I’ve long wondered why they haven’t used a nitrogen mask for a blissful way to die, but some states have apparently authorized it, and now Alabama may be the first to use it for capital punishment.
I’m sort of amused by the objection from the usual suspects: “‘No state in the country has executed a person using nitrogen hypoxia and Alabama is in no position to experiment with a completely unproven and unused method for executing someone,’ Angie Setzer, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative said.”
What they really fear is not that it is experimental, but that it will work very well, and remove one of the arguments against capital punishment: that it is cruel.
“What they really fear is not that it is experimental, but that it will work very well, and remove one of the arguments against capital punishment: that it is cruel.”
Strongest argument against capital punishment IMHO would be that it is difficult to correct the execution of the result if you make an error in conviction; due to incompetent legal representation/exculpatory evidence ignored/fraud/perjury etc.
I agree, but it remains ridiculous that if you are going to execute someone they don’t use this most obvious way.
With the average time between sentencing and execution being over 20 years, with seemingly endless appeals, and with better DNA technology used by the Innocence Project, the odds of an innocent person being executed are very small. Still, I have reservations about the death penalty because my faith in the legal system is at an all-time low.
It’ll come around eventually to where you can’t execute someone using a method that’s too humane.
Just you watch.
What do the Canadians use in their suicide booths?
Cheap and effective. What’s not to like?
When the AI’s take over (assuming there as smart as latest press seems to be implying they are/will be) expect the death penalty to make a big comeback. Since the machines will (allegedly) be nearly “perfect”, that would eliminate the possibility of error in determining someone’s innocence or guilt. They would also calculate the odds of someone being able to be rehabilitated vs cost of lifelong imprisonment vs summary execution; reminds of the “justice machines” from the key to time sequence of classic Dr who.
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Megara#:~:text=The%20Megara%20were%20floating%2C%20glowing,referred%20to%20as%20Justice%20Machines.
It’s relatively easy to calculate the odds of rehabilitation now – they’re very low. Recidivism rates are an underestimate since they require the convict to be caught again, yet they are shockingly large.
I suppose adding in a machine might make it more “scientific” and thus more acceptable to some people – and less so for others for much the same reason (“no compassion”).
It’s cheap, humane, easily applied, and even more than humane, it allows for 2 other things that I take into account. These people who face death are alone in a cold and thoughtless environment, only being able to take their last look at the world completely isolated. They might be complete scumbags, but many of them still have family and people who care about them, and this method through it’s ease of control would allow them to be close to their loved ones as they pass, and their loved ones can more easily accept is a process rather than a dehumanizing process of discarding waste.
But MY favorite aspect, not to sound cold, but a preferable aspect, is that these people did heinous things, and deserve to be removed forever from society of any kind, including the criminal creation factories of imprisonment, many of them at the end look for ways to make ammends, or at least pretend to. With Nitrogen Asphyxiation (the proper term for execution) there is no harm done to the body, other than a denial of oxygen to the brain. Which means, that these people could, as a final contrition, offer up their organs to save lives, after they receive the punishment of death for having taken one. Granted, if they volunteerily donate that is. No China coercian crap.
Larry Niven took up the idea of using criminals as organ donors, and extrapolated what happens next. Not sure I would want to go there, or how to prevent it from happening.
Sometimes I think that the future will find many of our medical procedures, including abortion, “gender reassignment”, and organ transplants, to be as barbaric as bloodletting and routine amputation.
When I first read Niven’s organ bank stories, many decades ago, I saw no way to stop it either. And yet it hasn’t happened. I really wonder why? The first step seems so sensible.
Like I said, through a voluntary act. They Choose, if they wish and through that they can offer SOME contrition for their crimes. No automatic harvesting. I’m a donor, I am willing to be a live donor if the option presents itself, and it would make me proud to be one either pre or post mortem. I see no issue with granting some of these people an option for such a sensation in their last act.
“Unproven method”? Really? If you don’t get enough oxygen you die, and there are industrial accidents all the time when someone enters a tank, or manure pit, etc. and dies from hypoxia. Death comes when the brain ceases to get enough oxygen to operate.
The looneys oppose this method of execution because it is easy to do, uses uncontrollable materials, and causes NO pain, the subject merely falls asleep then dies when their brain stops functioning. Run the N2 gas until the heart stops completes the job.
