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.
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.
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.