Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney Thursday and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method.
The Alabama attorney general’s office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” But what exactly Smith, 58, will feel after the warden switches on the gas is unknown, some doctors and critics say.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
Keller, who was not involved in developing the Alabama protocol, said the plan is to “eliminate all of the oxygen from the air” that Smith is breathing by replacing it with nitrogen.
How about stop murdering people
I don’t know why this is still a controversial concept. Just don’t kill prisoners. Horrific crimes are not assuaged by more death. It’s never worked in history and it doesn’t work now.
It’s arguably controversial because the human brain has a cognitive bias toward vengeance. There are lot of really interesting psych studies on this topic. It feels right to take an eye for an eye, and we often try to justify that urge, even if we don’t benefit from it.
The human brain has a lot of cognitive biases that we have collectively decided to legislate against.
This is one of the easiest to move on from. It takes significantly more effort to justify and carry out judicial murder than it does to ban it.
We banned dueling to the death over honor centuries ago, and that’s a very similar cognitive bias. Arguably a lot less impactful on society at large too, since a duel requires 2 willing participants and by definition has no collateral consequences, but it was still deemed wrong ages ago. There is no clear argument killing someone for their alleged crimes.
Agreed. The problem is that voters and politician have that same damn DNA and those same biases.
We can totally use higher level reasoning to think through that old ass amygdala wiring. But doing that often takes work, or showing people that some other low level need is being threatened by giving into the feels of vengeance.
Some people are just beyond saving man
It’s pretty arbitrary, too. A guy in a town I lived in killed his wife with a knife in front of their kids, and was sentenced to 40 years. This guy helped kill someone, served 35 years, and they still want execute him on top of it.
We actually do know the effect of breathing nitrogen gas. It’s a hell of a lot better than injecting someone with a drug cocktail. I don’t agree with the death penalty but this is about as humane as the death penalty gets.
Exactly. They make it sound as if nobody ever got exposed to low oxygen atmospheres. Absurd. Just the stories of divers is so so much. You feel absolutely nothing and then it goes black. Real simple.
Yeah, it’s really similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s not like suffocating because our bodies specifically react to the buildup of CO2, which triggers that pain and fear response. CO poisoning is incredibly dangerous because it’s so imperceptible and effective. When given the choice between O2 and CO our bodies will actually choose the latter because it bonds better to hemoglobin.
If ever there was a painless way to die, this is it.
My uneducated self was wondering how suffocation could be considered “humane”, but now I see that’s not what is happening. Thanks to your post, I have a better understanding of the process. I’m still against the death penalty, but I appreciate the info nonetheless. Thanks!
Yeah, I’m sick of the media drama about this dude. I don’t think they should execute him but there’s nothing that novel or cruel about the method.
It would be novel in that it’s the first time it’s ever been done.
Yes, apoxia is the way to go if you have to.
Do you know that your body behaves differently when voluntarily being underwater while holding your breath and being held underwater while holding your breath knowing the person isn’t going to let you breath again?
The negative side effects of the latter kick in way before you start to run out of oxygen.
How is that fixed by using a drug cocktail? Seems like any method of execution will scare the person being executed.
A drug cocktail, the electric chair, lethal injection, and any form of execution is going to cause distress. Distress is worse than just being scared because distress actually causes the body to feel as if it is being harmed whether it is or isn’t. The longer the process takes, the worse the distress.
The electric chair is probably the worst because you get the distress and ridiculous levels of pain. Same with the gas chamber. Lethal injection, if done right, reduces the pain but still has the distress. But they fuck that up so it ends up being both as well.
This new thing will be fucked up like lethal injection because the people doing the executions are incompetent. But even if they did it perfectly the person knows they will be dying and it isn’t significantly different from suffocation because they will still have the same distress.
That’s not how it works. Your body can’t detect a lack of oxygen but only build up of CO2. If you replace the air you breath with pure Helium, N2, CO, etc. you will just painlessly black out and die.
The difference is that nitrogen is odorless and colorless and we breath it in constantly. You won’t notice it, you’ll just start panting, get loopy, then lose consciousness.
That is relevant when the person doesn’t know. Someone being executed will know that getting loopy means they are dying, and trigger a distress response.
CO2 isn’t necessary to let your body know it is suffocating when you already know you are suffocating.
Starting to sound like your opinion to be honest. By the time he notices he’s loopy, it is over.
IMHO, executions don’t make sense given the amount of innocent people that we keep finding on death row.
It makes even less sense given that we need to have a long expensive, and highly imperfect, appellate process to double check that we’re not killing innocent people.
