Nitrogen has been approved as an execution method by three states: Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
If something is banned everywhere except those specific states, there’s a 100% likelihood that it’s so heinous that it should never be allowed anywhere under any circumstances.
Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably the gentlest and most comfortable method of executing someone I can think of.
There’s a funny quirk of human physiology: we don’t have a mechanism for feeling hungry for oxygen. The desperate and painful sensation of needing to breathe fresh air? That’s your need to expel CO2. Cinching a Hefty bag (not sponsored) around your neck is a miserable experience because you’re poisoning yourself with your own carbon dioxide. Let the bag leak around your neck, and inflate it with a constant supply of inert gas - like helium, or argon, or nitrogen - and you won’t notice yourself dying. I recommend helium; it’ll make your last words that much more hilarious.
Reason I know this: I’m a flight instructor; you want to go somewhere where there’s not enough oxygen? Get in a plane and go about 30,000 feet straight up. You don’t feel that panicky “I can’t breathe” sensation up there because you can freely exhale CO2, but there’s not enough oxygen to keep your body working for long.
It is my understanding that among the states that still practice the death penalty, the methods that the law authorizes are lethal injection, electric chair, cyanide gas, hanging and firing squad, and the last two are technicalities that haven’t been repealed yet. Compared to these methods, inert gas hypoxia is a lot more comfy. The electric chair and cyanide gas are proper horrifying, lethal injection is supposed to be humane on the theory that they anesthetize you before chemically stopping your heart…except no actual anesthesiologist wants anything to do with it, so they get some random guy to do it and they pretty much always botch it. It’s not hard to flood a room with nitrogen, though.
The cruelty in this subject is found in these particular states executing people often enough to worry about it.
Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably the gentlest and most comfortable method of executing someone I can think of.
You must not be very imaginative, then. Look to Dignitas, the Swiss nonprofit organization providing physician-assisted suicide. If oxygen deprivation was really the gentlest and most comfortable method of ending a human life, don’t you think that’s what they would do?
Putting aside for a moment the fact that killing someone on purpose against their will is and always will be murder regardless of whether it’s the government doing it, these three states don’t want to use nitrogen because it’s a gentle method. Everyone with actual medical expertise asked about it say it probably isn’t.
They want to use nitrogen because it’s cheap and because it’s plentiful enough that people of better morals and ethics than themselves can’t keep them from getting it. Those are the actual reasons no matter their pseudoscientific claims backed up by no evidence.
Euthanasia advocates are generally a compassionate bunch, and nitrogen asphyxiation has been proposed numerous times in that space. I don’t think it’s fair to vilify its usage just because you look down upon the states that have legalized it’s usage in this capacity.
I’ve also personally blacked out from a lack of oxygen, and I can tell you it was far too sudden for me to comprehend I was about to die, let alone process potential pain.
I am against capital punishment, but if we’re going to do it, the current methods are far too brutal. We need to be accepting of new alternatives, especially ones that historically have been effective in other contexts.
nitrogen asphyxiation has been proposed numerous times in that space
And never approved, for clearly stated reasons.
I don’t think it’s fair to vilify its usage just because you look down upon the states that have legalized it’s usage
It’s not that my reason for opposing state-sanctioned torture murder is that I don’t like those states. While I’m sure there are some positive aspects of two of those states, there’s no one thing that those three have in common with ONLY each other that isn’t awful.
It’s like how Orban and Mohdi are both amongst the worst tyrants in the world, but they agree on very little. That loving Putin is one of the few things they both do is very fitting. Likewise with these three states and nitrogen torture murder.
I mean how many progressive stars have the death penalty? Most of the pushback towards it is because you could never design an ethical test, and that prisons might make a mistake (such as impure nitrogen).
Lethal injections have a 7% failure rate, so at least 1 in every 14 executions are already botched.
“The odds of being tortured to death by lethal injection are pretty substantial. The odds of a botch with nitrogen hypoxia are uncertain,” Dunham told CNN. “I think it’s a choice to avoid a sure bad thing, as opposed to an affirmative embrace of nitrogen hypoxia.”
These are the same arguments that got the electric chair, and lethal injection approved. So unless we are going back to a firing line (which is practically painless, just messy), why not try to make it more ethical?
