‘Astonishingly cruel’: Alabama seeks to test execution method on death row ‘guinea pig’

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Cruel? Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably one of the most painless, gentle ways to go.

Your trigger that you can’t breathe is a buildup of carbon dioxide. But as you can still exhale, you feel no panic. You just slowly drift unconscious and die. I’d take it over most causes of death.

dmonzel

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Execution is cruel, regardless of method.

Meowoem

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I'm against the death penalty but if I ever murder a load of people then I'd like to be able able to freely choose death by nitrogen over a life in prison

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You know what else is cruel? People killing other people. And the former continuing to live despite their cruelty.

The only rub against execution to me is the risk of executing the innocent. But that is not the concern here. There is no dispute this guy is guilty.

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Capital punishment is government sanctioned killing. Outside of war, the government should not have the power to kill anyone.

Let them rot in prison. It's cheaper anyway.

Abolish capital punishment.

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Except them rotting in prison is cruel and unusual punishment. No, they get shelter, 3 meals a day, healthcare when they need it, and even recreation.

And I’m anti-war. It’s ok for innocents to fight and kill each other, but not to kill murderers?

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The government shouldn't be sanctioning killing. Period.

Other than Japan, the US is the only Western country left with this primitive, revenge-based way of looking at crime and punishment. Yet, the US continues to be the most violent country of them all and the murder capital of the Western world.

Usually, when something doesn't work, we try something else. Time for the US to try something else.

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The US is likely more violent due to a combination of corrupt capitalism and lead poisoning.

We do need to try something else, but that something else is in terms of economics, infrastructure, and healthcare, not punishment.

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do need to try something else, but that something else is in terms of economics, infrastructure, and healthcare

I definitely agree there, especially in healthcare. What an awful mess in the US when you look at how successful other countries are with universal healthcare.

But I will just never accept capital punishment. It's such an awful way to seek revenge. It's especially surprising that conservatives love the concept of government power extending to killing its own citizens. And evangelicals who are commanded by Jesus himself to turn the other cheek and seek forgiveness. I know they are backward on many things, but this seems particularly egregious.

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hoshikarakitaridia

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The only rub against execution to me is the risk of executing the innocent.

Right, so why is that not a total disqualifier then? Even if the risk is fleeting small, there is no taking it back. If it came out later on, dead is dead. Combining that with the fact that executions are obv a psychological cluster fuck for everyone who deals with it, especially the one executed, and the fact that it takes a lot of resources every trial because it's such an unusually cruel punishment, the arguments for it are dwindling.

Also

You know what else is cruel? People killing other people.

Right but we're not voting someone in office who can eliminate all homicides in the United States. Things are different for execution.

We could also talk about how this "well tough shit" opinion always fucks over positive and healthy change, but that's probably the least impactful argument for the folks who still bank on executions as some sort of greater good.

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Read the rest of what I said. There is no doubt here. I do think the death penalty should require a higher standard of guilt. But some people, through their actions, simply have forfeited their right to live.

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Glad to have it straight from the moral arbiter of the universe, someone who feels they can personally determine, from a safe distance, whether someone has forfeited their life. Otherwise I’d be seriously worried the state was carrying out a horribly immoral practice that regularly results in murder of innocents in order to deliver, at best, the short-lived false victory of vengeance, for the low priceof permanently extinguishing of a human life. Which I’ll remind you doesn’t bring back their victims.

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I am allowed moral opinion, same as you.

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I know, me pointing out that the pompous way you phrased your opinion made it sound like you thought you were expounding on universal truths isn’t going to stop you. It wasn’t intended to. Maybe if you don’t want pushback next time, avoid the phrase “have forfeited their right to live.”

FooBarrington

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You know what else is cruel? People killing other people.

Then why aren't you advocating for executing those that execute killers? After all, they kill people. But I'm going to assume that you think those killers are okay.

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Executions are generally set up so no one person is responsible for the person’s death. And they generally volunteer.

How are they different from a war veteran that killed somebody during war?

