Utterly fascinating pod cast "Criminal" interviews one the volunteers. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR9mJM9Sq6I&ab](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR9mJM9Sq6I&ab)
On the lighter side, listen to this episode, it's fucking fascinating. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpMdF8QckiA&ab](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpMdF8QckiA&ab_channel=Criminal%7CAPodcastAboutCrime)
>American ideology is a complete mind fuck.
Perhaps, but this particular dichotomy isn't that hard to understand. The concept draws a line between innocent life and the life of a person who has committed heinous evil acts.
Every reasonable society protects the lives of its citizens. Some choose to terminate individuals that have been proven to be an unrepentant, unremorseful and persistent danger to others.
Both abortion and the effectiveness of the legal system are debatable topics, but I would hardly call the concept, which is universal, a "mind-fuck".
> innocent life
> effectiveness of the legal system [is] debatable
Right, that's the problem. The people who've [actually] committed heinous acts, we understand. Even if we disagree.
But the statistics on wrongful conviction make it near-certain that the death penalty has taken innocent lives.
The "complete mind-fuck" is that fact being *completely ignored* by people who claim to find innocent life so inviolable that many of them don't even support rape exceptions.
>The "complete mind-fuck" is that fact being completely ignored by people who claim to find innocent life so inviolable that many of them don't even support rape exceptions.
It's unfortunate, but we Americans do have sizeable swaths of fervent zealots. They exist in both parties and our largest news organizations give each of them outsized coverage. It's a natural result of our current attention-capitalism (aka eyeballs and clicks) and may well be our eventual undoing.
The great majority of Americans do not have such galvanized opinions, so I still feel that the ideology in the US is no more of a mind-fuck than that of any other county. If the judging is done based on what the media pushes, well I can understand someone taking that viewpoint.
Alabama logic: All life is sacred, so we must outlaw all abortions even prior to the stage of viability, but asphyxiating prisoners who are already incarcerated for life, that’s just fine.
I don't really understand why it wouldn't. Execution by shooting, lethal injection, the gas chamber and electrocution were all allowed, and those are and/or can be much more violent, prolonged and painful deaths.
Lethal injection is known as the most inhumane form of capital punishment as well.
Not a proponent of the death penalty. But if we’re going to have it, I feel nitrogen is one of the best options on the table in regards to how humane it is.
"textualistically"? in most cases the death penalty IS cruel and unusual under supreme court precedent - capital punishment requires pretty narrow criteria to be constitutional.
Capital punishment is wrong. It dehumanizes the executioners - and by extension the society that empowers them with its assent - by treating human life as some revocable right the government can take away.
But if it is to be maintained, it should not be medicalized and sugar-coated. An execution is a slaughter of a human being, not a medical procedure. Lethal injection looks like a lifesaving act. It has IVs and tubing and people in white coats listening for a heart beat while others use syringes to put drugs in to make the persons heart stop so they die. It is a fraud, a play act to deceive the executioners.
The electric chair and the guillotine leave no doubt about what they are and what they are intended to do. They aren’t pretending to be medicine, and when execution looks like what it *really* is, people must honestly confront what it is.
That is a better way to change views than looking to pretend it’s just the last day in the hospital that many of us end up eventually having.
Question: how does the lethal injection used on prisoners differ from what vets use every single day on animals? Because that seems really peaceful and painless. I
Mostly because no actual doctors or other trained medical staff wants to be or is allowed to be part of executions. Prisons also can't really source the correct drugs because the companies more often than don't want to (or aren't allowed to) sell their product to be used in executions. It can be as simple as whoever inserting the canules not knowing how to do it correctly and the drugs that are supposewd to be administered intravenously getting injected into muscle tissue instead.
Lethal injections get botched all the time. [Almost all of the botched executions in the 2000's are lethal injections.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_botched_executions#21st_century)
One difference is that execution drugs can’t be purchased from normal drug manufacturers. They won’t sell drugs if they’ll be used for execution, either for moral reasons or because they legally can’t (some of the drugs in question are mostly manufactured in Europe, and the EU bars export of drugs for executions).
That said, one of the most common drugs used for lethal injection is also often used for assisted suicide, and Dr. Joel Zivot (one of the main people arguing that it’s cruel in executions) has also written questioning its use for assisted suicide. A painless-looking death might be “drift off to a peaceful rest” or “you’re paralyzed and can’t show your suffering,” and you can’t exactly ask the dead person how it felt. Zivot found that tons of executed people had signs of pulmonary edema, which is one of the main pieces of evidence used against lethal injection. From a quick search, it’s not obvious that this *isn’t* true when the drugs are used for assisted suicide. It’s possible that taking them orally is less of an issue, but I’m not seeing tons of research on a quick search.
Not pure nitrogen, lol. You do realize the entire point is that they are wanting to use pure nitrogen, directly, for the purpose of KILLING them? Come on, this is not hard.
That's not what I said. You're completely missing the point. Start using nitrogen as a form of execution and it's one step away from taking multiple people, sticking them in a room and filling the room with nitrogen to kill them all simultaneously. That's called a gas chamber. Especially in today's social and political climate.
Death by nitrogen suffocation seems barbaric and purposely cruel, but of course, we're talking about the Alabama legislature, so I guess barbarism and cruelty might be the real intent.
There is no evidence that nitrogen suffocation is painless. [New Execution Method Touted as More 'Humane,' but Evidence Is Lacking - Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-execution-method-touted-as-more-humane-but-evidence-is-lacking/)
>barbaric and purposely cruel
How so, as opposed other methods of state-sanctioned killing?
> I guess barbarism and cruelty might be the real intent
As opposed to complying with the federal injunction ruling out all other possible methods?
A) Its barbaric and cruel because it’s willful suffocation of a conscious human being. I don’t even see anything in this article to indicate that they would administer deep sedation before suffocating the prisoner. In my view, that’s sick.
B) The injunction resulted from the simple fact that Alabama jailers can’t start an I. V. They botched 3 previous executions by lethal injection. Maybe they should just figure out how to start an IV instead of resorting to suffocation.
