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.
There was no way to perform the execution correctly.
Sure there is, fill an airtight prison cell with nitrogen on a random day while he’s asleep. People go out soundlessly to CO poisoning all the time like this.
Yep, except that has two huge flaws – first, how do you make sure he really doesn’t know its coming so isn’t inflicted with other kinds of torture like prolonged sleep deprivation (because sleep = death). Second, how do you maintain the spectacle for the onlookers that have bloodlust in their hearts, who these executions are designed to make happy?
Sure there is, fill an airtight prison cell with nitrogen on a random day while he’s asleep. People go out soundlessly to CO poisoning all the time like this.
Yep, except that has two huge flaws – first, how do you make sure he really doesn’t know its coming so isn’t inflicted with other kinds of torture like prolonged sleep deprivation (because sleep = death). Second, how do you maintain the spectacle for the onlookers that have bloodlust in their hearts, who these executions are designed to make happy?