“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’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 shotty ass methodology.
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.
Precisely. They apparently either felt it was fine to cut corners, do not fully understand how nitrogen hypoxia actually works, or a little bit of suffering was intentionally part of the process because it still is Alabama after all…
Was gonna say, in Alabama you could give them a step by step guide and they’d take shortcuts.
The exit bag uses nitrogen suffocation as a suicide method. It’s a bag that encloses the person’s head. If they felt a mask could have been used, they would have
The big, really big issue, and I hate to say it. Is that, depending on the jurisdiction and laws in place, executions cannot be done by professionals. Most of the people who would know how to do it properly, medics, nurses, engineers, are ethically banned from participating or facilitating executions. Not that this stops them all from participating, and in some contexts some do, but on the general, executions on the USA are performed by completely incompetent individuals.
The more reason to just not fucking do them in the first place. How did they botched it using a mask when almost every single expert on medically assisted death recommends at least a sealed hood.
The people with the most experience with nitrogen suffocation are scientists working with animals. It’s the current best ethical euthanasia method.
I’m willing to bet my left testicle they thought in their lead-addled brain that it would work like a diver’s mask. Pumping in gas pushes out the water, so it must also push out the air, I tell you hwat! I don’t consider myself to be a very bright person, but even I know that water and air work differently.
their shotty ass methodology.
In case you didn’t know, that should be “shoddy” as in “made or done poorly”
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.
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.
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.
If you hold your breath you still build up CO2. You know, as a reaction to being killed.
And after a couple minutes at most you will reflexively take a breath or pass out and start breathing. In an inert atmosphere that first breath will knock you out almost immediately. After that you won’t feel anything. After the individual is unconsious you just need to keep them in an inert gas for a few more minutes for them to actually die.
“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Even with a portion of that being ‘just to make sure’ his vital signs had stopped, it was certainly longer than a couple of minutes.
Because clearly they fucked something up. He was still getting oxygen somehow. I’m guessing they didn’t have the nitrogen flow high enough so he was still getting some oxygen.
It could have also just been agonal gasping which can last over an hour even after the person is already dead. It’s fairly common for people to see that and say the person is still breathing even though that person has already been dead for a while. It also happens with heart attacks and it frequently leads to ems having to explain to family members why there is no hope of resuscitation even though to them it looks like the person is still “breathing”.
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.
Cruelty is the point in America.
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
They used a mask. Not a sealed chamber like the suicide pods. So presumably it wasn’t completely air tight.
Ah, I didn’t read in the article that they used a mask. What a cruel / incompetent thing to do
Oh, they botched it alright.
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.
The nitrogen assisted suicide used a different delivery method. The mistake was using a mask for the execution.
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
The process - which is only authorised by Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi - involves breathing in nitrogen through a respirator mask placed over the inmate’s nose and mouth, which kills them as a result of oxygen deprivation.
Well shit, they should have at least used a full face covering or a hood at minimum.
Where does it say in that article that it’s well-tested or that they botched it?
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, fuck USA.
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.
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.
“Waterboarding doesn’t cause suffering because it isn’t literally drowning.”
That’s what you sound like.
The body is weird when it comes to breathing. It doesn’t measure one of the critical gasses. 3 things particularly send the body into a breathing panic.
-
Rising CO2 (via blood acidity)
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Water in the airways.
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Resistance to inflating the lungs.
Water boarding is particularly evil, since it creates just enough of the last 2 to trigger a full blown drowning reaction, but is light enough to not actually be dangerous. This lets the questioner hold the victim in that zone, without permanent physical harm (but massive psychological harm).
Nitrogen hypoxia doesn’t set off any of those triggers. This makes it particularly dangerous to some workers. They don’t realise anything is wrong until they pass out.
Also, to clarify. I am massively against the death penalty. It’s both cruel, and not particularly effective as a deterrent. It’s also no cheaper, in practice, than life imprisonment. However, if it is going to be used, it should be as humane as possible. Nitrogen hypoxia is about as humane as it can get.
They cannot do it humanely with a method that requires the person to breath normally to work. If they can hold their breath it will always be inhumane because they will still be struggling and have the same impending doom and physical reaction as waterboarding.
It does not matter if the chemical properties are different when the person has a working brain and doesn’t want to die. Or if it is being implemented by incompetent people who couldn’t even kill him with lethal injection in 2022.
So what method would you suggest, assuming you must choose a method?
I’m completely against the death penalty. It’s no longer an option over here in the UK. However, if it must be done, do it as humanely as possible.
Locked in a box, with a cat, a flask of poison, a radioactive source, and a Geiger counter.
Except when the Geiger counter gets a hit, it sets off a nuclear bomb inside the box so I’m instantly vaporized.
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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.
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?
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 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.
They tortured him to death.
Bullet to the brain next time.
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.
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.
I don’t support the execution of the Uvalde shooter.
What does killing him accomplish?
Justice? Not really.
Restitution? Not at all.
Vengeance? Not really.
Deterrence? Not really.
Closure for the families of the victims? I suppose.
I don’t know about this case, but some families of victims oppose the death penalty, even in the case of the murder of their children.
Some reasons for this view could be religious beliefs, or the view that death is the easy way out, or the deterrence value of being able to point at a person in jail, or the potential for the person to do some good in the world.
These people would object to closure for them being used as justification for killing their child’s murderer.
It’s not fair to victim families to make them choose life or death for a murderer. It would be a decision they’d have to live with forever. We can’t do that to them.
My opinion is that capital punishment should only be used where a person guilty of a ‘capital crime’ can’t be reliably imprisoned.
Ie I’m not sure Iraqis were wrong to execute Saddam Hussein. I don’t think it would be wrong for countries that struggle with corruption in their penal system to execute cartel leaders (that have been convicted of ‘capital crimes’). War crimes, insurrection leaders, that sort of thing.
What does killing him accomplish?
One thing and one thing only: saves tax payer money long term.
Nope. The math has been done on this many times, and death sentence is more expensive than life without parole. And that’s according to the State’s own numbers.
Good that there is extensive evidence on the effectiveness of (brutal) death sentences as means to reduce crime!
Oh wait…
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.
…this is hilarious. The dentist gives you nitrous oxide (laughing gas), not straight up nitrogen.
Because the nitrogen that you and I get at the dentist is enough to kill us… That’s fucking stupid.
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.
Complain that execution is wrong, not that the method was unpleasant.
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.
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.
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