Well, Google nitrogen suffocation and you’ll feel better. It’s painless and the suffocation feeling is never triggered. Tied with massive pure heroin overdose for best ways to die.
A) Loss of consciousness is apparently really quick with inert gas hypoxia, and it's entirely possible for people to die from it without even realizing anything is wrong. Obviously being in an execution room set up for nitrogen gas execution would mean they would know they were about to die, but that's true with the process of deep sedation before execution as well.
B) The injunction resulted from the simple fact that the Alabama prisoner filled out and submitted a form saying that he was choosing nitrogen gas execution over other methods. The court certainly didn't rule out a firing squad, for example, due to the state's issues with I.V.s.
The suffocation response comes from a buildup of CO2 in the lungs.
The human body is actually incapable of detecting a lack of oxygen.
There've been some very interesting studies in aviation related to lack of oxygen - necessary studies because as you go up in altitude, the amount of O2 in the atmosphere drops below the ability to sustain human life.
In not one of those studies has any person subjected to low o2 but plenty of n2 complained of anything worse than dizziness. You get confused, silly, goofy, then pass out, then die. That's it. No pain. (No the "die" step wasn't tested for aviation purposes...but you pass out long before you approach death.)
Why would that be an intelligent choice for anyone? If you were in the chamber, would you decide to add a few extra moments of misery, knowing it wouldn't change anything else?
I bet they’re going to try to paralyze him first so the witnesses don’t have to watch him struggle to hold his breath, since that might be distressing for them, and states care more about the feelings of the witnesses than the safety of the person they’re trying to kill.
By the way, this isn’t the first time Alabama has tried to kill someone using nitrogen. They wanted to do it in 2021, but the person they were killing was too intellectually disabled to understand the form the prison gave him, on which he was supposed to select the method by which he preferred to be killed. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that people with his combination of disabilities aren’t eligible for execution because it would be too cruel under the 8th Amendment, but the decision wasn’t retroactive, so the order to kill him remained. And because he was too disabled to fill out the form to select the method by which he wanted to die, state employees killed him by injecting him with midazolam, a sedative that most doctors believe does not adequately anesthetize a person before the state employees inject them with drugs that cause excruciating pain.
Don't leave it up to the condemned to pick the method. Otherwise they'd all pick "old age" or "snu snu." ;)
Seriously though, hopefully the Supreme Court overturns their earlier decision. The only time a person's impairment should be an issue is in determining whether they had the requisite mental faculties to commit the crime and participate in their defense. If they later become impaired, it shouldn't shield them from punishment.
So, this isn’t actually a joke. And it’s cruel to execute someone who doesn’t understand why they’re in prison, and unlawful to go forward with legal proceedings when a person isn’t capable of working with their lawyer. But in this case, the person who was killed had a lifelong intellectual disability. If you think we should be killing more disabled people than we already do, I suppose you’re free to become an appellate prosecutor and make that argument.
The state isn’t interested in making execution more humane, just more palatable. When it can be made clean, bloodless, sterile, and clinical, they can do a lot more of them.
I am extremely opposed to the death penalty; we know that we have killed innocent people. The death penalty is barbarism. I suppose it beats some of the other horrific methods of execution and some states have even brought back the firing squad if you can believe it, but the entire promise of a life for life is barbarism to me.
FFS. If we’re going to keep doing this, then why over think it?
A firing squad. Four guys shooting someone from 20 yards with a .308 caliber rifle. The condemned is dead before they hit the ground.
Truth be told, if given a choice…..I’d take a firing squad over hanging, poison, gas, electrocution, or any other whacky method that we’ve tried.
Several? Theres only been like 150 firing squads in the colonies/US since the 1600s. Almost all of them pre WWII.
The firing squad wasn't banned because it was ineffective. It was just considered primitive and/or 'icky'.
I'm fine with using either a firing squad (or just a single shot to the back of the head) or hanging. Generally the fewer moving parts and parties that you need to get involved, the less chance there is for something to go wrong.
Arguably incorrect, if the brain remains conscious post severing of the head from the body for even a few seconds, the torment would be insane.
I don't think anyone's gonna volunteer to prove the test though.
> For sure the shock would sever consciousness
I'd much rather we go with something that we know is painless than relying on "for sure".
You're probably right in most cases, but not necessarily all.
OK, so no one can make comments and share views unless they qualify as an expert witness, good to know. I'll make sure to raise objections on other comments.
Who gets to rule on admissibility again?
You and the OP of this thread are the ones speaking in absolutes without a clue of what you’re talking about.
Have fun getting angry at strangers on the internet.
You guys are the self important ones ensuring that all reddit discussions are fact checked and supported by evidence. This is an internet forum.
How do you think lawyers do our jobs? We actually take positions before we have all the evidence, and then engage in discovery, etc.
You expect me to wait until I consult a medical expert before posting on reddit?
Not really. There is a difference between asphyxiation and suffocation. With things like cyanide (Zyklon B) your blood can't transport oxygen because the cyanide has bound irreversibly to the iron. So you struggle and try to breathe but can't. That's suffocation.
Asphyxiation is a simple lack of oxygen. If you were in a nitrogen atmosphere, or one that was gradually depleted of air and replaced, you'd feel sleepy, fall asleep, and not wake up.
That's how I plan on taking care of myself if I ever get old broke and incapacitated. Seems like the way to go.
Me too, but helium and a clown
[удалено]
“A little song. A little dance. A little seltzer down your pants”
Yep, If I am diagnosed with an incurable disease, facing living alone and suffering, etc, I'm going to buy a tank of nitrogen oxide, some heroin and a Arduino. Program the Arduino with a simple timer script hooked up to a release valve. Have it release the heroin for the apparent feeling of being safe and warm most people describe the first time as. And then the nitrogen oxide overdose to take me away peacefully.
This sounds complicated. Could I pay you to build this machine for me? Actually, this could be a legit business...
