Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates
Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in nitrogen gas execution: Updates
“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
I personally experienced breathing nitrogen until loss of consciousness under controlled and supervised conditions for training purposes with the RCAF. I was in a room with seven other people who were all doing the same thing as well as instructors who were in here with us for safety.
The point of the exercise was to sit in a room with a mask on, recognize the symptoms of hypoxia when we experienced them and throw a lever that would resume normal air breathing once we had enough. We were given tablets with simple games to play to simulate having our minds occupied on accomplishing some tasks. We knew they were going to switch or air supplies with pure nitrogen at some point to cause hypoxia but we didn't know when it was going to happen. The room was also a hypobaric chamber but it didn't stimulate a high enough altitude to induce hypoxia by itself, it was only there to simulate the environmental signs of decompression ( fogging of the air, percieved drop in pressure, cooling sensation, etc)
We sat there for a few minutes accomplishing the tasks on the tablets (basically paying candy crush) with nothing special going on. Then I noticed that we all started breathing deeper and harder. When I looked around people were also red in the face but strangely did not feel any discomfort from it and some people were even still playing on their tablets without noticing. Some of them threw their personal lever immediately because the point of the exercise was to recognize the signs of hypoxia. But others including my competitive ass wanted to see how far I could take it and if I could outlast others so we kept going.
My breathing naturally got deeper and harder but strangely I wasn't feeling like I was suffocating. I started feeling pins and needles in my extremities. Concentrating on the tasks in the tablet became increasingly difficult and slower. A few moments later I got tunnel vision and my hearing started to sound muffled. These two effects progressively got worse until I could almost not see or hear anything anymore at which point I finally threw the lever just before passing out due to a phenomenon called oxygen paradox where when oxygen supply is resumed the hypoxia symptoms briefly get worse before going away. I didn't even notice passing out. I woke up a few moments later and from my perspective it seemed that time had skipped forward a minute. Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.
All of this took less than 5 minutes and I never experienced anything worse than mild discomfort throughout. I don't know how they managed to make it last 25 minutes other than maybe the brain stem running on fumes and keeping the heart beating but there is no consciousness at that point. If I ever had to pick a way to be executed this would be it, provided that it is done correctly.
Sounds like they didn't remove the CO2, just gave him a mask that forced him to breathe nitrogen. Like a standard medical respirator, so he spent half an hour rebreathing his CO2 and whatever oxygen slipped in around the mask.
I know that CO2 is what the body uses to push the sensation of "needing" air. So I wonder if that would have changed his CO2 content from what it would be in just nitrogen...
You did that in a safe situation where nobody was trying to kill you. I don't suffer when holding my breath underwater, but the moment someone holds me down I am going to panic.
Try to hold your breath for as much as you can, and you will feel an very strong urge to breathe. This doesn't happen with nitrogen.
Sure, the person is mad scared, but he's not suffering because of the nitrogen.
It is not fair to liken this to being held underwater. When forced to hold your breathyour lungs fill with CO2 which will cause pain, an urge to breathe and a primal urge to panic because your body has evolved the ability to sense this excess of CO2 to force you to breathe. But when breathing pure nitrogen your body doesn't have an evolved way to detect it besides minor symptoms that you may or may not notice until you pass out.
Yes, the very idea that you will die can be emotionally distressing but this will be common to all methods of execution.
When I’m held down I get turned on.
A lot of people are focused on this quote:
Witness Reverend Jeff Hood told reporters he saw a man ‘struggling for their life’ for 22 minutes as Smith became the first US death row inmate executed by nitrogen asphyxia
Which says to me that from the time they brought him in and strapped him down until he died lasted about 22 minutes and the murderer struggled physically against the restraints the entire time.
This quote farther down suggests from the time they started administering the gas until he died only took a couple of minutes:
But, witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for several minutes, shaking and writhing on the gurney.
Several could be 25, and he could have been shaking from pain and agony, but it seems more likely he was holding his breath and shaking out of fear while trying to fight and get free.
Keep in mind that the first quote is from his anti-death penalty spiritual advisor and this entire article is brought to us by a magazine with an "end the death penalty campaign".
I'm generally anti-death penalty myself, but nitrogen asphyxiation seems way better than electrocution, lethal injection, or hanging. They could probably do it better by using some kind of general anesthesia to render him unconscious and then flood the room with pure nitrogen, or even just get rid if the death penalty all together. Unfortunately this is the world we live in and so fae this is the least bad option we've seen.
How dare you actually read the story!?
I do have some reservations about the idea of a compassionate execution method. It's kinda like tasers. Yes, they are a huge improvement on the alternative, but that also means they get used a lot more frequently.
The death penalty is barbaric.
Tom Scott did a video on this as well.
25 minutes does seem like an awfully long time.
State fucked it up ..dude it's Alabama.
I can't say that I'd be giggly about having my brain cells oxygen deprived for going on 5 minutes.
Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.
You did that shit for a job? I hope they paid you well, sounds like you could have easily died if something went wrong..
So they fucked it up and then there's a real gem in the article. The jury voted to give him life without parole. A judge overruled that jury to give him the death penalty anyways.
There are no more laws. Only the whims of judges.
Was this based on sentencing guidelines at the time?
But yeah... Brought to you by the same people who convince juries that nullification is not a real thing for malum-prohibitum crimes.
If it was then why even have a sentencing jury? Wouldn't that qualify as false hope torture and as such a violation of the 8th amendment?
The American system of elected judges is bonkers to me. Here in Canada even your basic judge has to be a lawyer in good standing for a decade before being reviewed by a panel of seniors judges and recommended to the position. Their job isn't to play "tough on crime" to the crowd and do everything possible to obtain convictions so that people will like them. Until they retire up here their whole job is to uphold and defend the presumption of innocence so a defendant gets the full benefit of the law and an innocent person is not unjustly punished. Their job is to put into practice the ethics and design of the law as written to afford the humane treatment to other humans by the state and defer the ultimate judgement of guilt or innocence to a jury of peers.
Elections in a system like law create natural conflicts of interest and once someone is convicted once on shitty practice by a judge with no prior qualifications getting that person out of the system is like trying to swim against a riptide. The American system seems primed to create victims of the state, not to uphold justice.