Also, we don’t really have any good data to support the claim that the death penalty deters people from committing terrible crimes. People that are going to do something -that- bad are usually going to do it.
I don’t see it as intended as a deterrent so much as a statement of values. A way of saying some things are not games or forgivable.
But in order to make that statement of values, are you willing to execute innocent people and to divert money away from other public programs that uphold other important values?
A way of saying some things are not games or forgivable
Whats the point of saying that if its not meant as a deterrent? Who are we telling this to? Is it all to show upstanding citizens that “look, we’re the good guys, we’re killing the bad guys!”?
Is that really worth peoples lives, especially with the chance that those people aren’t actually bad guys?
That’s why you lock them up forever. Unless of course later evidence vindicates them, since the justice system is imperfect and innocent people do occasionally get wrongly convicted. Y’know what totally prevents later vindication if someone was wrongly convicted?
Whether or not some crimes deserve the death penalty, so long as it’s possible for innocent people to be convicted, the death penalty is morally unjustifiable.
Like murdering an innocent person?
Life without parole would have the same effect though.
I don’t want absolute human garbage to be given food and accomodations paid by taxes for the rest of their lives.
The death penalty uses significantly more tax money.
A statement of values held by society that sometimes you have to kill people in cold blood.
You wrote a contradiction in which it’s not a deterrent but is one too.
a statement of values.
Is that statement “killing is bad, and if you do it we’ll kill you”?
We know exactly what happens when people experience nitrogen hypoxia. They get confused, then they lose consciousness, then die only if deprived of oxygen for quite some time.
We know because many people have experienced it and survived (because the oxygen was switched back on). I personally know someone who experienced this in a controlled test with the military.
Voluntarily having that happen is confusing at best.
Knowing it is going to happen is terrifying, because the person knows why they are slipping away.
Like the difference between choosing to be underwater and someone forcing you underwater. The latter is going to feel like drowning immediately because of anticipation.
Sure but that’s because of execution itself rather than the method of execution. This is physically painless even though obviously the emotional impact is bound to be intense.
Not really - not being able to breathe is pretty unique here. It’s very slow, and even if you don’t feel pain directly, you can feel oxygen deprivation indirectly - if you’ve ever gone way up in altitude you’d know the feeling
At this point, why not just give them an elephant’s dose of fentanyl?
That’s not what the science says. It turns out humans can’t detect oxygen deprivation, they can only detect either increased CO2 concentration or reduced pressure. (Interestingly isn’t necessarily true for other mammals, such as rats, who can detect oxygen deprivation directly.)
Since this is inert gas asphyxiation (nitrogen), it does not trigger the same suffocation response. Additionally, at volumes of O2 less than 6%, it only takes one or two breaths to cause unconsciousness, making it quite different than the effect you’d feel at altitude.
Not the “I can’t breathe” feeling, the dreamy, detached state your mind goes into. The heaviness of your body.
Now imagine yourself slipping away like that, where it rapidly comes on.
Not a good way to go.
It’s easy enough to miss that people can die without noticing they’re in a cloud of nitrogen, but if you know it’s coming?
Also, are you sure the DIY system they’re building, without any help from experts, is going to be that fast
I strongly disagree, the brief, euphoric confusion of hypoxia is likely one of the most ideal ways to go.
The supposed “DIY” nature of the system in question is another matter entirely that sidesteps the only point I’ve argued here - is inert gas hypoxia a painless, quick death? Science still says yes.
The emotional response leads to a physical response…
I mean, its the same response knowing you are going to be executed. No method of execution is going to prevent what you propose is a problem with the new method. Same thing when you set up the lethal injection and then slowly go through the stages of the cocktail.
Finding out in court has a different response than being strapped down to a table while they start the process.
The whole thing is just a big torture process and we should stop doing it.
An example of said training given to the untrained.
https://youtu.be/kUfF2MTnqAw?feature=shared
I wouldn’t want to die that way.
The pain might not be there but the realisation is.
He’s able to state that he doesn’t want to die, but needs help putting the mask on.
It’s a slow mental death, even if not a physically painful one, it’s slow.
The humane way to kill someone is quick and painless. Not slow and painless. This is better than the injection which is slow and painful but still not humane.
Fast and painless are not the only criteria. Looking at how america typically kills it’s citizens it also clear that it has to look peaceful and respectful. Thats why they put a bag over people getting electrocuted and why they don’t just fire a shotgun at your head from a close distance.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
We do, in fact, know what a person feels from nitrogen suffocation, and we know because nitrogen suffocation happens accidentally with some degree of regularity from workers that don’t follow proper safety protocols.
