Witnesses watched through a window at an Alabama prison as Kenneth Eugene Smith became the nation's first person to be put to death using nitrogen gas.
Beyond the burning in your lungs, the signals your body gets from your brain when your C02 levels are too high, include strong, painful, and involuntary contractions or spasms of the diaphragm and the muscles in between your ribs. At some point the spasms become so frequent and unbearable that you can no longer hold your breath.
Yea, it’s not that it was botched per se, it’s just that this is a terrible, torturous way to execute someone.
N2 asphyxiation is only “peaceful” when it is an industrial accident or performed on a cooperative participant (i.e., self euthanasia) – it just makes no sense for execution because someone who doesn’t want to die is going to be tortured to death by it. Forced to fight every instinct they have to resist breathing until it hurts so bad they think they will die if they don’t breath in, except they KNOW they’ll die if they breath in so they push on.
It’s really, really awful. It’s a really horrendous way to execute.
Forced to fight every instinct they have to resist breathing
That’s part of what I mean by botching it. It does require some bit of knowledge about how the body responds physiologically to various gases to prepare for it. I’m not sure if there’s a way to know for sure, but if they didn’t explain that letting him fill his lungs with N2 from the start instead of letting him accumulate CO2, his death would’ve been entirely peaceful. Also, making him fall asleep first would’ve guaranteed that he didn’t fight it. There are various ways of doing that.
Overall I’d prefer this method over any other if I had to choose. I just have a feeling that they could’ve handled it much better than they did from lack of experience and forethought.
But he didn’t want to die. If you don’t want to die – if you aren’t cooperating with the execution – it is going to be torturous with this method.
The attitude of “this is the way I want to die” is automatically assuming that you want to die. That you’re a willing participant. Execution must be presumed to have an uncooperative victim and the humaneness must be judged in that context.
Lot of people saying he should’ve just let it happen. It would’ve hurt him less. That’s unacceptable to say to a victim of violence in any other context, so I’m not sure why it makes sense to people here.
Like I said, there are many ways of making an unwilling person cooperate but there will always be someone arguing the contrary. Just because this didn’t go as expected doesn’t mean it’s a tortuous method. Some convulsing is expected but that doesn’t mean that the person was conscious.
I’m not for the death penalty but I’m glad that more options are being explored and I hope that this is used as a learning experience.
If I’m going to be killed, and I know I have no choice, I will choose this method over anything else any day. Maaaaybe I’ll consider a shotgun blast in the head, or being blown into tiny pieces. But nitrogen or helium seems like the best way to go - for an unwilling but cooperative person like me.
That might just create a situation where the person goes through all this torture multiple times as they hold their breath and experience the pure agony until passing out only to wake up and have to go through it all again. It maybe seems better, but it’s still basically the same torture.
Other than doing it TOTALLY unscheduled in the person’s sleep, I cannot imagine a way you avoid the horror of this kind of execution method. And it’s hard to even piece together a way you could practically implement unscheduled/in their sleep that wouldn’t result in the person refusing to sleep, with sleep deprivation itself being a form of torture.
Every method of execution requires the person’s participation in some way.
Once that mask is on and the nitrogen starts, you have the choice between dying in one of the least painful ways that we know of, or dying in one of the most painful ways.
I don’t know if this guy thought that he could find another loophole and delay his execution, but all he accomplished was making his last moments on Earth miserable.
Calling it torture is to say that he has no agency, which is obviously untrue.
I have a feeling that they botched it if it was so violent. It’s also common for people to be given/take sleeping pills to prevent spasms.
No, that’s just what happens when you hold your breath for as long as possible
Spasms for holding your breath? Uh, no?
Give it a try while recording yourself. Don’t worry, you won’t die. Just have someone with you while doing it, for safety reasons.
https://www.scq.ubc.ca/waiting-to-inhale-why-it-hurts-to-hold-your-breath/
Beyond the burning in your lungs, the signals your body gets from your brain when your C02 levels are too high, include strong, painful, and involuntary contractions or spasms of the diaphragm and the muscles in between your ribs. At some point the spasms become so frequent and unbearable that you can no longer hold your breath.
Yea, it’s not that it was botched per se, it’s just that this is a terrible, torturous way to execute someone.
N2 asphyxiation is only “peaceful” when it is an industrial accident or performed on a cooperative participant (i.e., self euthanasia) – it just makes no sense for execution because someone who doesn’t want to die is going to be tortured to death by it. Forced to fight every instinct they have to resist breathing until it hurts so bad they think they will die if they don’t breath in, except they KNOW they’ll die if they breath in so they push on.
It’s really, really awful. It’s a really horrendous way to execute.
That’s part of what I mean by botching it. It does require some bit of knowledge about how the body responds physiologically to various gases to prepare for it. I’m not sure if there’s a way to know for sure, but if they didn’t explain that letting him fill his lungs with N2 from the start instead of letting him accumulate CO2, his death would’ve been entirely peaceful. Also, making him fall asleep first would’ve guaranteed that he didn’t fight it. There are various ways of doing that.
Overall I’d prefer this method over any other if I had to choose. I just have a feeling that they could’ve handled it much better than they did from lack of experience and forethought.
But he didn’t want to die. If you don’t want to die – if you aren’t cooperating with the execution – it is going to be torturous with this method.
The attitude of “this is the way I want to die” is automatically assuming that you want to die. That you’re a willing participant. Execution must be presumed to have an uncooperative victim and the humaneness must be judged in that context.
Lot of people saying he should’ve just let it happen. It would’ve hurt him less. That’s unacceptable to say to a victim of violence in any other context, so I’m not sure why it makes sense to people here.
Like I said, there are many ways of making an unwilling person cooperate but there will always be someone arguing the contrary. Just because this didn’t go as expected doesn’t mean it’s a tortuous method. Some convulsing is expected but that doesn’t mean that the person was conscious.
I’m not for the death penalty but I’m glad that more options are being explored and I hope that this is used as a learning experience.
If I’m going to be killed, and I know I have no choice, I will choose this method over anything else any day. Maaaaybe I’ll consider a shotgun blast in the head, or being blown into tiny pieces. But nitrogen or helium seems like the best way to go - for an unwilling but cooperative person like me.
Yeah, they need to have the person breathing regular air through the mask for a while and then randomly switch it to pure nitrogen.
That might just create a situation where the person goes through all this torture multiple times as they hold their breath and experience the pure agony until passing out only to wake up and have to go through it all again. It maybe seems better, but it’s still basically the same torture.
Other than doing it TOTALLY unscheduled in the person’s sleep, I cannot imagine a way you avoid the horror of this kind of execution method. And it’s hard to even piece together a way you could practically implement unscheduled/in their sleep that wouldn’t result in the person refusing to sleep, with sleep deprivation itself being a form of torture.
Every method of execution requires the person’s participation in some way.
Once that mask is on and the nitrogen starts, you have the choice between dying in one of the least painful ways that we know of, or dying in one of the most painful ways.
I don’t know if this guy thought that he could find another loophole and delay his execution, but all he accomplished was making his last moments on Earth miserable.
Calling it torture is to say that he has no agency, which is obviously untrue.
It’s definitionally coercion if the only other option is death. You do not have agency in that situation. End of story.
Death isn’t a choice here, he’s being executed.