As always, the cruelty is the point.
There are many accounts of workers accidentally entering confined spaces that have been purged with nitrogen and they were all unconscious in seconds. (OSHA records). If it took the prison 22 MINUTES to execute this guy, then they totally botched that execution.
The gas mixture clearly had oxygen still in it. If he's gasping for air for 22 minutes, he was still receiving low amounts of O2.
Yeah I think when an airplane depressurizes at high altitude it's something like 5 minutes and people are unconscious. And people just act like drunken idiots after one minute.
Remember in the event of depressurization, put your own mask on before helping others. Because you're likely to be a just complete idiot that's just getting in the way if your brain isn't properly oxygenated.
But anyway... yeah these guys fucked up. A big problem with executions that people don't talk about is that there isn't a lot of overlap on the Venn diagram of people that are competent enough to perform an execution vs. the people who are willing to perform an execution.
78% of the air you and everyone breathes is nitrogen you dumb shit.
And that's why, when you remove that critical 21% of oxygen, your body doesn't realize it's suffocating. You breath normally but pass out really quickly since your brain has nothing to burn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarco_pod?wprov=sfla1
Some reporter from Salon, or Wire - some big site like that - participated in a controlled nitrogen hypoxia experiment on himself, and wrote about it. It was really interesting, but search engines are flooded with that Alabama execution, and I lost interest in searching for it.
Is this bait? Lol
Water is also 33% oxygen but I dare you to try to breathe it
What are you even hinting at? That breathing 100% nitrogen is fine??
Fun fact for friendly posters: companies that make gas detectors use lots of nitrogen because it’s a great “zero” gas. That is, 100% dry nitrogen equates to “nothing there” on sensors for all kinds of gases.
Including oxygen sensors! Did you know in air they measure 20.8% and in nitrogen they measure zero point zero?
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it. You can't expect people to follow, "do what I say, not what I do."
It's cruel, it's a reflection of our morals. The death penalty is not a deterrent for murder. The death penalty is hypocrisy. The death penalty is for an unserious society.
But the death penalty is just a symptom of a greater chronic illness we suffer from. We'll just continue to kill ourselves until we find a cure for the disease.
Edit: I see many do not like my wording for state sanctioned murder. If you are reading this and don't understand, imagine if listening to George Bush (can't remember which) tell the tv America doesn't negotiate with terrorists. He's drawing a moral line in the sand with terrorism. That's my point. We need to figure out where our moral line in the sand is with the death penalty, because right now it's all over the place. Do I think outlawing the death penalty will solve our societal woes? No, I do not. The people will demand it until it is reinstated. For me I ask what is the purpose of the death penalty? Does it serve a greater good for a society? Obviously it does not. Americans are murdered all the time, so it serves no purpose.
The cure is education. Unfortunately they are killing that, too.
Good education is so underrated, yet so difficult to actually get, especially with these silly book bans and stuff which only serve to narrow students' perspectives
I want to preface this by saying I am against the death penalty.
The argument
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it.
really falls apart when you consider all the other things the state is allowed to do that would be otherwise illegal. The simplest comparison is imprisonment but there are dozens of others.
Exactly, the government has a monopoly on a lot of things, among them violence and as an extent of that monopoly also incarceration.
I can see how some people have a hard time grasping that. I mean most of us would like to have no violence at all, so allowing some that power can seem strange. But how about traffic laws?
You can't get in your car and go 200km/h down the road, which I sometimes would like to, but I hope we all can see how everyone doing 200, where 80 is more appropriate, would be a problem. So we're ok with police/fire/rescue being the only ones allowed to break the speed limits and running red lights, right? It's the same thing.
We've got specially trained people, who have been given strict guidelines for doing stuff ordinary citizens can't do, because the society need something done that can't be done without these powers ... and who have oversight (hopefully), so these powers aren't abused.
How'd you make your comment in bold font?
I think you are onto something. The cure will be found when nobody is left. /S
I will also preface this by saying I am 100% against the death penalty. The fact that we could put an innocent person to death for what I see as zero gain makes it very hard to convince me otherwise.
However:
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it.
Murder is by definition the illegal killing of someone. Unless I'm mistaken, every state has some law on the book that allows you to kill someone, at least in the case of self defense or the defense of another when it's reasonable to believe there is imminent danger to one's life. And the defense of the DP is that it's "defending" society against these criminals. It's BS, but your point is also incorrect.
This is kind of a silly argument. The state is not a person. When they fine you money, it is not identical to someone stealing from you.
Ah, so it is okay for institutions to murder people. Gotcha.
The state doesn’t intentionally murder innocent people. Your argument is invalid.
The state does not care whether they are innocent as well, and that callousness is just as bad from the eyes of people living in a civilized society...
Since 1973, at least 196 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. Source
Civilian murderers also have justifications for their actions. I accept those justifications just as much as I do those of the State murderers.
This place is so stupid sometimes they'd fight for the rights of their own families murderer's. No point in trying to put facts in front of people like that. They've made their decision.
Stop executions.
What about billionaires? Can we at least execute them?
Well if you want to execute billionaires then I'm not going to stand in your way. But I absolutely oppose having civil courts ordering death sentences.
Lemmy is so fucking dumb. Down voting anyone who says certain guilty people should be killed. Then someone says hey what about billionaires and up votes all over. Like they realized "oh yeah some people are pieces of shit and don't deserve to live with the rest of us" DUH you fucking morons lol
Every day you wake up and think, "There's no way America can get even more fucked up than it was yesterday".
And every day some asshole says "wanna bet...watch this."
USA, USA, USA!
Fuckin Merica fuck yea.
Very Christian of them...
You're right brother. At times like this, I remember Exodus 21:17, Deuteronomy 22:24 and Genesis 9:5-6.
Yeah, God would rather you bash their head against rocks as they're still babies
It may not be Christ-like but it is very god-like. The Christian god made man in his own image, and god killed over 2 million people in the Bible.
These are more fans of the Old Testament stuff where God was metal.
That ain’t just murder… that’s 25 minutes of panic and fear…
With a tiny bit of torture and inhumanity thrown in for good measure
Gruesome.
I'm not convinced the death penalty is worthwhile except to feed someone's wrath.
