Move follows Alabama’s recent killing of death row inmate Kenneth Smith using previously untested method
Three of the largest manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas in the US have barred their products from being used in executions, following Alabama’s recent killing of the death row inmate Kenneth Smith using a previously untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia.
The three companies have confirmed to the Guardian that they have put in place mechanisms that will prevent their nitrogen cylinders falling into the hands of departments of correction in death penalty states. The move by the trio marks the first signs of corporate action to stop medical nitrogen, which is designed to preserve life, being used for the exact opposite – killing people.
The green shoots of a corporate blockade for nitrogen echoes the almost total boycott that is now in place for medical drugs used in lethal injections. That boycott has made it so difficult for death penalty states to procure drugs such as pentobarbital and midazolam that a growing number are turning to nitrogen as an alternative killing technique.
Now, nitrogen producers are engaging in their own efforts to prevent the abuse of their products. The march has been led by Airgas, which is owned by the French multinational Air Liquide.
Nitrogen hypoxia sounds like one of the best ways to die, without pain or panic, but I completely understand why no company wants to be the supplier of the means of executing people. Small volume, small profits, extreme controversy. What’s to want there?
Sure. If it was done correctly and we could trust the justice system to not kill innocent people. However they figured out the cruelest way to do it and SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they’re innocent because it might hurt the court’s reputation of they back down.
I’m not familiar with this. Is this something that actually happened?
I believe they’re referencing this:
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NPR Source
This is so from 2022.
I hate the Supreme Court so much.
It’s called “finality”.
The idea that it’s more Important that the process is followed and then stops at some point than that justice is achieved.
Same reason they barred introduction of new evidence when appealing from state court to federal, giving potentially corrupt state courts full power to block exculpatory evidence to deny someone justice because the federal courts must uphold the verdict if the evidence which was accepted indicates guilt under the state law. Same thing if the prosecutor knows of evidence of innocence and withholds or, or if the evidence only turns up after the trial. You get only one chance and then you’re screwed.
yes more then once. Most recently the supreme court ruled you can’t bring new evidence to an areal. Why? because it would undermine the state right to be sure of their decision. Also note that the most successful way to win an appeal on a criminal case was to bring new evidence that showed your defense did not do their job or the prosecution withheld evidence that showed your innocence.
Shinn V Ramirez, 2022.
They were arguing ineffective counsel post conviction because evidence wasn’t submitted that could have shown Ramirez was innocent. Lower courts agreed, citing previous SCOTUS rulings. SCOTUS decided federal courts must be bound by the original evidence only.
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Personally I love how they say we need to respect a state’s right to enforce social norms. With the death penalty. Because those are equivalent things. Betty doesn’t like to mow her lawn. She likes to let her neighbor Lucy do it. Off to the chair for her! Okay jokes aside what they mean is their power to make laws, enforce laws, and have a court system.
And then it’s too expensive? Really? I’m not going to be surprised when we end up with the purge only instead of being everywhere it’s actually when the air raid siren goes off during yard time at the prison.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226936713/alabama-execution-kenneth-smith
Because they did in the worst way possible. All Alabama had to do was flood a sealed room with nitrogen and the execution would have been fairly “unremarkable”. Instead they forced a has mask on Smith that required his cooperation to function properly, didn’t have a one-way valve to remove exhaled gas, causing CO2 to build up in the tiny mask.
A haircut is also a painless and quick procedure, but that doesn’t mean your barber can’t be incompetent and totally fuck up your scalp.
Especially if the American Barber Association has a rule that none of its members may participate in the haircut; and scissor manufacturers all refuse to sell to you. So you end up having it done by a random person who doesn’t mind ignoring what every barber says, using a pair of rusty scissors the sherrif was able to find at a garage sale.
Maybe at that point you shouldn’t cut the damn hair
That’s the thing and something I bring up with other engineers all the time. The medical community decided to not help and the result is the government can’t do it very well making it harder and harder to justify the practice. Engineers however continue to work on military tech.
We need to organize and blacklist those that help make weapons.
Is there some reasoning behind that? As far as I know, there are at least some gas chambers in the US. And even if Alabama happens not to have one, it doesn’t seem too complicated to build one.
Cruelty and human suffering is the foundation upon which Alabama was built. The barbarity of it is the point.
Give me a Cessna Caravan and I’ll kill anyone you want with hypoxia 18 at a time. It’s not that hard. Alabama fucked it up because school is illegal there.
