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.
Done correctly, lethal injection is quite humane. We do it with pets; you administer a strong sedative, and then you use an overdose of a barbiturate to stop the heart (which is not the same as a heart attack). But that’s **not **how lethal injections are typically done in the US, esp. since pharmaceutical companies don’t want to sell their medications to prisons to be used to execute prisoners; that was because anti-death penalty advocates found ways to put pressure on drug companies. But how do you stop the sale of nitrogen to a prison? I can literally go buy a tank from any welding supply company.
Edit: the sedative is used to prevent feelings of fear or panic when the heart stops.
Wrong.
The method used in human execution uses Potassium Chloride to stop the heart, not Pentobarbital. It literally causes a heart attack.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, and a quick search what have shown you that.
“If the person being executed were not already completely unconscious, the injection of a highly concentrated solution of potassium chloride could cause severe pain at the site of the IV line, as well as along the punctured vein; it interrupts the electrical activity of the heart muscle and causes it to stop beating, bringing about the death of the person being executed.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_injection
Based on this thread, it sounds like the new method should be getting the death row inmate crazy high on something, AND THEN you give them the nitrogen mask.
I think the point was that killing someone by injection doesn’t have to be inhumane. If we have a protocol to kill a dog gently we could do the same to a human, we just choose not to.
Agreed. But most of the people who support the death penalty are also the kind of people who enjoy hurting others. They want it to hurt.