What if, (and hear me out,) we did for corrections the sort of thing that countries with low recidivism do? Like, not use for-profit prisons with incentive to turn out re-offenders, and not use prisons that turn out hardened criminals that aren't equipped to function in the world without resorting to crime, and actually take the 'corrections' or 'rehabilitation' parts of their nomenclature seriously?
If all we do with our prisons is punish and humiliate (and squeeze slave labor out of) convicts, we're just creating future crime and all that's left at that point is killing convicts at industrial pace unless you can figure out that crime is more driven by poverty than anything else, and the USA just doesn't want to figure that out because it just doesn't want to solve poverty or crime, it wants to make money creating and punishing both.
It is seriously incredible that in the United States prisons are for profit. Healthcare and water are for profit too...
Only 8 percent of US prisoners are in for profit prisons. This is definitely a problem, but it's not the main problem with our justice system, by any means. The way we focus on punishment instead of rehabilitation is a bigger problem than the fact that for profit prisons exist. I mean, getting rid of for profit prisons is a start, but the whole thing needs reform.
The cruelty (and profit it generates) is the point
In a for profit economy; to create an upper class, you have to have an under class. Wealth isn’t created, it’s extracted through exploitation. Rich/Poor. Empire/Colony. Master/Slave.
Wake up! It’s time to wake up America and re-discover our socialist past.
What if we change the material conditions of society so that people are provided a job, education, healthcare and recreation so they’re less likely to commit crimes? I might be crazy, but it just might work!
That message might be more effective if it weren't associated with a weird doomsday cult that most people don't like.
You will always have some crazy evil mfucker even if you give them all of it. There were a gang in my country from mid class families that robbed houses. They went in a van and stole until the last TV. Human CAN BE evil by nature. It happens in other species too. Bears kill salmon just for pleasure.
It's not just the prison system that's fucked. It's society in general.
A former prisoner will always be shunned. No matter if rehabilitated or not, people will always fear a former prisoner (at least in cases of brutality or sexuality) and often even former accused people. That also makes the whole system absurd. If people don't trust in rehabilitation and therefore always push former criminals away and back into one corner or another, we might as well continue/intensify killing them right away; society decided that there is no way back, so why bother. And that sucks.
What if we change the material conditions of society so that people are provided a job, education, healthcare and recreation so they’re less likely to commit crimes? I might be crazy, but it just might work!
How on earth did they fuck this up? The point is to starve the person of oxygen by replacing his air supply sith pure nitrogen. Either he's an accomplished free-diver and held his breath for 21 minutes, or they bodged it.
Also, how about you stop giving the state the power to kill people? Especially when the victim's family said they were forgiven "years ago". Whole thing is disgusting
It sounds to me like they didn't account for the oxygen in his lungs. They put a fucking mask on him and filled it with pure nitrogen, but it was probably a closed system so his own breath had nowhere to go. Most of the oxygen that goes to your lungs is not absorbed, and you have breathe in your own breath for a while before the CO2 content makes it poisonous.
That's the wrong fucking way to do it.
CO2 poisoning is fucking brutal. Your brain recognizes that you can't expell carbon dioxide, and your body panics. You'll thrash about and struggle to breathe fresh air, even though you still have lots of oxygen in your lungs and in your blood stream.
The whole point of Nitrogen is that your body doesn't realize it's not getting Oxygen, and you slowly lose consciousness without any panic or reflex. To do that, you have to pump nitrogen into a chamber and then filter out oxygen and carbon dioxide. The chamber can be the size of a mask, but a sealed box would be less likely to leak. As you breathe, the oxygen and the carbon dioxide are continuously scrubbed from the air.
Basically, this guy was tortured to death. If you've ever had the sensation of being under water too long, and you have that shocking dull pain in your chest and a headache, it's like that but for 23 minutes until you die.
Ah, I didn't read in the article that they used a mask. What a cruel / incompetent thing to do
A CPAP mask could obtain a similar effect. It forms a perfect seal on the face with a one way valve for exhalation. As long as the mask is piped to a bottle of pure nitrogen you'd quickly remove all oxygen from your air supply and be out like a light in no time
The obvious outcome is someone trying to fight against being killed in whatever way they can. If you know that you won't get oxygen, the obvious response is to hold your breath.
This would work humanely for someone who wants to die, but as a method of execution is is torture like all the rest.
No US citizen should be surprised that Alabama of all places fucked this up, lol. My personal opinion is that it all started when religion got involved with the execution process
Gonna have to say that a botch job could have happened anywhere, because medical professionals aren't involved in executions, flawed executions have happened in many states many times, geography doesn't have much to do with that, it's the nature of state sanctioned murder sadly.
Oh, they botched it alright.
As someone well versed in inhaling Nitrous Oxide, why not not just use Nitrous Oxide? That'd be a quick way out, and it's cheap, you can buy enough to kill a person on Amazon for like $30. Even if you fuck it up, they're unconscious and feeling nothing.
Same reason they don't just OD them on morphine: those are enjoyable drugs, and we can't be giving our death row inmates that.
There's functionally no difference. The way that they messed this up would have still created suffering because they weren't letting carbon dioxide escape.
The suffocation feeling comes from CO2 buildup, not lack of oxygen. The same issue can happen with nitrous oxide if you don't let the CO2 escape.
Also, and keep in mind I have never killed myself using this method, so I don't know first hand, but, nitrogen is lighter than carbon dioxide, so if the person had 100% pure nitrogen to breathe, and no carbon dioxide, and is maintained with their head near the top of the pod, they would have died fast and allegedly without feeling it.
However, I am absolutely convinced that the people responsible for this execution did research on how to make this method as painful as possible (done right, it is apparently euphoric, and there is NO WAY they would even remotely take the risk of this happening), so they probably went out of their way to have a nitrogen-oxygen mix (like our atmosphere), but with lower amounts of oxygen, and forced the person to stay in a position that would guarantee they would die from CO2 asphyxiation rather than nitrogen.
It is even more inhumane than just using CO2 (as is done in meat "production"), because it prolongs the suffering quite a lot... The whole point of using CO2 on animals is to expedite the process... at the expense of their suffering.