I think I read some people had to be in the room or they were requiring it anyway, not that they had to.
Why!!? Why would anyone want to be in that room!?
Why do people be such a hard on for asphyxiation executions. This is the same shit the said about the first gas chamber. What about the added adrenaline from the body and mind knowing the are in a death situation? What is the person beings to hyperventilate? Even the persons level of muscle mass can effect how fast it takes or when the body switches over to known O2 sources of energy to contract muscles in an attempt to keep the heart pumping. Probably the Cedar like conversions we saw from the first person they tried this on. This will inevitably be found to be an on sound way execute people and outlaw, the only question is how many people will be tortured to death before people wake up!
I take it you failed aviation physiology class?
I didn’t. Then I earned a flight instructor certificate and taught it for a few years. And I’ve flown unpressurized airplanes to their service ceilings. Lemme tell ya: Hypoxia is some serious shit.
The brain needs oxygen to live. No oxygen, brain die. I wonder how much adrenaline was in the systems of all them cave divers who ran out of air over the years.
Done correctly, the condemned won’t live long enough for hyperventilation to be a factor. But go ahead and try; it’ll only kill you faster.
Harken back to 9th grade health class and recall that mammalian lungs function by diffusion. Oxygen enters your blood only because chemicals want to pass from areas of relatively high concentration to relatively low concentration. Blood that has entered the lungs from the body doesn’t have much oxygen in it; some but less than fresh air. So oxygen flows in, and CO2 flows out. The reason putting your head in a bag sucks so much is because CO2 quickly builds up in the bag, and then it stops flowing out of your blood. Your body has the ability to feel too much CO2, and that sensation sucks a lot. If you’re in a big room full of nothing but nitrogen, your body can get rid of the CO2, and it will actually get rid of oxygen too. The blood in your veins, returning from your body to your lungs, that doesn’t have much oxygen in it, does have some. And if the air in your lungs has absolutely no oxygen in it, that “some” oxygen in your blood will diffuse out.
In normal air, hyperventilation sucks because you actually remove too much CO2 and that messes with your body’s natural ability to regulate your breathing. But, it doesn’t take many lungfuls of zero oxygen air before you lose consciousness.
That feeling of panic you get when holding your breath, or breathing with your head in a bag, where you’re breathing in your own old breath, and it hurts and sucks? That feeling happens because there’s too much CO2. In a low oxygen environment with plenty of air for you to exhale in, that doesn’t happen. You just get a little dizzy, you get a little lightheaded, you fall over and just fucking die before you realize what the problem is. Happens to sailors sometimes; there are compartments of big steel ships that are usually sealed, the walls use up all the oxygen in there by rusting, then a sailor has to go in there to maintain something. They open a door, climb in, take a few steps, and fall over and just fucking die.
That’s how you would describe it if you were his buddy at the door watching him. “He was fine, then he fell over and just fucking died.” Because the air around your face outside the door is safe to breathe, the air 6 feet away on the other side of the door killed your friend in less than a minute and it’ll kill you too if you try to climb in and help him.
And the scariest thing is it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t smell, it doesn’t taste, it doesn’t feel. It breathes like normal air because normal air is mostly nitrogen. We breathe it all the time; most of the gas in your lungs right now is nitrogen.
And Commander Adama might set his light saber to warp drive. Have you considered that?
List of the human body’s “known 02 sources:”
That’s it. Your body doesn’t have any spare oxygen saved up in your bones or whatever. No oxygen go in mouth and nose, no oxygen go in blood, no oxygen go in brain, brain die.
The heart can pump all it wants, if the heart pumps blood with no oxygen to the brain, the brain dies. That’s the fundamental principle we’re working with here.
I had to go through fairly extensive training so that I didn’t kill myself and several other people this way by accident, yet Alabama couldn’t manage it properly on purpose.
Because nitrogen hypoxia is a completely humane method of execution, if done right. You just go to sleep and never wake up.
here’s Destin from smartereveryday experiencing hypoxia. he’s told to his face that he is going to die if he doesn’t put his mask back on and get some oxygen, yet the whole time he has a giant grin on his face
I’m staunchly opposed to the death penalty, but if you’re going to kill someone nitrogen induced hypoxia is one of the most humane ways to do so.
Yeah you need to be in a chamber where your exhaled co2 is so immediately diluted that you get no feedback from it. I believe the current attempts used normal medical masks
If “right to die” laws become more of a thing, this would be the most compassionate way of doing a home suicide kit. I wonder if the manufacturers would oppose that as well, or only executions.
