“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.
“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.
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
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?
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.
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.