2edgy4me
Look. Execution is inhumane. You can't make it gentle, peaceful, or nice. All you can do is make it quick, which it sounds like they failed to do here. But if the good people of Alabama aren't comfortable with someone struggling for half an hour and then dying, they shouldn't execute people at all.
That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed's spiritual advisor. If I was Smith's spiritual advisor, I'd also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful. The reality is that it's a lot more cruel that Smith went back into the execution chamber despite them botching the job the first time than that they half-assed the nitrogen asphyxiation. It was an untested method, but every method of execution has a first person to be executed with it.
If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you've already ceded the moral high ground. We have already solved execution, and we've had it solved for decades, even centuries arguably. Hanging, firing squad, electrocution, beheading, lethal injection--every method has its proponents and detractors, but every method is to the same end. If you're too squeamish for what happened in Alabama, an alternative method of killing people isn't going to fix that for you. The solution is staring you right in the face, and it's life without parole.
If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you've already ceded the moral high ground.
Well said.
That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed’s spiritual advisor. If I was Smith’s spiritual advisor, I’d also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful.
Yes, the person who actually cares about the person being killed speaks up for the person being killed. Does that make their opinion less valid than all the liars who said he was going to just pass peacefully, which of course did not happen?
But if the good people of Alabama aren’t comfortable with
A lot of people want the US to stop supporting Israel killing Palestinians. Is that happening?
Governments often act against the wishes of the people. Did everyone in Alabama agree this man should die this way?
I don't support capital punishment.
But hypoxia in humans is well studied. Unless they were using monumental stupid gas like CO2 (which triggers your breathing reflex) then the problem wasn't the method, in principle.
I wouldn't put it past a execution supporter to fuck it up somehow, though.
Use a bolt gun. It is good enough for the cows and pigs it is fast, it probably hurts but likely less time than even a needle.
I suggest starting by testing it out on the person that though slow suffocation for 25 minutes was humane.
another good one. Not quite as theatrical as a canon execution, but a funny idea nonetheless.
I feel like I have heard someone say it tastes better that way. I'm sure that would make it justifiable.
Pro Life!
“Pro-life” is just the label they put on it to seem pious. It’s not pro-life. It’s anti-women. With conservatives the suffering is the point.
personally i think we should start doing a slightly modified version of the traditional british canon execution.
For those who aren't familar, you strap a dude to the front of a canon, with a dud charge (i don't believe there is a projectile) and then set it off and run. Apparently it's pretty "spectacular" I say we do the same thing but delete the head in the process. Or perhaps add a canon ball because why not.
If we're executing people theres no need to pretend what we're doing is "good"
Too expensive and dangerous. A 2-ton tungsten cube dropped on the head is quick, painless, cheap, and puts on a show that can be cleaned up with a power washer.
We’re going to adopt your proposal but all that’s in the budget is a 45 lb plate from a local gym that closed down. Next execution is scheduled for next week, we hope to see you there!
I imagine that a two ton cube of anything would probably work.
Apparently, getting compressed by seawater inside a collapsing carbon fibre tube at a depth of 8kms is ultra quick.
Maybe we should just force condemned prisoners to test-pilot oceangate submarines.
actually, i like this idea. I think someone else mentioned just dropping a massive concrete cube on people for execution. It's a funny one for sure.
Tungsten is not cheap, also it might fracture
And it's reusable!
tungsten isn't cheap. look up the prices
and that's a pretty small rod
Only if they eat glitter as part of their last meal.
i second this.
When is America going to learn that you can't punish murder with murder? You are literally saying "rules for thee but not for me."
I once saw a slogan on a button at a street vendor in Washington D.C. "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" It's stuck with me after two decades.
I don't know that we do it to make any such statement to the guilty party. I personally think we do it to 1. deter others from going down that path for fear of the consequences, and 2. remove an individual from society who has shown themselves incapable (in the most malicious and extreme way) of properly functioning in society. They are a danger to society, therefore they need to be removed. Obviously you could make the argument that we could simply banish them somewhere or lock them up for the remainder of their lives, but in my personal opinion that's not definitive enough. They could escape, be let out early, and harm someone else.
Is sending them to Australia still a viable option?
Sadly it didn't work out well for the Aboriginals the first time around.
What should you punish murder with? Genuinely asking. I see many who want to do away with prisons and switch to rehabilitation. In some cases I can certainly understand that, and I am against for profit prisons, but I also know that a certain portion of society is just fundementally born with dysfunctional brains and no amount of rehabilitation will ever correct that. What do you do with the person who is sadistic and sociopathic in their disdain for other human life?
I'm against the death penalty but that's a terrible argument against it. It's not hypocritical to jail someone who was falsely imprisoning their victim. The state has a monopoly on violence, which means a monopoly on punishing wrongdoers, controlled by the will of the people.
The state is allowed to do all sorts of things individual people can't. It has a different role. It taxes, it enforces justice, it regulates business, it provides services that the private sector won't.
I don't know anything about this other than the guy most have been pretty terrible to be on death row but even a brutal killer should have some rights nobody deserves to die like that
There's also this bit..
When asked at the news conference about Smith shaking at the beginning of the execution, Hamm said Smith appeared to be holding his breath “for as long as he could” and may have also “struggled against his restraints.”
That's false spin. Nitrogen air is just regular air minus oxygen, 78% of the air you breathe is nitrogen. He was suffocated to death simply put, he died of hypoxia. It would be like someone getting shot, but then taking 5-8 minutes to slowly die minus the immediate burning pain of a gun shot or sudden drop in consciousness from immediate/fast bleed out.
He only killed one person too. Seems he killed the wrong person, maybe someone with power/connections. It makes no sense how he gets the death penalty but other murders don't.
even a brutal killer should have some rights
Dude, sincerely, fuck off.
What you do to the worst is a good indicator of how we treat everyone else
A brutal killer should have no rights and should be killed brutally.
You sound like a republican
He wasn't a brutal killer, he was hired to kill someone and did it out of greed. That's actually not brutality. Brutality would be someone raping someone and then killing them for glee. The state in this case is doing this out of brutality, they are doing it because it brings enjoyment and their method of execution is quite brutal.
Could you do it? Would you make someone else do it for you?
From another report:
“It appeared that Smith was holding his breath as long as he could,” Hamm ( Alabama’s corrections commissioner) said at the press conference.