At first you feel out of breath, but you don’t feel panic from it; it’s like exhaling everything in your lungs, and then breathing in solely from a helium filled balloon (which I’m guessing most people have tried). You feel slightly high and light headed because the oxygen in your bloodstream is rapidly depleted; you are hypoxic. As you take a second and third breath, your vision tunnels, and you pass out. Your body has a mechanism to detect a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, but since you’re expelling the CO2 with every breath out, and breathing nitrogen back in, that panic response doesn’t get tripped.
Nitrogen suffocation has been a preferred choice for right-to-die advocates.
We can argue about how the death penalty is applied, and whether it should exist at all (I believe it should, but is almost always inappropriate), but there’s no serious argument about whether nitrogen suffocation is a good or bad way to die. The people continuously fighting against this execution are fighting the method because they’ve lost all their other avenues to prevent the execution; attempting to call this process ‘untested’–when it’s been tested by a large number of people using it to end their own lives, and tested via industrial accidents–is the only option that they have left to prevent this execution.
Thank you, I’ve been wondering why we’re suddenly seeing all this hub bub around nitrogen execution when it’s 100% obviously a better method than the barbaric injected cocktail that regularly fails. Thought I was taking crazy pills.
I’m not pro death penalty, mostly because we suck at not convicting innocent people, but if we’re going to execute someone this is probably the best way, and have thought this is how it should be done for a while. I’m not suicidal but if I was going to do it it would be with nitrogen.
You still have to take at least 3 breaths knowing you are killing yourself as you do so, and if you so choose can make the moment more awkward by holding your breath and struggling and/or screaming.
Surely the actual best way is completely instant and unavoidable like being crushed by a giant weight that moves faster than the human reaction speed and completely obliterates the body, or having your head exploded by a cannon ball or being completely instantly atomized by a massive explosion?
Doesnt carbon-monoxide do this too?
Well. Yes, but also no. CO poisoning will make you feel sick. That might be because it’s not enough CO.
thank you. the number of incorrect statements by people who just don’t get the physiology in this article was driving me nuts. As long as no CO2 buildup happens, you have no feeling of air starvation. That’s why certain types of re-breather accidents can get out of hand so quickly.
As someone who has been a bit too close to a leaky nitrogen tank, it just felt like I had stood up too quickly. There was nothing painful about the experience, and if I had been hit with a higher dose I imagine I would have been unconscious before feeling anything.
Don’t get me wrong, capital punishment is bad, but this feels like one of the least bad ways to go.
Abolish capital punishment. The US is such a freakin’ primitive country in so many ways.
I don’t know man, some people really, really deserve to be removed from existence:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito
How can you reform someone who raped, tortured, killed and then raped again (while dead) more than 100 minors?
Put yourself in the position of a father who knows this guy raped his kid, then tortured him with mutilation, and then raped the corpse.
Imagine knowing that this person is in jail, probably getting decent food and watching TV… Probably jerking off to the memories of the mutilated body parts of your child… while you have to live knowing he is still there.
Revenge is not a good motive though. It doesn’t bring those children back. Removing people like him from society while not forgetting our humanity is all we can do.
I get that there are horrible people out there. No doubt. But the first thing societies like the US (and Colombia in this case) should do is to reform society to produce fewer of these people.
Much of Europe seems to have found a good recipe. Remove the desperation, especially economic desperation. Create equality. Promote health and community and less selfishness and greed. Focus on rehabilitation and productivity instead of punishment and passivity in prison systems.
Unfortunately, a lot of American leaders and voters see revenge as justice, many in the name of Christianity. Not exactly the Christian way from where I’m sitting, but that’s reality.
I don’t see it as revenge but instead as a means to let families move on. I think it is a burden to them knowing this person is still somewhere out there, even if they are locked.
These are pretty special cases. I think countries with capital punishment take those sentences very seriously, it’s not like they go around killing people for funsies.
I think that particular individual that I sent really should be killed. It’s just too much, his case is just too extreme. This is just an evil person… Raping, TORTURING, killing and raping again 300+ innocent minors in the span of 7 years.
He raped, tortured and killed one minor per week in average, for 7 years. Doing that a single time is INSANE. Doing that 300+ times just deserves death.
I get what you’re saying. I disagree, because I just find the concept of capital punishment ethically and morally wrong. Just because someone killed, no matter how and how many, doesn’t give us the right to kill. Not as individuals and not as a society. We have to be better than that.
