Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.
The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
That’s a pretty good way to go, apparently.
But there have been an absolutely breathtaking number of death row cases that have been overturned due to new evidence that had exonerated the condemned.
It seems pretty clear that the state is doing a very crappy job of determining guilt, and therefore shouldn’t be handing down such a permanent sentence.
Heh
I used to fully pro death penalty, especially for some of the sick fucks…
But then I learned about all the false convictions, some COERCED by the fucking police, and since then I’m 100% against the death penalty.
The satisfaction I get from a heinous killer getting killed, does not outweigh the horror I feel for even one innocent life being taken by the state.
It’s also cheaper to keep people in jail forever than put them to death because of all the appeals. And despite being more careful, we still get it wrong.
Also, in my mind, death is a release. Keep those fuckers stuck in their filty meat suits while they rot in prison for the rest of their lives with no hope for escape. The especially heinous ones will get extra comeuppance from the other inmates
Right. Even a life sentence can very much be reversed if exculpatory evidence appears.
It can be overturned, but it can’t be reversed. You can’t give someone those years back.
This is what changed my mind on the death penalty. I have no problem putting a murderer or pedo to death, but we keep freeing people when new evidence is found that proves their innocents. Until we can get it right 100% of the time, we should just lock them up until death.
Yeah this is one reason why I generally don’t support the death penalty. There’s no way to undo it. At least if evidence exonerates someone 50 years later, they’re still alive.
Not to give anyone ideas but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bag
I would argue that we need the death penalty as a way to protect society from the absolutely most dangerous criminals but it’s very frequently misapplied. I would say, for instance, that people that are serial killers, or serial rapists (or serial child molesters), people for whom there is no significant doubt that they’re guilty, and people that will reoffend if they ever manage to get out of prison, should be executed. A simple murder for hire, or a robbery? No. Ed Kemper? Absolutely.
I think that even life sentences with no parole are overused; most people can be rehabilitated and returned to society safely, if we were willing to dramatically overhaul our criminal justice system to not be based on punishment and retribution. (But if we did that, then how would we get free prison labor…? /s)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country
All of western Europe has abolished the death oenalty completely. Many of these are countries with very low rates of serious crime.
Meanwhile countries with the death penalty, but usually also very long prison sentences and high rates of incarcerations like the US are pretty bad with crime.
It is impossible to justifiy the death penalty empirically. The statistics actually indicate that the death penalty is linked to more crime.
Also the problem is, that clear cut beyond a doubt is what every judge who sentences someone to death, will claim about the case. Yet there is hundreds of cases in the US alone, where people were later exonerated. Some only after they have been murdered by the state already. There is nothing to gain, but a lot to loose with an execution. It cannot be overruled anymore.
Correlation =/= causation. C’mon, you know better than this. It’s more probable that they have lower crime to begin with. Serial killers are not uniquely American by any stretch of the imagination, but they are quite uncommon relative to the population in other developed countries.
Read what I wrote again. I’m advocating for the death penalty in very, very limited cases, where there is no significant doubt at all, where there is no reasonable or even unreasonable belief that an offender can be rehabilitated, and the offender is extremely likely to harm more people if they ever have the opportunity.
Thats why i said indicate not “proof”. But again you say no significant doubt at all. But that is always the case of the people making the decision. For them there is no doubt, yet there is regularly wrong decisions.
Would you then claim that there was any significant doubt as to the guilt of John Gacy, Theodore Bundy, Edmund Kemper, Gary Ridgeway, John Geoghan, et al.? Would you agree that they would have all posed a significant risk of future harms had they managed to escape?
No proof is 100% absolute; there is always the possibility of some error. Video evidence? Could be tampered with. Eyewitnesses? Memory is fallible. DNA? Must be from someone with near identical DNA. Confession? Those are very frequently coerced (and, seriously, confessions are a pretty terrible way of determining guilt, esp. when there’s no forensic or corroborating evidence). 29 bodies or people you were last seen with found in the crawlspace of your home with your DNA and fingerprints on them? Pure coincidence, it’s too good to be true, must be planted.
Given that it’s impossible to know a thing with absolute certainty, how good does the evidence have to be before you would admit that there was not a significant chance of a false positive?
It’s wild you disagree with life sentences and desire rehab, but also advocate for the death penalty.
I advocate for it in the case of people that can not reasonably be rehabilitated and pose an unreasonable risk to the existence of other people.
I don’t know why that’s difficult to wrap your head around.
You aren’t going to rehabilitate a serial killer, or a serial rapist.