Well, that would certainly make things worse for the prisoner and the witnesses.
If that's the case, then he wasn't going to be unconscious in seconds, as it would be expected by breathing the gas.
Instead, he inadvertently caused himself a lot of unnecessary suffering.
That's okay next time we'll just run a tube down his throat! That's not cruel at all!
Or maybe we put them in a room and fill it with the nitrogen gas. Some kind of... Chamber.
I think a mask, which I assume they used, is far better in this context. Just like being at the dentist.
But in medically assisted suicide, an injection is used (sometimes drugs that a patient can take themselves), and it is by far the most respectful, humane way to do it.
If a prisoner is going to hold their breath and make it worse than it needs to be, you can't fault the method.
That said, the situation was still horrible from what's been described.
Come on, isn't this america? Why don't they just shoot prisoners?! It's quick, cheap and they love shooting, don't they? Coming up with so many twisted ways to kill a person just to do it differently than the Nazis. If even Belarus is still officially shooting their people, why isn"t the greatest country in the world?
/s because I can't handle this
Mississippi authorizes firing squad if nitrogen hypoxia, lethal injection, and electrocution are held unconstitutional or “otherwise unavailable.”
Oklahoma & Utah have similar rules.
Because guns don't kill people. The NRA said so.
Holy shit, you're right. Firing squad would be kinder. And I hate guns, so…
From a purely academic/scientific perspective, is there a reason why they do not administer some form of benzodiazepine to gently sedate the prisoner before conducting the execution protocol? I'm not a medical professional, but I do have prescription benzo and it works miraculously in calming me down and lets me drift off to an incredibly deep sleep.
They’re worried about the prisoner becoming addicted.
pharmaceuticals manufacturers won't sell you this stuff, this already happened with lethal injection
taiwan (?) gets this well, as far as you can get death penalty well. prisoner is sedated with injectable benzos and then shot, no pain, no consciousness at all, very hard to fuck it up and no pretence of subtlety
Medical professionals, particularly doctors who have sworn an oath against causing harm, refuse to take part in the executions. This is partly why lethal injections are so hit and miss. Even if you can get the drugs, the dosages are tricky. IV placement is a skill. All of it being done by untrained individuals leads to a high rate of failure- and that was before the pharmaceutical companies started refusing to supply prisons.
I would imagine that if benzos became part of the nitrogen hypoxia protocols prisons would then have a hard time sourcing them, which is terrible for those other inmates who might need them for other reasons (anxiety, alcohol withdrawal, seizures)
Cost
I imagine the "eXpErImEnTaL jAb!" group is fine and dandy with experimental murder.
Flawless logic.
Wait are you saying people who got vaccinated against COVID likely support creative forms of capital punishment?
My guy, you're lost.
The odd way round. The anti-vaccination group
Seriously, fuck USA.
Youre just jealous pal. You wish you could be an American. /s
Ok, I do. The idea that I can endure something like this is the bollocks. And also you can meet people that can't read. What a greatness!
Barbaric.
I'm waiting for the witch trials to restart in the US.
How does the delivery method here differ from the euthanasia setup in Switzerland?
IIRC, Switzerland used a hood over the patient, or an airtight pod, that was flooded with nitrogen. It pushed out all other gases so the patient just fell unconscious due to hypoxia without the discomfort caused by CO2 poisoning.
The execution method used a mask, like a rebreather. The nitrogen delivery was inadequate and the convict was able to breathe in some oxygen, either from less-than-pure nitrogen gas, or gaps around the mask.
The person who chooses euthanasia will also be choosing to breathe normally so they don't get a buildup of CO2 from holding their breath.
the swiss method is automated, and calculated.
sounds like there was a guy here goin 'should i have turned the air off?'
Active euthanasia is illegal in Switzerland (administration by a third-party), but supplying the means for dying is legal (assisted suicide), as long as the action which directly causes death is performed by the one wishing to die. Source
Nitrogen gas would be administered through a facemask while the person is restrained (essentially suffocation) ... so hardly a peaceful death by choice.
People who are being euthanized are doing it voluntarily and will breathe intentionally to get the peaceful effects of losing consciousness and drifting off. They won't be panicking, or trying not to die.
I assume they also have the option to stop at any time, so they are fully in control of the process.
IDK about you guys, but in raising our kids we believed it was important that they know where meat comes from. So when slaughtering poultry the kids help out. Maybe apply the same thing here?
If you support capital punishment, then you must sign up for firing squad duty. If less than 50% of voters sign up for firing squad duty, then the death penalty is abolished.
Talk is cheap, conscience is expensive!
Smith’s death came after the US Supreme Court denied a final, 11th-hour bid to stay of execution. The ruling received dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor who wrote that the state had selected Smith as a “guinea pig” by using the untested method.
Because it's ok to use a human as a “guinea pig”.
I guess they should have killed a random selection of people with nitrogen first, so that it wouldn't be an "untested" method.
Weird, everything I saw on Lemmy until yesterday was about how humane and painless this method is, without any suffering. Seems that the tone has changed
as with anything, it can be fucked up... and leave it to this backwoods state to fuck it up.
like if he chose 'firing squad' and the squad start from the legs up. ya know, for target practice. go 2nd amendment.
Not enough attention was paid to the delivery mechanism and most of the attention was on Nitrogen gas in the abstract. The lawsuit was a total scattershot approach of throwing everything at the wall in order to delay or prevent this execution. It made it too easy to focus on the things that were absolutely wrong and not examine the delivery mechanism more closely.
And I'll own my part in that - the articles being posted contained a lot of bad science that stood to be corrected. The fact that the mechanism for delivery was a tiny mouth & nose mask that didn't dilute or remove the CO2 wasn't explained - probably because of the clear lack of understanding of how Nitrogen asphyxiation works.
Like, I might argue cottage cheese is safe and humane to feed someone, but when you fire a tub of it out of a cannon into someone's face, I will concede there are ways to do it inhumanely if you are sufficiently stupid or determined, but that shouldn't detract from the argument.
Nitrogen asphyxiation in and of itself is a humane way to go and should be preserved as an option while capital punishment remains. However, it must be performed correctly.