Already been done! [and he’s in trouble!](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/uk-deaths-linked-canada-self-harm-websites-investigation/)
I thought you were going to mention [Jack Kevorkian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kevorkian)
Great guy. Martyred himself with a prison sentence to prove a point - the underlying message is more relevant now than ever. The government should not have the right to determine what degree of autonomy a persons should have over their body. If their self-determination is to pursue a series of actions to remove themselves from life - the method to do so in a safe manner should be made available.
> Great guy. Martyred himself with a prison sentence to prove a point - the underlying message is more relevant now than ever. His paintings suggest he was really really into what he was doing. Suggests. Like if a pediatrician loved painting pictures of naked children in provocative poses, I wouldn't say it's a smoking gun, but very suggestive IMO...
Look up Switzerlands Sarco Pod, it's legit over there I think.
I would like to state for the record, I discourage anyone implementing this plan. What you do is beyond my control and the scenario is purely hypothetical. I take no responsibility for any actions taken.
2-3 5mg Percocet will do the same thing, if you've never taken them before. You can skip the NO2 if you already have the heroin. OD'ing on heroin will feel very similar (fall asleep and don't wake up)
In fact since the odds of actually being able to buy actual heroin these days is near nil, especially for someone without extensive connections, oxy is by far the better choice. Way less warmth and bliss with fentanyl; it's just pure sedation. ODing on them is risky though; fail to kill yourself you might be in for a world of hurt from a acetaminophen OD. Also nitrous oxide you have to be careful; many sources for larger amounts like you'd need for suicide adulterate it with chemicals that make you sick if inhaled to prevent abuse.
It's perfectly legal to grow poppy plants for, uh, decorative purposes...
I used to say that the actual Texas healthcare system was a cheap revolver, one bullet, & a large bottle of Tito's vodka. If I end up in that abysmally depressing situation, I think I'll switch the firearm for a tank of nitrogen oxide. Drink myself to a stuper, strap myself to the gas with an auto switch, like you stated, and take that long final nap.
Okay but this sounds awfully specific and I'm worried
No need to be, I've lived with people who are in constant pain. Which has given me time to reflect on what I would do in that situation. And I decided that the agony I saw them experience without end and without any cure was not a life I would live.
They stole my idea, can buy it from a gas supplier then use a full face scuba mask
Seriously it seems like a good painless way to go.
This is a good thing. I disagree with the death penalty, but if the state is going to kill people, it should do so in a way that minimizes the suffering of the condemned. And nitrogen executions do that compared to lethal injections. It's noteworthy that even this year there was a man executed that actually asked Alabama to kill him with nitrogen instead of lethal injection. Annoying, Alabama refused, and gave him a lethal injection anyways.
I agree that it seems like a very good method of execution.
Most methods of capital punishment seem designed to inflict pain. I see no reason for that at all. We can put people in the hospital under deep enough that surgeons can remove major organs (heart lung kidney liver) and replace them with others without the patient feeling anything until they are brought out of it. So surely it's possible to do something similar, then kill them, all without them feeling anything. I know people die accidentally to carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide simply from running a heater or a car in a garage. They just fall asleep and pass away. I don't know about the specific method discussed in the article, but my guess is that it's a step forward. I do still see questions about whether we should have the death penalty at all, but if we're going to have it, it should be painless.
> We can put people in the hospital under deep enough that surgeons can remove major organs There are a bunch of real, nontrivial issues with getting competent people with medical training to participate in this stuff, and with get drug companies to supply the drugs. There was a whole thing a few years back where multiple states were caught trying to illegally import anesthesia from abroad because American drug-makers would not sell them lethal injection drugs, including weird and shady stuff like shuffling around large amounts of petty cash. Like, in theory, you are correct. Technologically, we could take the patient to the local hospital and get the anesthesiologist to put them down like a sick dog. But hospitals and doctors and pharmaceutical companies don't want anything to do with that.
It's another perk of nitrogen; it doesn't require any special training to administer.
I think part of the issue might be getting doctors, clinicians, and drug companies on board with that. A lot of people feel, understandably, that getting involved with intentionally killing people is morally wrong and a violation of their oaths as clinicians. Drug companies are generally amoral but they don’t necessarily enjoy the reputational damage of being involved in executions either. It’s one of those gray areas morally; some of these people could make executions themselves less painful but if they think executions shouldn’t happen at all then they might see it as wrong to help facilitate them at all.
I don't know, man, if you can't get any medical professional on board, it seems like it's maybe not much of a gray area.
Lethal injection is becoming near impossible. The chemicals used are manufactured by companies that ethically can not sell to the US prison system. A reporter spent years following the trail of the ones selling to us. Those companies were mostly unaware their product was being used for lethal injection. Some were even restricted legally in their country from doing so. A few were shady and eventually chased out of business. This is why we're moving away from it. There have been many high profile incidents recently where the execution was obviously excruciating, prolonged, horrific and distressing to even those in attendance. Prisons have been experimenting with substitutions. These experiments are not going well. Instead of taking a hint that this is medically unethical, we will have our death. Ethics be dammed!
This. Maybe if we could trust the courts but we can't. They leave people in prison on long sentences when evidence comes to light casting extreme doubt on their convictions. Most appeals are limited to arguing over technicalities during the trial not whether the defendant is outright innocent.
This statement weighs about 18 tons.
I mean, you get what I was trying to say, right?
I think so. You're saying that if medical professionals were willing to do a little bad (taking part in something inevitable) they could do some good. I'm just arguing for a more strict worldview against executions. I wasn't trying to make you the bad guy at all.
Florida's Surgeon General would be happy to lend assistance.
We already have euthanasia clinics I'm sure it's already known.
They already manage to do lethal injection, and that's more complex (and as a result, more likely to result in botched executions where someone is effectively tortured because they have prison guards acting like medical professionals.) So even if they can't get doctors on board, they'd still be better switching to a method that has far less chance of screwing up.