FooBarrington

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Executions are generally set up so no one person is responsible for the person’s death. And they generally volunteer.

Okay. Why not kill all those who might be the killer? If not, why allow the spreading of the responsibility? If two guys beat someone up and kill them, would you be as lenient, considering we don't know which one actually killed them?

How are they different from a war veteran that killed somebody during war?

In war often there is no choice (at least if you're defending - I don't condone wars of aggression). With death row inmates we do have a choice! You understand the difference, right?

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As I said elsewhere, because they are doing their duty. We empower people to do otherwise illegal things all the time. If some random guy demanded your tax records and wanted a percentage of your income, they would the charged with theft. When an IRS auditor does it, it isn’t illegal.

So you are ok sending the innocent to die, but refuse to condemn the guilty? I am sorry, I do not like the other choice. When someone kills someone else and we can prove it beyond any doubt, that murderer should not get to be housed, fed, and cared for for life. I get that it may even cost more, but that’s where I’d rather spend money.

FooBarrington

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As I said elsewhere, because they are doing their duty. We empower people to do otherwise illegal things all the time. If some random guy demanded your tax records and wanted a percentage of your income, they would the charged with theft. When an IRS auditor does it, it isn’t illegal.

So people killing people is okay if the right people kill the right people?

So you are ok sending the innocent to die

No, defending yourself is different from "sending the innocent to die". If the choice is to die peacefully or to die fighting, the latter is the better option, since you might not die.

but refuse to condemn the guilty?

Where did I say anything about not condemning the guilty? Is killing other people the only way to satisfy your dismay for them, even if you'll kill innocent people this way?

I am sorry, I do not like the other choice. When someone kills someone else and we can prove it beyond any doubt, that murderer should not get to be housed, fed, and cared for for life. I get that it may even cost more, but that’s where I’d rather spend money.

Then why do states with the death penalty keep killing innocent people, even though this is supposedly already the standard? You're the one who wants innocent people to die.

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Doesn't 'people killing other people' include the state killing people? I don't see how vengeance for a murder solves anything.

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Why doesn't it include that?

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Because they are carrying out a judgement. We don’t toss prison guards in jail for false imprisonment. We don’t send IRS agents to jail for theft.

https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/

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Lots of people carry out a judgment when they kill someone. They just don't get to do it legally.

BaroqueInMind

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Opinion 👆.

Fact: it's necessary to remove certain people who are prone to violence and incapable of rehabilitation. If you have such a problem with execution, then volunteer your time, money, and home to accommodate a violent psychopath with you forever.

reverendsteveii

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Fact: when we sentence people to death we get it wrong one time in three

Fact: executing someone is more expensive than keeping them in prison for life

SendMePhotos

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Wait why is it more expensive?

reverendsteveii

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The long appeals process we use to try to not execute the innocent costs a lot. It would be cheaper to just imprison them.

TopShelfVanilla

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Ah, but it doesn't have to be. There's lots of inexpensive, humane ways to dispatch a human. How methods like electrocution and lethal cocktail injection were decided on is difficult to understand. Nitrogen, though, is probably the nicest way it could be done. Relatively cheap too, and with zero chance of failure.

reverendsteveii

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The expense is in achieving that blistering 70% correctness rate, not in the way the condemned are killed.

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It's not the method that's expensive, it's the appeals process, supposedly to stop innocent people from being executed. And even with all of the appeals, innocent people have still been executed.

*https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents

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Human medical experimentation on prisoners is cruel and unusual in and of itself. However well you personally think execution by nitrogen would go (and I doubt you’d volunteer), people on death row have a right to know we’re not trying novel execution methods on them. Maybe if what we’re doing doesn’t actually benefit anyone more than prison would and is considered so barbaric that European manufacturers won’t supply us with the drugs we need to do it, we should stop.

The mania for execution led Arizona to refurbish its gas chamber and reverse-engineer a Zyklon B equivalent.* That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. How about you?