It's humane when done properly, this one sounds botched. Which was probably the point, given that cruelty is part of the death sentence system.
Isn't it the same way they let sick people kill themselves? I remember seeing a recent story about someone using a new capsule. They get inside it; it fills with nitrogen; and they drift away.
I'm no fan of the death penalty. Just genuinely interested in whether I'm correctly remembering that the best known voluntary method matches the new execution method.
Apparently they thought they could skimp on the capsule and just use a mask. Cheap and evil.
The key difference is that you need something to be actively removing the CO2, not just replacing the O2 with nitrogen.
Suffocation, as in the choking and suffering, is caused by carbon dioxide buildup, not lack of oxygen.
In humane suicide or confined space accidents, there's no oxygen but you can freely get rid of CO2. It's why workers test before going into sewer pipes and wear safety harnesses and sensors, and setup ventilation hoses. Without them they wouldn't even notice they were dying until they got loopy and fell over.
Method is important. The medium is the same (nitrogen) But putting an "oxygen" mask on someone and plumbing it to nitrogen is a different method than putting someone in a chamber that is sealed and the oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide* are quickly displaced.
*Carbon dioxide is what makes you feel like you're suffocating.
Sick people want to die and will breathe normally, which is what makes it painless. Resisting causes the suffering.
Yeah. Turns out they shouldn't have used an untested execution method. Especially when the judge made a blatantly unconstitutional decision to kill a man anyways. Clearly Alabama has no problem testing on humans.
It's a well-tested method, they botched the methodology.
https://www.ladbible.com/news/us-news/kenneth-smith-execution-euthanasia-pod-creator-193400-20240125
I'm still here saying that. Alabama fucked up something that should've been dead simple. Sealed mask with a one way valve, hooked directly up to nitrogen. That or an anoxic chamber for the victim. I'm against capital punishment but if it's going to happen, nitrogen is still the way to go.
Look I can't help but feel deceived.
Every single time the death penalty was brought up, nitrogen asphyxiation was touted as a humane alternative. There were always claims that it would be painless, and that the process itself was extremely well understood. It was usually further implied that the reason states don't do this was because death penalty advocates wanted the prisoner to suffer as long as possible.
Yet the second nitrogen asphyxiation became a viable option, the very same people touting it lined up against it. Suddenly it was completely unproven. Suddenly it was wholly inhumane and inflicted suffering.
It's so incredibly obvious that the push for nitrogen asphyxiation was at least in part a bad faith argument by people who are philosophically opposed to the death penalty.
Being philosophically opposed to the death penalty is a valid opinion, but the dishonesty makes me much less inclined for me to take these people seriously.
I don't think I'm unique in that regard. Nobody likes being deceived or lied to.
It seems weird to base your argument on the grounds that a needlessly cruel ineffective and largely incorrect application of something that has long been scientifically and medically understood means the individuals describing how the mechanism is more humane are suddenly sympathizers....?
You should feel betrayed not to deceived. Imagine if someone told you that tires can roll and then they produce a square tire that doesn't roll. Should you really feel deceived that they failed to produce a round tire? That claims that round things roll are therefore wrong?
It's well understood that breathing inert gases causes hypoxia and hypoxia is well understood. This man should have been unconscious in less than a minute.
We shouldn't have the death penalty to begin with and this is a great example why. Because apparently we just can't get it right even when getting it right is it literally as easy as filling a chamber with pure nitrogen and ensuring that it's cycled out...
See it's shit like this. For years hypoxia was touted as a humane solution. Now that states are switching to it all of a sudden the argument shifts to how there isn't any humane solution.
Goalpost moving.
Nitrogen is a humane route…. if it’s done right. I’m not a capital punishment person but to say it’s inhumane because they fucked up is a bit ridiculous
The quickest and most painless method was invented by the French: the guillotine.
If anything, I think the botched nitrogen execution should throw concern at the suicide advocates who touted nitrogen as the ideal method. They were probably wrong.
What if you're right though? Isn't then a perfectly good time to lie? If you know for sure that the death penalty is evil (which doesn't seem too big a leap given the facts), then it's wrong not to lie to people to get them to stop it. Otherwise you'd be saying that your own morality outweighs the humanity of others. If it results in no death penalty, it was a good action. People act like the ends aren't justifying the means in 99.99% of cases. It is notable specifically when the ends do not justify the means. If the ends are preventing murder, and the means is lying, there is no question whether lying is justified.
Complain that execution is wrong, not that the method was unpleasant.
Good that there is extensive evidence on the effectiveness of (brutal) death sentences as means to reduce crime!
Oh wait...
Anyone still want to use the cool nitrogen based suicide pods from Austria?
Correct me if Im wrong but those pods are in Sweden, and also take steps to ensure what a person exhales is quickly removed from the system to prevent rebreathing. If this had been done with one of those pods, he would have lost consciousness in minutes, the fact that he lived to struggle for long suggests this setup was not using pure nitrogen, and not accounting for exhaling. Strangling him would have been quicker, meaning he was getting oxygen somehow.
Edit: I recommend watching the Smarter Every Day episode on Hypoxia. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw the TL;DR is that if done right, dying from a proper nitrogen execution would be practically painless.
In this execution, the setup seems to have accidentally on purpose been setup to ensure maximum suffering, even disregarding the victim holding their breathe and seemingly hyperventilating themselves to saturate their co2 levels, something the body will respond to and trigger panic flight or fight responses.
Switzerland actually (but I was closer). I thought it was supposed to be instant not take minutes to lose consciousnesses. Struggling to breath for 10 seconds would be terrible. Minutes? No thank you. This definitely doesn't make it look any good.
In Spain they just let you drink a lot of pentobarbital at home. It's supervised by a doctor and hundredths of people already did it without issues. The pod is just a gimmick.
Reuters mentions the execution used a facial mask connected to a tank of nitrogen.
So yeah... No CO2 removal and probably not a perfect seal against outside atmosphere. This is a pretty half-assed implementation.
78% of the air you breathe is nitrogen dummy.
Liquid nitrogen, yeas please.
Freeze me into an iceblock and shatter me like a T-1000
👍
🔥🔥🔥
Every day I wake up and say: "what the fuck, America?!"
America is such a funny place. They dont have a problem with execution just experimental ones...