You lock em up and just leave them there. Current estimates put the faction of innocent death row inmates at about 2%. That’s completely unacceptable. Is killing a bad person out of revenge worth innocent lives when you can just lock them up for life instead?
For most of human history we didn’t have the option of keeping someone imprisoned for life, so killing evil people was really the only permanent solution. It’s understandable that that desire would be engrained in us. But if we don’t have to kill them, shouldn’t we avoid doing so so that we don’t get innocent people killed?
That’s what supermax prisons are for. Do you think they’re pleasant places to spend the rest of your life?
Put yourself in the position of…
That is not how the law works. if the law worked based on how you would feel if you put yourself in the place of a person, you’d get “it would feel bad to be stolen from, but it would feel good to steal, therefore they are the same.” If you could only place yourself in the place of the victim, no one would be innocent because it would feel bad, and thus they must be guilty. It’s a ridiculous concept. What if I imagine myself as the father and I also imagine I don’t care, should murder be legal?
He killed and raped x many people
So did the US army. Rape isn’t punishable by death, for good reason. It’s only added here as an appeal to emotion with no reflection on how it would impact legal process. Rape is very hard to prove, and also way more common than murder. Based on the average number of rape cases and the average length of a death penalty case you’d have half a million 20-year-long cases a year every year forever in the US alone.
Then when it comes to killing lots of people - obviously I’m not defending it, but lots of people kill lots of people. Tobacco manufacturers, car manufacturers, armies, secret services, the police, doctors when things go wrong - or even when things go right but the person can’t be saved…
It’s all well and good to look at one guy and say “this person should die,” but the problem is the law has to be administered fairly and for everyone or there’ll be no law, so when you look at 16,000 people per year every year, it looks very different .
You know what would be more humane?
Not killing people.
Agreed. I don’t know how you can consider yourself a modern civilization while still putting people to death. It’s barbaric.
I want to recap the long sequence of events that has led up to this point:
- In the beginning of this narrative, every death penalty state was doing lethal injections with a three drug protocol.
- Italy and maybe some other European nations start arresting pharmaceutical executives and charging them with murder, because their drugs are being used for these lethal injections in the United States.
- Drug companies stop selling their drugs to state penitentiaries. States are not able to perform executions.
- Death penalty states start amending their protocols to switch to different drugs and sometimes a single dose barbiturate protocol.
- Those drugs become harder and harder to source. Pharma companies become completely unwilling to dispense the drugs at all. State legislatures start allowing corrections officials to change the protocol without amending state law, in an effort to keep up.
- States resort to buying drugs from shady compounding pharmacies in secret. Having prison guards write dosage protocols turns out to have been a bad idea. Because, guess what, anesthesiologists are a highly compensated medical specialty, because what they do is highly complicated. So some exit l executions are botched, which delays things even more.
- It’s in this environment that this nitrogen idea migrates from internet boards into the state legislatures.
The big picture here is that if execution remains legal, but you take away all the options, death penalty states will go looking for alternative options.
I’m not sure why people obsess over the method. It distracts from the act itself.
It kills innocent people, and the appeal process that we put in place, to try our best not to kill innocent people, costs a shit load of money. Money we could spend on other things we desperately need. Oh, and studies show that it doesn’t deter people.
The only thing it really does is satiate our amygdala’s ancient bias for vengeance. Our biology tells us that it feels right, but the data shows that individuals and societies don’t really benefit from it.
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Because it distracts from the act itself.
“Nevermind the govt is literally a death panel for the poor and middle class only, just worry about HOW we kill you, k?”
Why obsess over the difference between prolonged suffering or painless death?
If it’s pure nitrogen it’s as painless as it can get. Make sure there is no O2 in there, get rid of exhaled CO2. Simple. But still, your country should think about death sentences in general. If you think nitrogen is too inhumane just shoot them im the head with a shotgun from a close distance, that too should do the trick.
As long as we continue to do this, we should be forced to pull “execution duty” like we can pull jury duty.
Make people come in to press the button that kills the person.
Let’s see how people vote concerning capital punishment after that.
The distraction is the point. By making the execution look less grotesque, they believe it will make it more palatable to their mouth-breathing constituents. They want the delusion of the condemned drifting off to sleep to slake their bloodlust without their pesky consciences feeling the guilt.
Er…I suspect that part of the point is that their previous method of execution was lethal injection, and there was a pretty well-documented shortage of the drugs for that. They got really expensive. I suspect that’s around the point where someone looked into alternatives and came up with this.