TopShelfVanilla

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There's no experiment necessary in proving nitrogen as a silent and painless killer. Scuba divers have done all of the experiments for us, mostly by accident.

Imprisonment is barbaric.

If someone has done something so bad that they should be locked up for life then they should be dispatched not kept as some kind of morbid pet of the state. If you murdered a bunch of people (mass killing of serial style) you need not waste any more of our air. If you rape you should be killed too. If you've gotten yourself on death row fuck your rights.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT50/015/2008/en/

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If you imprison an innocent, they can be freed. Execution takes away that possibility. And we have absolutely, provably, executed innocent people. I hope that never happens to you, but if life were a play, it would certainly make for some dramatic irony.

LastYearsPumpkin

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Shitty take. There are more than two options here, and suggesting otherwise is using an either-or fallacy as a bad way to try to win an argument.

hoshikarakitaridia

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Opinion 👆.

Fact: punishments can be reversed, if the punished stays alive. Any percentage of unjust executions is irredeemable. Also, there is a lot of evidence that abolishing the death penalty either does not affect the crime rate, or it has a positive effect (see link below).

More opinion: executions have no place in a society that highly values human rights because killing people is the exact opposite of humane. If you think prisoners are monsters and you could never end up in there, watch a documentary about it. If you see what some ppl went through, you know how easy anyone can end up there.

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That's as silly a comment as "if you think Native Americans were wronged, give your house to one," something else I've heard people say. Societal wrongs are not solved by individuals.

Somehow all the countries that don't allow capital punishment find ways to deal with extremely violent people and don't have murderers running amok.

BaroqueInMind

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Somehow all the countries that don’t allow capital punishment find ways to deal with extremely violent people and don’t have murderers running amok.

Russia be like...

IchNichtenLichten

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Kinda funny that you label the comment you replied to as opinion and then proceeded to dress your own (shitty) opinion up as fact.

agent_flounder

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Also opinion 👆

neuropean

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Exactly, the headline is just trying to get people to react.

https://www.documentarytube.com/videos/how-to-kill-a-human-being-2/

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It’s people’s that want to ban the death penalty. They have already have succeeded in getting pharmaceutical companies to stop providing the drugs traditionally used.

Nitrogen, though, would be hard to ban. There is plenty of it, and it is cheap and easy to isolate. So they are arguing hard that it shouldn’t be accepted before they can prove how painlessly effective it can be.

Hyperreality

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There's a BBC documentary about it, I think this one:

How to Kill a Human Being

It's been a long time since I watched it, but I think the inert gas route is very pleasant. He even gets slightly high/happy from it.

Key takeaways:

there are surprisingly easy ways to kill people humanely.
many in the US doesn't want to kill prisoners humanely, they want it to hurt and be a punishment, not die in a euphoric high

edit: found it:

Rendered unconcious within 15 seconds, dead within a minute.

In testing pigs would happily stick their heads in a space with pure nitrogen and munch on apples till they lost consciousness, fell over, then stick their heads back in the space with nitrogen to eat some more apples.

czarrie

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What kind of apples asking for a friend

jasondj

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Do you like apples?

captainlezbian

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Well yeah if we wanted it to be happy and comfortable we’ve had morphine for over a century

CurlyMoustache

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Medical companies will not sell if they suspect it will be used to kill human beings. If they do, they might get banned in Europe

https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/lethal-injection-pharma-kill-death-penalty/

squiblet

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Yeah, compared to injecting horrifically painful substances, I don't see why this is controversial.

CrayonRosary

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It's even better than that. Hypoxia causes feelings of euphoria! You get high, pass out, and die. It's the best way to go, IMO.

freddy

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Fedizen

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I'd take a firing squad or an enormous hydraulic press tbh. If I were to be an innocent stuck with a death penalty I'd be happy to know somebody will have to clean up a messy pile of guts after my quick death.

The whole point of using gas or chemicals for the death isnt to make the punishment humane - the death penalty is not humane in any way - its to make it easier on the people doing the killing. No mess, no fuss.