Many of us have a problem with all executions. And capital punishment was illegal in America from 1962-1976 until the Supreme Court reversed their original decision.
Ik i should have added /s to my comment but its still disturbing to me that there are people who are okay with execution.
The only people I'm ok with killing are the ones we have undeniable poof for. Like the Uvalde school shooter. They have footage of him in the school with the gun and know he killed the kids. In my book he's OK to execute. if there's even a shred of doubt in anyone's case then execution should be off the books period.
"Funny"
They tortured him to death.
Bullet to the brain next time.
Shit alternatively just strap an explosive to their head. Seems to be working for Russians in Ukraine when they wanna die.
State sactioned torture and murder. This was no execution, this was torturing someone to death.
As someone who gets nitrogen at the dentist office with a mask I have a theory that it was just him consciously fighting it. It’s positive pressure nitrogen that you just breath in at normal breath rate. If you breath really hard you can displace the nitrogen and suck in some regular air. It sounds like he fought it which caused it to take longer. It is the standard human reaction to fight against one’s own death and I’m guessing he thought that if they held out long enough they would stop. If they are going to use a mask like that as opposed to a hood or chamber they really should sedate the person first.
You do not get 'nitrogen' at the dentist's office.
You are given a solution of normal air with a small amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) to relax you. You are never deprived of oxygen, since the dentist isn't trying to asphyxiate you.
...this is hilarious. The dentist gives you nitrous oxide (laughing gas), not straight up nitrogen.
The rest of the comment is perfectly valid, though. If I have a mask on my face and I know that it's feeding me a gas that will kill me, I'd do everything I could to dislodge it and hold my breath and whatnot that I could. A far better approach would have been to fill the chamber with nitrogen, ideally without any sort of obvious hissing noise or other tell.
And a far far better approach would have been to not kill the guy in the first place, but I guess there's no stopping that particular bloodlust right now.
As someone who gets nitrogen at the dentist office with a mask I have a theory that it was just him consciously fighting it.
No shit Sherlock. Someone who likes having their breathing restricted during sexual escapades would also fight it and suffer if someone was actively trying to kill them.
If this is the case I wonder if it was his attempt to it fail like the first attempt. After that he may have had a good case to go life without parole rather than face another attempt at execution.
Because the nitrogen that you and I get at the dentist is enough to kill us… That's fucking stupid.
Wouldn't a firing squad machine be so much faster and more effective? Have 3 people push buttons only one button works. It's all a horrible mess, regardless of the method.
Forget death row inmates, I volunteer as tribute
I wonder how long Elizabeth Sennett struggled to live after Kenneth stabbed her to death. May she and her family rest in peace knowing justice has been served.
Murder isn't justice. We have shit carved into rock explaining to you rockheaded morons that violence only begets more violence.
There is also a little book that religious nut jobs use to validate whatever belief they seem to have at that time.
For instance you could point to that same funny stone tablet you mentioned and ask yourself why didn’t Kenneth follow that exact same rule and refrain from murdering Elizabeth Sennett??? But I doubt you asked yourself that before you posted your comment.
Where's all the people that said we "do actually know what it does to people and it's painless" now?
I'll admit it. I'm one of them.
The report is in direct conflict with what I've seen and heard in the past about this method. It's impossible to find right now on Google, but there was a documentary where someone subjects themselves to this method and it was the complete opposite of what's being reported now.
I'm against the death penalty, btw, but if it has to be done, I believed this method was the most humane. I have to ask if it was 100% nitrogen or did they do what the justice system always does and run it through hundreds of iterations to actually make it worse, like 50% air, 50% nitrogen or something like that.
We are here, learn to read. They did it wrong, just like they usually botch every single form of execution because cruelty is the point. Thus, stop all execution and remove the dead penalty.
The difference between a model and reality is often in the implementation. Clearly, this person had access to oxygen for 22 minutes after the execution started, which is a problem if you goal is to suffocate someone quickly. He was also suffering, which is possibly an indication that CO2 levels were too high, which would be another problem. It could also just be due to stress, which is unavoidable in an execution. Seizures near the time of death are also likely.
Ultimately, inert gas asphyxiation, if done correctly, is still probably the most humane means of execution, except for a large caliber bullet to the brain, which is very messy.
These issues are all secondary to the question of whether capital punishment should ever be used. I've stated my beliefs on that before. In short, it should never be done but if you're going to do it, it should be as humane as possible.
Captive bolt would be just as lethal as a bullet, and less messy. They're designed not to make a mess ever since BSE, you don't want to get brains everywhere. Yes that sounds grisly but I run a ranch, it's something we have to talk about.
They could use a custom designed unit, but if the ones we use can drop a full grown bull, I suspect they would be adequate.
A small and fast bullet like .22 Magnum is also extremely effective and leaves no mark except a tiny clean hole, at least on livestock. But they have different skulls from humans. I'm sure those ballistic gel guys could come up with the optimum bullet and load.
There are plenty of humane ways to kill when drugs/sedatives are involved.
In my opinion, the real issue is people won't be satisfied with someone feeling high or relaxed or whatever before dying (if their death was supposed to be a punishment). But those same people also don't want suffering...? It's very confusing to me.
I mean if they on death row. Just hang them.
Says his religious advisor, who is against the death penalty.
And one of the reporters who was there:
One of the five members of the media transported to Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore to witness the execution told the BBC it was unlike any other he'd witnessed in Alabama.
"I've been to four previous executions and I've never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas," Lee Hedgepeth told the BBC's Newsday programme.
"Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total."
Has anyone offered an account that contradicts this? Because I know the state of Alabama didn't.
The simplest explanation for what went wrong here is that Kenny's religious advisor is lying and we need to ask a neutral observer what actually happened.
No, the simplest explanation is that Alabama is filed with fucktards who didn't research the correct way to perform this task. They used a mask instead of a hood. Also, this same guy (and another guy last year) SURVIVED lethal injection in Alabama because they fucked it up. It took Alabama 5 hours to try killing him with lethal injection last year, and they STILL failed. What makes you think Alabama started a first of its kind process in the US and used it successfully?