Can’t know if you don’t try. Some artists have come out and said they had these urges and art is the thing anchoring them enough to keep them from doing heinous things.
…And there’s your key. Moreover, they think that art keeps them from doing it; they have no way of experimentally knowing whether or not they’d do those things in the absence of art. It seems more likely that art is their excuse and that, in the absence of art, they would find anothe,r different reason to avoid committing atrocities.
There’s a distinction between wanting to do a thing, and actually doing the thing.
Prisons (at least in the US) have never been about prisoners and their reform. It’s about how much money they can bring in from the state and practically free labor. Like most things in the US it is driving by profit margins.
…yay capitalism
Eh, no. We had prisons before we used prisons as a stand-in for chattel slavery. OTOH, we used to kill a lot more people for much less severe offenses, so people didn’t usually end up in jails for very long. And there was a period of time where we believed in reform, but that was well over 100 years ago now.
Yep, NO. I’ve tried it. You can’t get a breath and you feel like you’re suffocating.
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Good to know.
I had just assumed the party helium situation was caused by the shortage.
Helium (as a suicide method) has been around a while. My best friend used it to kill himself 13 years ago. Maybe it’s making a comeback.
well, the science behind feeling out of breath is CO2 being pumped into lungs from blood, lol
I was beginning to wonder if breathing pure nitrogen was some kind of party trick or rite of passage for science geeks.
I have, sort of. I’ve worked HazMat most of my life. One of the jobs I had years ago involved neutralizing a large pit of acid. It was just a huge pit in the ground with a roof over it. From the outside, it just looked like someone had pulled the roof off of a house and set on the ground. There were only two openings, one at either end, so it was completely enclosed. The method here was to send the two youngest (and therefore invincible) guys into the pit with acid suits and full faced respirators, with buckets of soda ash, we walk around in it and stirred it up while we sprinkled the ash around. Safety standards back then were not what they are today. Anyway, the people in charge realized that there would be a reaction with gases betting released, hence the respirators, but no one considered the possibility that the gases might be heavier than oxygen. Which they were. We didn’t know what kind of acid it was but this was an old fertilizer plant, so probably nitric. Which means the gas was most likely nitrogen. Whatever the case, we got into trouble when we realized that we were both getting rather lightheaded. We tried to leave, but the only way out was up a ladder and by the time we got to it the other guy, we’ll call him Rick, could only get about half way up before he just couldn’t move anymore, which left me leaning on the ladder at the bottom, completely unable to help, as I was in the same state. Luckily, our foreman was a lunatic and he jumped in and pulled us out. You are absolutely not supposed to do that because you are just as likely to end up in the same trouble as the guys you’re trying to save.
The experience with the gas was not unpleasant. I should have been terrified, but was mostly just mildly concerned. The only real effects I remember feeling are the lightheadedness and being really sleepy.
Nitrogen hypoxia is a risk wherever liquid nitrogen is used. If too much boils too fast, it will displace the oxygen in the room. People in the room won’t even realize what happened until they pass out and die shortly thereafter.
There are reports of people rushing in to rescue those who passed out, and suddenly passing out themselves and needing to be rescued as well. That’s how insidious it is. And that’s why MRI scanners (which use liquid nitrogen) have oxygen sensors in the room. You can’t trust your own body to tell you that all the oxygen is gone.
MRI machines are cooled by liquid helium. Nitrogen is not cold enough. I’d imagine as a noble gas it has a similar effect though.
They are cooled by liquid helium, but also have a liquid nitrogen outer dewar as well with a vacuum insulator in between. The N2 takes the brunt of the ambient heat so you don’t have to top off the (much more expensive) helium as often.
Definitely doesn’t seem terribly traumatic - https://youtu.be/176eog7mZjc?si=B4TPpWw7CJb-IGXl
(CW - shows pig putting its head into a box filled with inert gas to eat food. The pig falls over, regains consciousness, then immediately places its head back into the box to continue eating)
Can you please share more of your experience? What was the occasion and the set-up? What was it like?
Sure, Jan.
That’s not the case with nitrogen asphyxiation.
I’m willing to bet what you inhaled was carbon dioxide – that gives an instant feeling of suffocation. Which ironically makes it one of the safer asphyxiant gasses, as it’s heavier than air and you can detect it’s presence instantly. Inert (“noble”) gasses like helium, argon, and nitrogen don’t have that effect.
CO2 is also cheap, readily available, non-toxic, and doesn’t cause physical damage. This makes CO2 asphyxiation somewhat popular for “stunning” or killing in places like slaughterhouses, labs working with smaller animals, or “feeder” animals for reptiles.