Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.

The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.

Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    First, no licensed medical personnel can participate since it violates the Hippocratic oath, so you have to design the protocol without any input from anyone who understands the human body well enough or any scientific studies because human experimentation designed to end a life is illegal. And then also carry it out without people who know how to find a vein, much less understanding what to do when things go wrong.

    And if it requires drugs or complex equipment whose sole use is executions, very few companies are going to want that contract. It’s not lucrative with no other uses, and you tarnish your reputation and possibly lose more lucrative contracts in less conservative states.

    There are very few methods that are effective and painless for everyone and not messy since you want people to watch, including the victims’ friends and families. That way you can justify the act, pretend that you’re using it as a crime deterrent, and fewer people are likely to feel sorry for the person and stop future executions. And it has to be cheap because one of the justifications is that life in prison is so costly.

    Honestly, the best bet for painlessness, ease of execution, and simplicity of the equipment and maintenance is the guilotine. But it’s messy and most people don’t want to see a headless body fall to the ground. And it’s hard to find workers to clean up after.

    • Square Singer@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      But, you don’t have to. You just get a butcher who knows how to do a carbon monoxide execution on animals and apply the same thing to humans.

      All you need is to pipe the exhaust of an old gasoline engine into a room and be done with it.

      Costs nothing, doesn’t require medical personell, not even medical equipment. There are tousands of people in the US who routinely do it and it’s as cheap as can be. All you need is an old car or a scrap engine, a hose and some gasoline.

      But I guess, since it was the favourite form of execution of the Nazis, it would probably be pretty on-the-nose about how terrible the act of state-sponsored murder is.

      • krustymeathead@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The issue is this may be considered “cruel and unusual” punishment, and that is what lethal injection was designed to avoid. However, there are all sorts of problems with lethal injection in practice. Nitrogen would effectively be a better lethal injection without the complications (drug inventory, dosing amounts, etc).

        The issue here isn’t killing people. It’s doing so in a way the defense lawyer can’t argue against to a judge.

        • Square Singer@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Tbh, the lethal injection with all that regularly goes wrong with it is super cruel and unusual.

          And isn’t murder in any instance cruel and unusual?

    • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, the best bet for painlessness, ease of execution, and simplicity of the equipment and maintenance is the guillotine.

      I was thinking about a 50t weight. 10x10x10 cube of steel, put you into a socket, have you stand in the middle, drop. by the time your brain could register pain, everything would be a few mm thick layer of you-goo. It’d work every time, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the eyes blinking after, or the body running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off. No brain function would upset the executed.

      If I had to be executed, something like that would be vastly preferable to dying via asphyxiation whether chemical induced or atmospheric deprivation…