I think you're putting too much emphasis on the geography here, this is just the nature of execution in America, it's what happens when medical personnel aren't involved, you end up with a flawed system, which it always has been. There were botched hangings there were botched electrocutions, there have been botched lethal injections all over the country, this is more an issue with capital punishment than it is location.
That's actually a much more complicated explanation.
Certainly not an unbiased observer.
https://www.treadbylee.com/p/never-alone-the-suffocation-of-kenneth
Bring on the downvotes but this guy is not some hero Elizabeth Sennett was stabbed to death by him I am sure her fate was worse.
Its not hard to not kill people.
Its not hard to not kill people.
The irony of this statement could not be thicker.
We judge people not on how they treat their best, but by how they treat their worst.
It’s easy to be nice to good people
Calling a method of execution barbaric in it's practice isn't the same as saying the executed is a hero. If you're not willing to engage with this subject, then please don't make one up to get angry at others over.
Sorry. I can't emphasize with criminals. It's impossible for me. The only thing that is weird to me is why on earth you took almost 40 years to execute a prisoner? It doesn't make sense. And other thing. I hope all the 4 criminals get the same punishment as well. It looks like the idiot paid the most.
"Pastor Charles Sennett Sr. hired Billy Gray Williams, one of his tenants, to murder his wife, 45-year-old Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett.[6] To carry out the plan, Williams hired Kenneth Smith and John Forrest Parker to assist him.[6] Sennett was going to pay each of the men $1,000 for the murder.[6] On March 18, 1988, Elizabeth Sennett was found with fatal injuries in her home in Colbert County, Alabama.[6]"
Oh and other thing for all the softy snowflakes. Let's hope your mom, sister, granny, father, brother, never get killed. It's way too easy to talk from your comfortable positions.
I can't emphasize with criminals
That says more about you than about the criminals. They are still human beings. Also, we’re supposed to be better than them.
Disagree that rapists are human.
Agree that the only way to make the world better is to not stoop to someone else's level.
Would add that protecting the wrongly accused is more important than getting rid of the guilty.
Most sane people can't empathize with (violent) criminals. But I can empathize with the wrongfully convicted. As distasteful as it is to let murderers and rapists drag out their drain on society, it's infinitely preferable to executing an innocent person.
Did something happen to you? Like was your mom, sister, granny, father, and/or brother killed?
Too that shit to those that were executed whilst innocent
Read the article:
"We didn’t see somebody go unconscious in 30 seconds,” said Red Hood. “What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life.”
You have absolutely no evidence that this is true, you're just parroting after-the-fact propaganda while entirely ignoring the good science on offer in this thread.
Those boots must be real tasty, huh?
Therefore his death was PAINLESS.
Except for the 22 minutes of struggling to breath. Unless you're discounting those by saying he was unconscious the moments before his death. If that's the case, most forms of what we consider painful death are after at least a few moments of unconsciousness.
I’m curious how they implemented this. The air completely has to be replaced with nitrogen, no breathing in a mix of nitrogen and outside air, no oxygen at all. People that enter confined spaces with no oxygen pretty much just drop and are dead quickly, so this doesn’t sound like they did it right.
They used a mask rather than the more appropriate method which would be to use a sealed chamber that was forcefully evacuated of oxygen and replaced by nitrogen the way the suicide pods are supposed to function.
The problem with a mask is it can't be a perfectly sealed system. The issue with the execution from a logistical standpoint was the redneck engineering they employed and not the actual science behind nitrogen hypoxia.
Please don't come at me, I'm not making a value judgment about the use of the death penalty, I'm just explaining the issue with their shoddy ass methodology.
Edit: accidentally a word.
Edit #2 (YouTube Link): Here is some additional information about why a gas mask is an ineffective and dangerous way to conduct an execution via nitrogen hypoxia from Dr. Philip Nitschke, a leading advocate of the right to die movement and an expert in the field of voluntary euthanasia. He personally examined the execution method being used in Alabama, and told them he felt it would be ineffective for many of the same reasons stated above.
FTR I’m generally against the death penalty, so same, don’t give me grief. I’m of the opinion that if it’s gonna be done, don’t fuck it up.
Ok. So regarding the implementation it sounds like they fucked it up. As you said (and I previously implied) it sounds like they didn’t properly exclude oxygen/remove waste CO2. Kinda hard to believe they fucked up something so simple considering the ton of evidence on hypoxic accidents.
I think the bigger issue is that he was aware of when the nitrogen started, so tried holding his breath for as long as possible.
If he had the mask on and it was pumping breathable air, and then at some point switched to pure nitrogen without any warning that would be more humane because he wouldn't know what was happening or when.
In case you didn't know, that should be "shoddy" as in "made or done poorly"
You shouldn't really need a seal if you have positive pressure. Agree that this was half-assed, though
Why not use like a scuba mask with a tank of nitrogen instead of oxygen? Scuba masks are seemingly airtight.
Or even a collar with a helmet like an astronaut suit. A lot easier to evacuate oxygen from a suit than an entire room.
He could have held his breath in a chamber too. The problem is it being forced on someone instead of being voluntary or unnoticed.
Also the guillotine is right there.. it's not pretty but the only method that "just works".
They often don't. There are moderate risks with lethal injections, and even if you seem unconscious, it's still disputed whether you would really be unaware or not. As for the gas, suffocate in any manner is very painful and unpleasant.
Your suffocation reflex is driven by a buildup of carbon dioxide, not a lack of oxygen.
If you leave air composition the same but remove the oxygen, your body doesn't notice and you feel fine until you suddenly black out.
https://youtu.be/UN3W4d-5RPo?si=3LKw5fe1wXfRDcrB
The Air Force does training on it, since it can happen if the aircraft loses pressure and pilots need to know how to notice and handle it. As you can see in the above video, the pilot is not suffering even though the oxygen level has been cut quite drastically.
You are not being “suffocated” in the sense that you aren’t allowed to breathe. I suggest you do some looking around and check out events where people have entered spaces that can have no/limited oxygen such as mines or anchor chain lockers on ships. They often simply drop unconscious and are dead fairly quickly. The victim isn’t re-breathing CO2, which is what gives us that panicked lack of air feeling, or someone holding something over your face making it difficult to breathe.
If you’ve ever had a medical procedure that puts you under, I can assure you there’s nothing remembered to be aware of.