Like you said, there’s not much in it for them either way.
How is this more compassionate that loading someone up with an OD of morphine or something similar?
For a home kit, there’s a lot less potential for abuse. You don’t need hard drugs, or any abused drugs, it’s just nitrogen. The person doesn’t have any feeling of suffocating, they just go to sleep. Similar to why carbon monoxide poisoning is so dangerous.
Because ODing can be a rough way to die. With nitrogen hypoxia you just go to sleep and never wake up.
Oh really? Sounds like this went well:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/25/alabama-executes-kenneth-smith-nitrogen-gas
Yes, they did it wrong. You’re supposed to use a chamber, not a mask. The mask let’s CO2 build up which is how your body tells it’s suffocating.
It sounds like a reasonable way to die when the individual doesn’t know what’s going on or is accepting/willing. As an execution method it’s shit.
Well, disregarding the normal fear of death that would be there regardless of the method, I think the issue is the mask. It would be much better to just fill the room with N2. You can do this easilly enough by evaporating liquid N2. Of course, this would not be “medical grade” so people would complain just to complain.
Yeah the mask and timing is what caused that one prisoner to be in so much suffering since he knew it was going to happen imminently so he held his breath.
If it were done gradually over a period of like 30 minutes, he likely wouldn’t have noticed and just drifted into unconsciousness.
Or put the mask on then switch it to N2 without him knowing when.
A lot more difficult to do without him noticing and the “feared” mask on his face and potential to vomit into the mask would still be an issue.
Yeah the room option is better in that regard.
It would need to have some hardware interlocks engineered though for safety reasons. After turning on the gas, you won’t be able to physically open the door until the ventilation system removes the nitrogen after the execution.
You could do that although N2 gas is not that dangerous. Just opening a door to a well ventilated room will get rid of the gas. It is not poisonous or anything. Its not like you are doing this every week that you get lax about procedure.
Reminder: Texas is still a member of the union, for better or worse.
…No, you’d notice. When you’re in that “not quite enough oxygen in the room” scenario, you get tingles and headaches and such. It kinda sucks. Though I think I’d rather die that way than those gas station lethal injections they’ve been doing.
Just not true! The execution method requires a willing or unconscious victim. Why do people think any type of asphyxiation will be nice and peaceful regardless of the gas used? (yes I understand the “science” behind using this gas.) but what if the person holds their breath, or account for the added adrenaline, or the person hyperventilating. I can go on. It’s not medically sound way to execute people. Honestly, this is the same lies they pushed about previous humane execution methods. “it’s painless, the science is sound.” I promise you, after about 5 more “botched” executions using this N2 method it’ll be abandoned.
“What if the person holds their breath?”
Then it’ll take maybe a minute longer, and their last words are gonna be “BUH! Huh! Huh! Huh! …huh.”
“or account for the added adrenaline”
No oxygen in brain, brain die. I think you lied about understanding the science.
“or the person is hyperventilating”
Yeah, what if they breathe no oxygen faster?
Is there a medically sound way? What does “medically sound” even mean? Theere is no patient who is supposed to survive.
It is the best way of execution I can think of short of explosives near brain.
That’s the point you pull out and try to focus on? “Humane” executions always had a medical backing for why it world work.
Then the you try to say “is the best way of execution I can think of short of explosives near the brain.” oh really that’s the best you can think of? Shows how flawed and warped your understanding of this is. If you honestly want to make it as quick and painless in pretty sure the French figured that out back in 1789. But Ya let’s blow up people’s heads with c4.
Your brain can function without oxygen for over 30 seconds. I see no reason why it wouldn’t in a detached head.
The guillotine suffer from the same issue most execution methods used until now, they only seem “quick and painless”. Nitrogen gas actually is painless.
Nitrogen gas will be found to be unsuitable for execution. I just hope people wake up to this before more people are tortured to death.
I really would like to know: The people who object to N2, if you could pick any reasonably practical execution method (but it has to be execution, no death by old age), what would you pick?
Ah yes, the ole “let’s bring back the guillotine that left you alive and semi conscious for up to 30 seconds while your head rolls around” argument. Such humane, much wow
Maybe also the moral and ethical questions that come with it, you know, besides just money?
Haha yeah, I’m sure that got an entire slide in the PowerPoint at the board meeting. I’m sure plenty of people there morally object. I also think that a steady and sizeable stream of income would instantly cure those objections though. But as the person above said already there is only a trickle of pennies in it for them.