This comment from a lawyer about the new practice of injecting potassium chloride into fetuses in the womb to ensure that they don’t survive the abortion brings up a question that perennially perplexes me.

Regardless of one’s position on the death penalty, why is it so damned hard for the state to come up with a way to execute someone painlessly? Apparently, this “three-drug cocktail” they’ve come up with can be quite painful if not done properly, or with the proper doses.

I just don’t get it. There are a number of ways that people die accidentally, with no apparent knowledge that they are going. Carbon monoxide kills many people every year with no warning to the victim. Maybe it’s only painless because it happens in their sleep, but how about this example?

Before the first Shuttle launch, some ground crew died in the engine compartment of the orbiter, because they were in there during a nitrogen purge. They apparently never knew they had a problem, but simply passed out. If there’s a CO2 buildup, the body knows it’s asphyxiating, and tries to do something about it, but no such warning mechanism has ever developed for a pure nitrogen atmosphere, because no animal would have ever encountered such an environment in nature.

So why not simply bring back the gas chamber, but instead of a toxin, simply remove the air and replace it with nitrogen? I’m sure there are other examples, but I fail to understand why this is such a difficult problem.