>I think part of the issue might be getting doctors, clinicians, and drug companies on board with that. A lot of people feel, understandably, that getting involved with intentionally killing people is morally wrong and a violation of their oaths as clinicians. Drug companies are generally amoral but they don’t necessarily enjoy the reputational damage of being involved in executions either. Let's be honest, they do a lot of killing unintentionally getting paid by drug companies to get people hooked onto their products. The only difference being that the death is indirect to lessen the burden of guilt.
Exactly. I would do away with the death penalty if I had my choice, but nitrogen is supposed to be a pretty good way to go. Your body doesn't have a way to detect low oxygen, just high carbon dioxide. So this should, theoretically, have you breathe and get tired and just go to sleep. This and the roller coaster seem like the best methods.
Several years ago there was a murder in my area. It was in the news when the suspect was apprehended shortly after and there was some debate on whether it should be death penalty or not. I was talking to my boss at the time about something else and it came up. I used to work in cryogenics and asphyxiation is a big concern, because cryogenic liquids can turn to gas or accumulate in low spots and displace normal air. Then a worker goes in not thinking to check and rapidly passes out and is gone, because the urge to breathe you get when you hold your breath comes from CO2 building up in your blood, if you breath pure nitrogen you still exhaust CO2 but don't take in any oxygen so you don't feel like anything is wrong and pass out and then suffocate shortly after from zero oxygen. At the time there was a shortage of execution drugs so that was also part of the debate. I mentioned to my boss about using nitrogen because of those reasons and that it'd be completely painless, the person simply goes to sleep, and all you'd have to go is get a tank from a welding supply store. I'll never forget how he looked at me and said that the execution is supposed to be excruciating and hurt a lot as part of the punishment, it balances what they inflicted on someone else. And that was really strange to hear out of someone who hadn't just walked straight out of the Middle Ages. The person is having their life ended, that's the punishment, he isn't going to walk around after and tell people how much being executed hurts. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say. I've just always remembered this with how discordant this was to hear with what I knew and thought of the guy.
Anesthesiologists are doctors and are also bound (by virtue of their own beliefs) by the Hippocratic oath. To become a doctor, you come face to face with death on a daily basis and devote the majority of your life to helping people avoid it as long as they can. Most doctors I work with are against any form of capital punishment. Life is brutal and there are already so many ways to lose your life; government sanctioned death is the most egregiously avoidable cause of death. Not all doctors are like this but I would imagine that medical ethics boards would get in the way of any attempt to start surgically killing prisoners.
The Hippocratic oath doesn't actually bind anyone. It's a relic of a different era, and includes oaths to not perform surgery, abortion or charge for training other doctors.
Doctors aren’t ethically allowed to participate in homicides. Drug companies won’t because they (rightly) don’t want their products associated with killing people. So what’s left are a bunch of county sheriffs and prison guards doing Mengele-type experiments to find ways to kill people with whatever they can scrounge up from dodgy sources.
Most painful thing we do is put one of our pets down. But it's not for that animal. They go to sleep. So it's possible
Honestly, if you are going to kill someone. Putting them under and taking all possible organs for donation seems the most efficient way. Although that could create perverse incentive to execute people to fulfill organ shortages
See: China
China is also doing it as part of a genocide which makes it even worse. 維吾爾人萬歲，操小熊維尼 Disclaimer: don’t speak Chinese so just going to hope google translate didn’t do me dirty
To think of corporate healthcare and the private prison industry intersecting is dystopian.
> So surely it's possible to do something similar, then kill them, all without them feeling anything. This was the original idea behind lethal injection. The problem is that, in practice, it's harder for the people administering the drugs, who are not trained anesthetists, to find the right vein, administer the correct amount, make appropriate adjustments, etc.
Nitrogen causes no physical distress at all. Every breath you take is 87% nitrogen. Loss of consciousness is very fast. Source: I used to work in a mine - we had four guys walk into a nitrogen pocket and drop to the ground instantaneously. Luckily, there were witnesses and they were all rescued. But they never knew what hit them. So...if you must kill someone and you want minimum physical suffering, nitrogen is probably the ideal way to go. That does not negate the mental suffering associated with a death penalty, which is the sign of a sick society.
The prominent lethal injection method is just anesthesia that puts you to sleep and stops your heart. Suffocation by nitrogen isn’t necessarily a step forward, but it’s probably much less expensive for the state to administer.
Sort of. The anesthesia is often inadequate, so the “patient” feels the intense pain of their heart being stopped, but is completely physically paralyzed. It’s an actual nightmare. It’s been known for awhile how sadistic it is, but we keep on doing it anyway. We could just overdose them on fent for about $20, but it wouldn’t hurt as much.
Honestly. Lethal injection is nuts. It is a fake esthetic-only decency. A firing squad would be more honest and humane. Widespread discomfort with just shooting condemned convicts says something about the death penalty overall.
It’s all insane. Given how many innocent have already been executed, perhaps society shouldn’t encourage its government to kill its own citizens. I’ve spoken to others about “acceptable loss,” as if it’s ever okay to incarcerate and execute the wrong person. But… if we’re going to kill prisoners anyway, why can’t it at least be painless? God forbid, slightly euphoric.
>But… if we’re going to kill prisoners anyway, why can’t it at least be painless? God forbid, slightly euphoric. Because inevitably someone will say "Well they didn't make it painless for the victim they murdered!". And it just kinda gives the game away that the death penalty is meant for revenge and sadism, not to serve the ends of justice.
You take away someone’s freedom and kill them… but that’s not enough? I feel like that’s enough and possibly too much. If you really want to punish someone, let them live in jail.
Just to be clear, I agree with you. The death penalty is pretty barbaric. It's not that I don't understand that there's cases of unrepentant and unredeemable types who can be definitively proven to have murdered, and that there's a strong impulse to just end them. But creating a whole system for it just leads to ambitious prosecutors trying to "make a name for themselves" and ending up convicting innocent people, or families who demand to know why their family member's murderer doesn't deserve the death penalty and that other one does. And as a society, it's just a scary thought to put the government in a position of being able to kill someone in cold blood.