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Citation needed

NightAuthor

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Is there a citation on the necessity of citations? Surely someone in the academic world has written such a work, if not several.

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The whole point of using gas or chemicals for the death isnt to make the punishment humane - the death penalty is not humane in any way - its to make it easier on the people doing the killing. No mess, no fuss.

If you are purporting this to be fact, yes, it requires proof. Of this is just your opinion, fine, but your opinion of the motives of others doesn’t carry much weight.

NightAuthor

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I say the same but to your “citation needed”.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/can-executions-be-more-humane/388249/

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It is well established that they are trying to make it more humane.

NightAuthor

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I’m sorry, I’m intending to be kinda silly, but also honestly curious, bc I’ve been in academia.

My original remark had nothing to do with the greater context of this thread and discussion. It was specifically to your “needs citation” comment.

You’re claiming that the other person should include a citation, declaring the fact that there should be a citation.

I’m saying, do you have a citation of a study or logical proof or something that objectively claims that statements of fact should be accompanied by a citation of said fact.

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It’s human medical experimentation as a punishment that’s cruel and unusual.

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It’s not experimentation. People have already died, even accidentally, from inert gas asphyxiation.

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If we didn’t study it for this purpose in human subjects before him, it’s experimentation. Reproducing something that has occurred organically in a new context is absolutely experimentation. I don’t know how I can make this simpler.

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It’s hardly an experiment if you know the results.

But by that definition, every method was “experimental” at some point. Lethal injection, firing squad, electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, the guillotine, the breaking wheel, being drawn and quartered, scaphism, whatever method had to be done for the first time once. And I would take nitrogen asphyxiation over any of those. Hell, when I start suffering, I sincerely hope that option is available to me so I can go out on my own terms.

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Yes. It’s true that every technology was once experimental. But how experiments are done is important. And I certainly hope we’ve moved forward morally since we started executing people. We’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, not use them to justify future ones.

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The prisoner volunteered. I’m not sure what better circumstances we could get.

I really think death penalty opponents just don’t want to break the seal. Right now the idea that it’s “experimental” is the only argument against it. Prove it works, and it will quickly become the go-to method.

Opposition got their biggest victory when they got drug companies to stop providing the traditional 3 drug cocktail that has worked for decades. Now they argue every other method is either cruel and unusual (new drugs or older methods) our too experimental (inert gas asphyxiation or opioid overdose) when those latter methods are likely far more humane and much harder to stop up the supply.

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Death penalty opponents oppose death penalty…more at 11

jpj007

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First off, I am against the death penalty. I suppose there are hypothetical scenarios were there may be some remorseless person who committed horrific crimes and for whom there is absolutely no doubt of guilt, and maybe then we can justify removing them from the world permanently. But in the real world, the death penalty is not limited to such scenarios. Innocents have been and continue to be executed. This is unacceptable.

But, if we aren't going to eliminate it, at the very least we can avoid unneeded suffering during it. As I understand it, nitrogen asphyxiation is a comparatively peaceful way to go. So this headline smells of bullshit to me.

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It’s experimental. No institutional review board in the country could ethically ask this guy to volunteer for such an experiment, simply because of the coercive power dynamics inherent in asking such a thing of a prisoner. But the government can, by fiat, decide to experiment on him, and you’re ok with that? Even if “nitrogen asphyxiation is a comparatively peaceful way to go,” human medical experimentation qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment; otherwise, what’s the point of banning cruel and unusual punishment?

Skyrmir

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The only experiment is doing it to humans. It's used to kill chickens by the thousands. Because it causes them less stress, leading to better tasting meat.

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Right. So it’s human medical experimentation on a prisoner. Which, ask any social scientist, is some seriously fucked up, unethical shit.

Mindlight

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So the method has passed animal testing... What are the next steps in your opinion?

APassenger

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Someone who meets euthanasia standards in a state volunteers to do it.

If I was terminal, it's something I'd consider. For science.

But I don't think I'd do it so they can kill people with less remorse.