It happens all the time, accidentally. In fact, during the preflight pad processing for Columbia’s first launch, five men were sent into the SSME bay to perform some work. It had been flooded with GN2 during a hydrogen leak test, and not properly ventilated afterward. One by one, they passed out without realizing anything was happening to them. Another technician saw what was happening, and got an oxygen mask and a security guard, and the two of them brought the five out. One man died on the spot, and another some time later in the hospital. The remaining three recovered, and were able to tell the story.
If you ever go through altitude chamber training, you will experience something similar. They take the pressure altitude up to 30,000 feet (IIRC), and everyone removes his oxygen mask. The objective is to recognize hypoxia, and as soon as you do, don your mask. There’s always at least on guy who doesn’t, and who keeps working on the maze they give you to try to solve. They let him go for a little while, and then put his mask on him before he passes out. It’s amazing how instantly you come back from the edge. While you are fading away prior to that, you don’t have a care in the world. All things considered, I wouldn’t mind going that way.
In a prior life I worked at a company with a captive semiconductor fab in the same building complex. Was told the story that when the fab was new and still somewhat under construction, those who worked around the tank farm that contained all kinds of shall we say “interesting” pressurized fabrication gases, were required to don breathing apparatus beforehand. I believe they were also supposed to work in pairs. In any case, the story goes that one of the people, alone, donned the breathing apparatus (a mask that also protected the face and eyes) hooked himself up to the breathable air line and set about to get to work. Now the connectors to the gaseous supply lines were set up so that it was impossible to hook the mask line into any other supply line but the breathable air line. The problem was the plumbing upstream had been connected wrong. (Remember I said this was a new fab not yet operational). So the air supply line was supplying CO2 not air. He only lasted a short time before passing out. And with no “buddy” to observe him that was that. Or so the story goes. Happened long before I got there. And in my job, never had a reason to enter the fab let alone the tank farm. Unlike other facilities at this company I worked at, THIS facility took the fire drills seriously. Screw up and not be where you were supposed to be and you could be fired.
Unfortunately, this type of accident involving breathing an inert atmosphere happens on farms and in storage of grain.
Controlled atmosphere (CA) is a technique for keeping apples fresh-tasting for sale in stores year around. Don’t know about accidents with that, but the inside of a farm silo can be deadly on account of the insidious effect of breathing an oxygen free gas. There is more than one account about all the men in a farm family perishing because one guy goes in and doesn’t come out, his brother goes in to check on the first guy, and so on.
The X-15 rocket plane also ran a pure nitrogen cabin atmosphere, and this is in advance of the Apollo launchpad fire. The pilots wore a pressure suit supplied with oxygen, but they were warned about the cabin atmosphere. Milton Thompson wrote about lifting the visor to scratch his nose in flight but holding his breath when doing this. How the nose scratch works is that the cabin is pressurized and the pressure suit is not inflated against a reduced cabin pressure, unless the cabin pressure leaks out.
You can hold your breath for at least 15 seconds, for minutes with practice and training, without passing out. A student once told me he passed out from holding his breath too long, but that is the first time I heard of that. He was on the swim team in high school, and his teammates dared each other as to how many lengths of the pool they could swim under water holding their breath, and this guy had to be rescued after breaking the team record.
I am not a medical respiratory physiologist, but I understand that breathing an inert gas is nothing like holding your breath, that one lung full can do you in. When you hold your breath, I guess you are still exchanging oxygen with the air in your lungs, and the thing that makes it feel like your lungs are going to burst is the build-up of CO2, not the depletion of O2 in your lungs.
Something tells me that breathing in inert gas at atmospheric pressure is not like breathing the thin air on a mountain top or in the altitude chamber. Yes, the altitude chamber training is to either teach you how to respond to lack of oxygen or to teach you that you are “hosed” if you are neglectful of the need to wear your oxygen mask in a high-altitude aircraft. Or maybe it is, but you have to be well above 30,000 feet for the onset of hypoxia to be as rapid?
Perhaps one reason they’re slow to move on this method of execution by pure nitrogen displacing air is simply there fearful that it will cause a spike in suicide. People (terminally ill or not) might realize there’s a quick easy and painless way to commit suicide.
It’s already a thing. At least one person offed himself using a plastic bag and a tank of helium.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-operative-who-sought-hillary-emails-killed-himself
Like that fatal helium leak on the ISS?
“It’s already a thing. At least one person offed himself using a plastic bag and a tank of helium”
Pretty sure that helium is a lot more expensive than nitrogen. My point is that if States started using that as a method of execution the resulting publicity would certainly make lots of people aware of it as a cheap painless easy to do method of suicide. I think the authorities are fearful of that possibility, a massive spike in suicides.