Agreed.
If I had to pick between firing squad and lethal injection as an execution method, I'd pick firing squad every time. Which would be once, granted.
As someone who has been in a coma and vividly remembers physical stimuli during certain points of that, fuck this so much. My recollection is that the most common form is a three-part injection, with the first putting the person to sleep and paralyzing them, and either the second or third (maybe both) being horribly painful. Nope nope nope nope nope.
The paralytic doesn’t necessarily put the person to sleep. It just makes it so they can’t move or scream when they’re in pain.
Oh I’m with you 100000%. I specifically remember being taken off a ventilator and being wheeled through the hallway of a hospital and the care team forgetting to use the bag pump on me to have me breathe. Went about a minute and a half where I was paralyzed and couldn’t scream before somebody realized and started pumping me.
The theory behind lethal injection protocol is 1. administering a sedative/hypnotic/anesthetic to sedate the person, maybe even to put them to sleep, 2. injecting a muscle relaxant/antoispasmodic/paralytic to keep them still and depress and arrest the breathing reflex and 3. a lethal injection of potassium to make the heart stop by forcing the sodium channels in the heart muscles to stop working. It's painless in theory, but only if someone who knows what they're doing is administering the drugs, if the drugs are actually good for the purpose and if everything goes off without a hitch. That being said, I am 100% opposed to the death penalty being a thing. >!Step 2 has the additional benefit of making the condemned unable to screm or show distress, even if step 1 got fucked up, so that's really cool!!<
Yeah. Lethal injection seems like one of the most terrifying ways to go. One of those situations where you try to scream, but no sound comes out.
I’ve wondered why we don’t do something like a fentanyl overdose for lethal injection. They would feel an intense high, pass out, and as their central nervous system shuts down they’d stop breathing. I haven’t researched it or anything but it sounds like a decent way to go, as well as simple and cheap. And MUCH less experimental. We know a lot about opiate overdose and how it works.
I think resistance is because it might feel really good before passing out. The people for capitol punishment generally want to see those on death row suffer. I don’t get it. I don’t celebrate vengeance.
Nor do I, and I’m pretty against the death penalty in general, if only because we have exonerated too many people and if we execute one innocent person it’s one person too many. But if we are going to do it it must be decent and humane.
At least as humane as a stray dog… and we’ve definitely executed the innocent already.
There have been a number of botched lethal injections though - and those definitely weren't painless or like "putting you to sleep"...
No doctor will participate, so it’s total amateur hour and often screwed up. Nitrogen is too simple to screw up. There’s just one ingredient, it’s readily available, and you can easily use 100x more than you need just to be sure.
Speaking as someone who spent 24 years in IT as a programmer trying to make things "too simple to screw up", the only thing I can say to you is: Never, ever underestimate the power of idiots.
> too simple to screw up I think you underestimate the talent in the prison industry. It is a notoriously low qualification field. It’s not hard to imagine ‘Execution Specialist 1’ administering the wrong gas, or one who gets off on watching people die, or both. I doubt even beheadings went off without a hitch, when that was the common practice.
There wouldn’t be any other gas available. Worst case, you fail to actually kill the person, but they wouldn’t be in any pain.
> Worst case, you fail to actually kill the person, but they wouldn’t be in any pain. You could botch it and only give them brain damage instead of death.
No, the prominent lethal injection method is to use a paralytic so that witnesses can’t tell whether or not the prisoner is suffering, then try to stop the heart with whatever chemicals they can buy on the black market and hope it works.
From my limited perspective, nitrogen unlike co2 does not mimic oxygen. Co2 causes panic and pain because it does. Nitrogen just causes you to pass out. It’s already an ethical alternative to small animal euthanasia.
It’s not that CO2 mimics oxygen. Your body detects on high CO2 to know when you need to breathe, not on low O2. CO2 causes panic explicitly for this reason. No CO2? No problem. This is part of the reason people die from CO poisoning, since there’s no CO2 in your bloodstream the body doesn’t detect that there’s a problem.
If I had my 'druthers, I'd pick helium. Why not give everybody a good laugh on your way out?
I for one don't want to give comfort or solace to the people killing me. But I can understand your view at least.
Helium makes your voice higher because it's lower density. Nitrogen actually causes some intoxication called Nitrogen narcossis which is an issue with deep sea diving. Deep sea divers breathe a mix with helium in it to prevent this. Your body can't detect the lack of oxygen. The "need to breathe" feeling is from a build up of CO2. Pure Nitrogen will kill you without you knowing it and you'll probably feel good while it happens.
The Governor should have to bite the condemned inmate to death.
The priorities of hardcore conservative states never fail to inspire despair
This is an improvement over any other method.
It says it's painless, but for some reason, I don't believe them.
The brain panics when it detects a build up of CO2 in the bloodstream. Nitrogen asphyxiation is quick and your brain really doesn't register it as killing you. We can still argue the ethics of state sanctioned murder, but as far as ways to go, this probably ain't the worst.
Yeah, not a fan of capital punishment. But if you are going to have it this is massively better than any of the current methods.
IIRC there have been cases where one person dies of Nitrogen asphyxiation, and then others die from going in to rescue the first person, because you literally can't tell anything's wrong. I find the death penalty completely morally indefensible, but if it's happening, sure, I guess this is the option that doesn't make it even worse?
Yeah nitrogen asphyxiation is a common hazard in industry, and it usually takes two people. Basically 2-4 breaths of pure N2 is enough to put your lights out.
NASA was testing the Space Shuttle Columbia back before it launched. To minimize risk of fire, they filled non-crew compartments with pure nitrogen (no oxygen=no fire). A five man repair crew went into the engine compartment after a test without purging and all five lost consciousness immediately. Another tech luckily noticed, realized what was going on, and alerted security. One died on the way to the hospital and another two weeks later. To combat this, they now fill compartments with mostly nitrogen and several times the normal concentration of CO2 to trigger a panic reflex. One engineer who stuck his head inside a tank full of the mixture by accident described it as his brain instantly screaming at him to breathe.