Talked myself into a corner there. But a bloodless, mess-less, painless way to die could be useful to people who want to die with dignity.

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In my opinion, the only morally acceptable next step is abolishing the death penalty. But, if I objected solely on the basis of the medical experimentation angle, an extensive formal review of the body of evidence by a panel of actual medical experts, plus not using as a subject a guy who already underwent one botched execution, at the very least?

Meowoem

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It's only experimental in that it's never been done before, everyone knows exactly what's going to happen and it's been closen because it's more humane than exciting options.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation

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“It’s only experimental in that it’s never been done before…”

Why yes, that’s right. Which is what “experimental” means. Assuming you know what will happen before trying something is deeply unscientific.

Meowoem

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It's not like it's unstudied new science, experiments on prisoners are such a well known bad thing because people did cruel experiments which treated the subjects as objects - this is choosing what's known to be an effective way to painlessly die over a more painful and less effective method.

And yes we know what's going to happen, nitrogen isn't a new thing and people have asphyxiated due to it before (over a hundred people in the US in the last thirty years), just not when it's been purposefully administered in a prison.

ashok36

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It isn't experimental is the way the word is normally used. We know what the effects of nitrogen asphyxiation are. People are accidentally killed by it all the time. If were going to have a death penalty (and I would argue we shouldn't) then we should seek less cruel ways to do it, which nitrogen asphyxiation is.

meco03211

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It says the method is rejected even by vets. But it only says the nitrogen atmosphere can induce a stressful environment "in some species". Do these other species have stress triggers when low on oxygen? Is there any further explanation?

It also mentioned this method has been adopted by 3 states. Have there been any successful attempts?

I'm against the death penalty but that's no excuse to skimp on reporting. Those seem like obvious questions that would have easily found answers. That they aren't in the article, begs the question if they were asked, answered, and excluded? Or just not asked?

Talaraine

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Yes, there are other species that react negatively to hypoxic environments:

But the idea with using it on humans is that we don't react negatively. We don't even feel like we're suffocating, like with excessive CO2. Nitrogen is plentiful and is already being used for legal suicide elsewhere, which is why they're wanting to use it.

Riccosuave

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Just posting this as an addendum to the information from the comment above. There is a 3D printed device called a Sarco Pod that has been developed for assisted suicides. As far as I know, it has yet to be deployed. However, it seems likely that it will be in the near future.

The prevailing objections to the death penalty appear to stem from the nature of the methods that have been utilized. I wonder if the sentiment would change if receiving the death penalty was effectively painless, and nearly instantaneous via one of these pods?

At that point you could certainly make an argument for life in prison being a significantly harsher, elongated, and cruel sentence. Just some food for thought.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarco_pod

NotBadAndYou

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Didn't he ask for that method himself? I'm sure he doesn't want to try injection again.

Fedizen

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I hate the death penalty - its barbaric, it kills innocent people etc.

But if people are going to do it I can think of no better metaphor for a state sanctioned death penalty than an enourmous hydraulic press.

All these injections and ethical guidelines are misguided. The cruelty is the point so they might as well just make it quick and lean into it.

GentlemanLoser

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"Crushed by the weight of the system."

Maybe "torn apart by the gears of justice?"

I'm pro-death penalty in theory but against it in practice. There's definitely some people who forfeit their right to exist with the rest of us. But we can never apply it fairly or even guarantee we aren't executing actually innocent people. And the ugliness and evil of that is more than enough to make me against capital punishment.

Cethin

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It's sometimes wrong is my #1 reason.

Om top of that, it's not fairly distributed sometimes and it's also more expensive than just life in prison. With all that, what's the purpose? It's clearly to make other people feel good, not about justice. People love revenge porn, and I think that says a lot about us as people that we're willing to deal with all the negatives to bring us joy about ending another person's life.

aidan

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It's not much of a guinea pig if you're just asphyxiating him, its pretty understood how that kills people. By the logic of calling him a guinea pig does that mean anytime anything is done to someone for the first time they're a guinea pig?