I think you’re probably right that the method seeming maybe more humane to some critics was part of the appeal of this particular method, but I think the main goal was probably cost reduction and ensuring that supply chain issues couldn’t interrupt their murdering any more.
Did they get the idea from the Sarco Pod (AKA the Swiss Suicide Booth)? I know inert gas deaths aren’t a new concept but it seems like an odd coincidence since the pod was just making news a couple years ago.
Nitrogen was talked about in the Oklahoma legislature a few years before this pod hit the news.
Thanks
Okay, can someone explain to me why states with capital punishment don’t just inject someone with a bunch of morphine and they just go to sleep and never wake up again? I hear all the time about the horrific shit they inject into people and the horrible deaths they suffer, while one easy drug can execute the person with no fuss? I just don’t understand.
Or just shoot them, or decapitate them. We’ve known how to kill people for centuries, but “humane” here usually just means what’s prettiest to look at, not what kills the quickest or cleanest.
Morphine is considered a ‘fun’ drug, and they wouldn’t want to be giving prisoners that.
Drug companies refuse to supply states with execution medications. Not sure if it’s liability, legality or ethics (probably not the latter). I’d think states could synthesize their own or use drugs they confiscated, though.
Also, the AMA and state medical boards punish doctors who agree to supervise executions, because to do so violates the Hippocratic oath.
Often doctors have travelled to the prison in secret, and go to great lengths to remain anonymous. Kinda like the hooded axe man of old.
Some of the drugs are not manufactured in the US. There has been an EU wide ban for selling drugs used in executions to the US without making sure they’re not used for executions. Which also is the reason why medical organizations were very unhappy few years ago when states lied to them in an attempt to get those drugs - as they risk getting cut off for legitimate medical use.
Reason for the EU ban is simple: We consider executions a human rights violation over here.
The appearance of having ethics matters for drug companies because of liability concerns.
The other thing that matters to big multinational pharma companies is when Italian prosecutors start charging their executives with murder. That’s definitely a “liability concern.”
Ever since watching the Jacob Gellar video about capital punishment, I truly think there is no form of “humane” way of killing someone.
there isn’t. There is no good argument for killing anyone. Even a child can grasp “who watches the watchmen.”
Sometimes violent people need to be secured from society to prevent pain/suffering/death — we have non lethal methods. And they are cheaper, more accurate, slightly less racist-influenced, and more effective than murder.
A large percentage of death row executions are later exonerated. A large percentage of executions are botched causing undue suffering to victim, executioner, staff and witnesses. The death penalty does nothing to dissuade any crimes from happening.
All it does is give people an excuse to talk tough, “Yeah well I’d kill him with my bare hands.”
Sure, Jan.
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I think we need to go and get sharks with freaking lazer beams attached to their heads
Don’t critics always and only raise doubts? How about making the article about what experts say instead of critics?
There’s a great Jacob Geller video about how methods of execution have evolved and why they’ve evolved.
I wouldn’t do it justice but it points out how every time we make a ‘more humane’ way of killing it often just reduces the person’s ability to show suffering, rather than reducing the suffering itself. In many cases the suffering is increased as we say the method is less barbaric; a firing squad has the highest success rate and likely the fastest death.
I can’t recommend this enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirR4FHY2YY Piped bot do your thing
We should abolish the death penalty.
Pretending no one knows what happens when people breathe pure nitrogen until they die is absolutely ludicrous. Especially because what you’re breathing right now is mostly nitrogen.
We know what happens because it happens to mine workers and scuba divers and others by accident. It’s pretty pain/panic-less, which is normally why it’s such a big deal to try and avoid. It’s advocated for as a method by right-to-die proponents because it’s so painless. Pretending this is random human experimentation just gives leverage to dismiss the entire argument.
At least it was painless /s
I do agree the death penalty should be abolished, by the way
Remember when Edison electrocuted a bunch of animals to prove how dangerous AC was? Do you not believe AC can be used correctly?
Nitrogen is one of the methods advocated for by right-to-die advocates for a reason.
Botched execution of the execution are one of the reasons there shouldn’t be executions. A bunch of guys “playing it by ear” who want the accused to suffer are not going to do a good job.
I agree wholeheartedly. My point was more that if you’re making execution into a pseudo-medical event (For example with lethal injections) then you’re going to have more botched executions since the people performing them aren’t medical personnel.
While I don’t believe we should have executions a gun is designed to be used with little training, but syringes and medical gas supply masks (Don’t know the actual name for them) are meant to be used with training. If executions are going to happen surely we should consider the aptitude of those administering them?