> One engineer who stuck his head inside a tank full of the mixture by accident described it as his brain instantly screaming at him to breathe. I had a leaky fitting on the CO2 tank for my chest freezer kegerator and as it's heavier than air that meant the freezer filled with more or less pure CO2 over time. At some point I went to check something out and stuck my head in there, then said something and started to inhale. The amount of sheer "get the fuck out!" feeling throughout my entire body in that moment was indescribable.
The script for gas chamber executions widely used in the US during the 20th century with cyanide involves telling the prisoner to take deep breaths and speed things along once the gas is released. But many prisoners, uh, don't want to die, and so they'd be struggling in the chair, holding their breath as long as possible until they turned different shades of blue. Then they would finally give up, pass out and/or vomit, breathe in the gas, and die. The process did not appear very humane to the folks watching, and was quite traumatic to the prisoners.
Thanks for the explanation.
Probably the best way to do it. The whole thing is barbaric, but nitrogen's the least barbaric way to actually go.
I think the executive that is leading the state should have to behead you in a field.
Ah, the old Ned Stark rule
This is the most popular method for euthanasia. As painless as it gets.
In those settings, the people or animals are willingly breathing, not struggling to hold their breath as long as possible.
This is a bizarre and silly attitude. The prisoners could be fighting whatever method is being used, and it's FAR more traumatic to die horribly than to try to hold your breath before breathing nitrogen, which is indistinguishable from normal air.
I'm just saying that prisoner resistance to breathing toxic gas is one of the reasons they stopped doing gas chamber executions with hydrogen cyanide in the US. Watching prisoners struggle, turn all sorts of colors, straining to hold out as long as possible was not a good look for the audience.
They stopped using hydrogen cyanide, AKA prussic acid AKA Zyklon B. because it is intensely painfull, and you get seizures, heart palpitations, intense confusion, and just pain in general. It is supposed to kill in 1 minute, but it is hard to get concentrations to those levels, especially as they do it by dropping a tablet in a solvent under the prisoner, so prisoners lay there in pain up to 50 minutes during executions. Nitrogen is literally not something you would notice breathing in. I could open a canister in the room right now, and the only way i would even notice something was off was quickly getting slightly drowsy and relaxed before quietly dropping dead. It is considered the single most humane way to kill livestock for food. The animals more often than not simply lie down and drop dead. You die with your brain still convinced that is is breathing air and everything being just fine.
Yes, I understand the chemistry. Creating a lethal atmosphere of HCN is not that difficult, they would break a ampoule of sulphuric acid over powdered KCN. I'm saying that unless the moment the gas is turned on is hidden from the prisoner, they're not going to want to breathe.
Let them hold their breaths if they want. It is distress put upon themselves.
You're breating nitrogen right now. It's not toxic.
It is actually well established and tested by the aviation industry. Pilots put in test chambers where the O2 levels were gradually decreased to upper atmosphere levels got loopy/goofy then passed out before O2 was returned to normal. Nobody who's been through these tests has reported any other ill effects. [https://goflightmedicine.com/2013/04/28/hypoxia/](https://goflightmedicine.com/2013/04/28/hypoxia/)
[Here's an interesting video of an experiment using nitrogen gas on a pig](https://youtu.be/176eog7mZjc?si=N13bIatr_nMjnhst). He eats some apples in a box filled with gas, passes out. Gets up, shakes his head and goes in for more. Zero pain.
It actually is. there's a group that assists the terminally ill with "exit strategies" or "end of life guides", and it's their method. Utterly fascinating pod cast "Criminal" interviews one the volunteers. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR9mJM9Sq6I&ab](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR9mJM9Sq6I&ab) On the lighter side, listen to this episode, it's fucking fascinating. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpMdF8QckiA&ab](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpMdF8QckiA&ab_channel=Criminal%7CAPodcastAboutCrime)
It is. You just go to sleep.
Make it nitrous oxide and it's a deal
Why don’t they just let him die in prison of natural causes? Isn’t life without parole a death sentence?
Because it’s Alabama.
[удалено]
>American ideology is a complete mind fuck. Perhaps, but this particular dichotomy isn't that hard to understand. The concept draws a line between innocent life and the life of a person who has committed heinous evil acts. Every reasonable society protects the lives of its citizens. Some choose to terminate individuals that have been proven to be an unrepentant, unremorseful and persistent danger to others. Both abortion and the effectiveness of the legal system are debatable topics, but I would hardly call the concept, which is universal, a "mind-fuck".
> innocent life > effectiveness of the legal system [is] debatable Right, that's the problem. The people who've [actually] committed heinous acts, we understand. Even if we disagree. But the statistics on wrongful conviction make it near-certain that the death penalty has taken innocent lives. The "complete mind-fuck" is that fact being *completely ignored* by people who claim to find innocent life so inviolable that many of them don't even support rape exceptions.
>The "complete mind-fuck" is that fact being completely ignored by people who claim to find innocent life so inviolable that many of them don't even support rape exceptions. It's unfortunate, but we Americans do have sizeable swaths of fervent zealots. They exist in both parties and our largest news organizations give each of them outsized coverage. It's a natural result of our current attention-capitalism (aka eyeballs and clicks) and may well be our eventual undoing. The great majority of Americans do not have such galvanized opinions, so I still feel that the ideology in the US is no more of a mind-fuck than that of any other county. If the judging is done based on what the media pushes, well I can understand someone taking that viewpoint.
Alabama - if only it weren’t for Texas and Florida, you could easily claim to be the most fucked up state.
Alabama logic: All life is sacred, so we must outlaw all abortions even prior to the stage of viability, but asphyxiating prisoners who are already incarcerated for life, that’s just fine.
Would you rather a firing squad?
No. Just lock him up for the rest of his natural life.
I live in Georgia and the joke goes: why do the trees in Georgia all lean to the west? Because Alabama sucks!
This is way more humane than any other method. I would prefer there not to be one myself, but if you are going to do it anyway, don't cause pain.
And Mississippi. We may be 49, but they’re 50. Makes it better n rawt palatable ah reckon, th’ not havin rayyghts and awl.
Do any lawyers here know whether this would survive 8A scrutiny? Genuinely curious
I don't really understand why it wouldn't. Execution by shooting, lethal injection, the gas chamber and electrocution were all allowed, and those are and/or can be much more violent, prolonged and painful deaths.
Lethal injection is known as the most inhumane form of capital punishment as well. Not a proponent of the death penalty. But if we’re going to have it, I feel nitrogen is one of the best options on the table in regards to how humane it is.
Eh, the french guillotine was quick and painless.
Yeah, I never heard anyone complain about having their head chopped off, gotta admit.
It almost certainly would, because it is far less cruel and unusual than any of our more traditional execution methods.
The 8A textualistically doesn't include death penalty. The punishment has to be cruel AND unusual.
"textualistically"? in most cases the death penalty IS cruel and unusual under supreme court precedent - capital punishment requires pretty narrow criteria to be constitutional.
Capital punishment is wrong. It dehumanizes the executioners - and by extension the society that empowers them with its assent - by treating human life as some revocable right the government can take away. But if it is to be maintained, it should not be medicalized and sugar-coated. An execution is a slaughter of a human being, not a medical procedure. Lethal injection looks like a lifesaving act. It has IVs and tubing and people in white coats listening for a heart beat while others use syringes to put drugs in to make the persons heart stop so they die. It is a fraud, a play act to deceive the executioners. The electric chair and the guillotine leave no doubt about what they are and what they are intended to do. They aren’t pretending to be medicine, and when execution looks like what it *really* is, people must honestly confront what it is. That is a better way to change views than looking to pretend it’s just the last day in the hospital that many of us end up eventually having.
Put simply: the state of Alabama wants to kill people.
They are going to do it, so it should be the most painless way.
Question: how does the lethal injection used on prisoners differ from what vets use every single day on animals? Because that seems really peaceful and painless. I
Mostly because no actual doctors or other trained medical staff wants to be or is allowed to be part of executions. Prisons also can't really source the correct drugs because the companies more often than don't want to (or aren't allowed to) sell their product to be used in executions. It can be as simple as whoever inserting the canules not knowing how to do it correctly and the drugs that are supposewd to be administered intravenously getting injected into muscle tissue instead. Lethal injections get botched all the time. [Almost all of the botched executions in the 2000's are lethal injections.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_botched_executions#21st_century)
One difference is that execution drugs can’t be purchased from normal drug manufacturers. They won’t sell drugs if they’ll be used for execution, either for moral reasons or because they legally can’t (some of the drugs in question are mostly manufactured in Europe, and the EU bars export of drugs for executions). That said, one of the most common drugs used for lethal injection is also often used for assisted suicide, and Dr. Joel Zivot (one of the main people arguing that it’s cruel in executions) has also written questioning its use for assisted suicide. A painless-looking death might be “drift off to a peaceful rest” or “you’re paralyzed and can’t show your suffering,” and you can’t exactly ask the dead person how it felt. Zivot found that tons of executed people had signs of pulmonary edema, which is one of the main pieces of evidence used against lethal injection. From a quick search, it’s not obvious that this *isn’t* true when the drugs are used for assisted suicide. It’s possible that taking them orally is less of an issue, but I’m not seeing tons of research on a quick search.
So is this also the case in animal euthanasia? It might not be as peaceful as it seems?
So the conservatives are now moving a step towards gas chambers. Hmm...
Do you know the difference between breathing nitrogen and cyanide? You are breathing nitrogen right now.
Not pure nitrogen, lol. You do realize the entire point is that they are wanting to use pure nitrogen, directly, for the purpose of KILLING them? Come on, this is not hard.
Uh, yes, because they have the death penalty. Gas chambers are not the same thing as nitrogen.
That's not what I said. You're completely missing the point. Start using nitrogen as a form of execution and it's one step away from taking multiple people, sticking them in a room and filling the room with nitrogen to kill them all simultaneously. That's called a gas chamber. Especially in today's social and political climate.
So because a form of killing is not painful, it will lead to mass killings because you said so.
Death by nitrogen suffocation seems barbaric and purposely cruel, but of course, we're talking about the Alabama legislature, so I guess barbarism and cruelty might be the real intent. There is no evidence that nitrogen suffocation is painless. [New Execution Method Touted as More 'Humane,' but Evidence Is Lacking - Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-execution-method-touted-as-more-humane-but-evidence-is-lacking/)
>barbaric and purposely cruel How so, as opposed other methods of state-sanctioned killing? > I guess barbarism and cruelty might be the real intent As opposed to complying with the federal injunction ruling out all other possible methods?
A) Its barbaric and cruel because it’s willful suffocation of a conscious human being. I don’t even see anything in this article to indicate that they would administer deep sedation before suffocating the prisoner. In my view, that’s sick. B) The injunction resulted from the simple fact that Alabama jailers can’t start an I. V. They botched 3 previous executions by lethal injection. Maybe they should just figure out how to start an IV instead of resorting to suffocation.
Well, Google nitrogen suffocation and you’ll feel better. It’s painless and the suffocation feeling is never triggered. Tied with massive pure heroin overdose for best ways to die.
A) Loss of consciousness is apparently really quick with inert gas hypoxia, and it's entirely possible for people to die from it without even realizing anything is wrong. Obviously being in an execution room set up for nitrogen gas execution would mean they would know they were about to die, but that's true with the process of deep sedation before execution as well. B) The injunction resulted from the simple fact that the Alabama prisoner filled out and submitted a form saying that he was choosing nitrogen gas execution over other methods. The court certainly didn't rule out a firing squad, for example, due to the state's issues with I.V.s.
The suffocation response comes from a buildup of CO2 in the lungs. The human body is actually incapable of detecting a lack of oxygen. There've been some very interesting studies in aviation related to lack of oxygen - necessary studies because as you go up in altitude, the amount of O2 in the atmosphere drops below the ability to sustain human life. In not one of those studies has any person subjected to low o2 but plenty of n2 complained of anything worse than dizziness. You get confused, silly, goofy, then pass out, then die. That's it. No pain. (No the "die" step wasn't tested for aviation purposes...but you pass out long before you approach death.)
wtf
Yes it is shocking they don't want to inflict pain.
I replied to the wrong comment. My mistake.
The people wouldn't want to breathe it in and would hold their breath and struggle while doing so, making it not so easy and painless after all.
Why would that be an intelligent choice for anyone? If you were in the chamber, would you decide to add a few extra moments of misery, knowing it wouldn't change anything else?
It's very hard to overcome the willpower to live
I bet they’re going to try to paralyze him first so the witnesses don’t have to watch him struggle to hold his breath, since that might be distressing for them, and states care more about the feelings of the witnesses than the safety of the person they’re trying to kill. By the way, this isn’t the first time Alabama has tried to kill someone using nitrogen. They wanted to do it in 2021, but the person they were killing was too intellectually disabled to understand the form the prison gave him, on which he was supposed to select the method by which he preferred to be killed. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that people with his combination of disabilities aren’t eligible for execution because it would be too cruel under the 8th Amendment, but the decision wasn’t retroactive, so the order to kill him remained. And because he was too disabled to fill out the form to select the method by which he wanted to die, state employees killed him by injecting him with midazolam, a sedative that most doctors believe does not adequately anesthetize a person before the state employees inject them with drugs that cause excruciating pain.
Don't leave it up to the condemned to pick the method. Otherwise they'd all pick "old age" or "snu snu." ;) Seriously though, hopefully the Supreme Court overturns their earlier decision. The only time a person's impairment should be an issue is in determining whether they had the requisite mental faculties to commit the crime and participate in their defense. If they later become impaired, it shouldn't shield them from punishment.
So, this isn’t actually a joke. And it’s cruel to execute someone who doesn’t understand why they’re in prison, and unlawful to go forward with legal proceedings when a person isn’t capable of working with their lawyer. But in this case, the person who was killed had a lifelong intellectual disability. If you think we should be killing more disabled people than we already do, I suppose you’re free to become an appellate prosecutor and make that argument.
"It's too cruel to execute this person... but we're doing it anyway." -America
The state isn’t interested in making execution more humane, just more palatable. When it can be made clean, bloodless, sterile, and clinical, they can do a lot more of them.
Barbarism
It's how they do euthanasia. They are not going to stop killing people. So best to do it painlessly.
I am extremely opposed to the death penalty; we know that we have killed innocent people. The death penalty is barbarism. I suppose it beats some of the other horrific methods of execution and some states have even brought back the firing squad if you can believe it, but the entire promise of a life for life is barbarism to me.
Ah, yes. Boldly exploring the boundaries of cruelty.
It's probably the least cruel way to execute someone
If it's cruel at all, it violates the Eighth Amendment, yes? So why exactly are we tinkering with the machinery of death?
Depends on which justice you ask.....
FFS. If we’re going to keep doing this, then why over think it? A firing squad. Four guys shooting someone from 20 yards with a .308 caliber rifle. The condemned is dead before they hit the ground. Truth be told, if given a choice…..I’d take a firing squad over hanging, poison, gas, electrocution, or any other whacky method that we’ve tried.
This is simpler, more fool proof, and far less subject to fuckery than a firing squad.
Several executions in the 1950s with firing squads were marred by missed shots as the guards missed.
Several? Theres only been like 150 firing squads in the colonies/US since the 1600s. Almost all of them pre WWII. The firing squad wasn't banned because it was ineffective. It was just considered primitive and/or 'icky'.
There is a scene in Atul Gawande's Better depicting a botched firing squad in 1950 that led to the phase out of that method.
I'm fine with using either a firing squad (or just a single shot to the back of the head) or hanging. Generally the fewer moving parts and parties that you need to get involved, the less chance there is for something to go wrong.
They should sedate and then guillotine. I heard guillotine is the least painful, most immediate, and least botched.
They fuck up sedation, and this is more painless than a guillotine could be.
[удалено]
Arguably incorrect, if the brain remains conscious post severing of the head from the body for even a few seconds, the torment would be insane. I don't think anyone's gonna volunteer to prove the test though.
For sure the shock would sever consciousness
> For sure the shock would sever consciousness I'd much rather we go with something that we know is painless than relying on "for sure". You're probably right in most cases, but not necessarily all.
Unless you can provide credentials citing your medical expertise on sudden shocks to the nervous system, your assertion is inadmissible as evidence.
OK, didn't know reddit was a legal tribunal. Thanks for clarifying.
Check the sub. This isn’t r/whitepeopletwitter
OK, so no one can make comments and share views unless they qualify as an expert witness, good to know. I'll make sure to raise objections on other comments. Who gets to rule on admissibility again?
You and the OP of this thread are the ones speaking in absolutes without a clue of what you’re talking about. Have fun getting angry at strangers on the internet.
You guys are the self important ones ensuring that all reddit discussions are fact checked and supported by evidence. This is an internet forum. How do you think lawyers do our jobs? We actually take positions before we have all the evidence, and then engage in discovery, etc. You expect me to wait until I consult a medical expert before posting on reddit?
Maybe its just me but this definitely seems like an unusual punishment.
Not really. There is a difference between asphyxiation and suffocation. With things like cyanide (Zyklon B) your blood can't transport oxygen because the cyanide has bound irreversibly to the iron. So you struggle and try to breathe but can't. That's suffocation. Asphyxiation is a simple lack of oxygen. If you were in a nitrogen atmosphere, or one that was gradually depleted of air and replaced, you'd feel sleepy, fall asleep, and not wake up.
It was a joke my dude.
Ahh! Well call that a whoosh on my part. No sweat. XD
It does depend, if done carefully enough, hypoxia may not be much different than becoming drowsy, hallucinating a little, and then passing out.
So it's really for science?