“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
I’m curious how they implemented this. The air completely has to be replaced with nitrogen, no breathing in a mix of nitrogen and outside air, no oxygen at all. People that enter confined spaces with no oxygen pretty much just drop and are dead quickly, so this doesn’t sound like they did it right.
They used a mask rather than the more appropriate method which would be to use a sealed chamber that was forcefully evacuated of oxygen and replaced by nitrogen the way the suicide pods are supposed to function.
The problem with a mask is it can’t be a perfectly sealed system. The issue with the execution from a logistical standpoint was the redneck engineering they employed and not the actual science behind nitrogen hypoxia.
Please don’t come at me, I’m not making a value judgment about the use of the death penalty, I’m just explaining the issue with their shoddy ass methodology.
Edit: accidentally a word.
Edit #2 (YouTube Link): Here is some additional information about why a gas mask is an ineffective and dangerous way to conduct an execution via nitrogen hypoxia from Dr. Philip Nitschke, a leading advocate of the right to die movement and an expert in the field of voluntary euthanasia. He personally examined the execution method being used in Alabama, and told them he felt it would be ineffective for many of the same reasons stated above.
As someone who gets nitrogen at the dentist office with a mask I have a theory that it was just him consciously fighting it. It’s positive pressure nitrogen that you just breath in at normal breath rate. If you breath really hard you can displace the nitrogen and suck in some regular air. It sounds like he fought it which caused it to take longer. It is the standard human reaction to fight against one’s own death and I’m guessing he thought that if they held out long enough they would stop. If they are going to use a mask like that as opposed to a hood or chamber they really should sedate the person first.
America is such a funny place. They dont have a problem with execution just experimental ones…
Many of us have a problem with all executions. And capital punishment was illegal in America from 1962-1976 until the Supreme Court reversed their original decision.
The only people I’m ok with killing are the ones we have undeniable poof for. Like the Uvalde school shooter. They have footage of him in the school with the gun and know he killed the kids. In my book he’s OK to execute. if there’s even a shred of doubt in anyone’s case then execution should be off the books period.
I don’t support the execution of the Uvalde shooter.
What does killing him accomplish?
Justice? Not really.
Restitution? Not at all.
Vengeance? Not really.
Deterrence? Not really.
Closure for the families of the victims? I suppose.
I don’t know about this case, but some families of victims oppose the death penalty, even in the case of the murder of their children.
Some reasons for this view could be religious beliefs, or the view that death is the easy way out, or the deterrence value of being able to point at a person in jail, or the potential for the person to do some good in the world.
These people would object to closure for them being used as justification for killing their child’s murderer.
It’s not fair to victim families to make them choose life or death for a murderer. It would be a decision they’d have to live with forever. We can’t do that to them.
My opinion is that capital punishment should only be used where a person guilty of a ‘capital crime’ can’t be reliably imprisoned.
Ie I’m not sure Iraqis were wrong to execute Saddam Hussein. I don’t think it would be wrong for countries that struggle with corruption in their penal system to execute cartel leaders (that have been convicted of ‘capital crimes’). War crimes, insurrection leaders, that sort of thing.
Pro Life!
Look I can’t help but feel deceived.
Every single time the death penalty was brought up, nitrogen asphyxiation was touted as a humane alternative. There were always claims that it would be painless, and that the process itself was extremely well understood. It was usually further implied that the reason states don’t do this was because death penalty advocates wanted the prisoner to suffer as long as possible.
Yet the second nitrogen asphyxiation became a viable option, the very same people touting it lined up against it. Suddenly it was completely unproven. Suddenly it was wholly inhumane and inflicted suffering.
It’s so incredibly obvious that the push for nitrogen asphyxiation was at least in part a bad faith argument by people who are philosophically opposed to the death penalty.
Being philosophically opposed to the death penalty is a valid opinion, but the dishonesty makes me much less inclined for me to take these people seriously.
I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. Nobody likes being deceived or lied to.
What if you’re right though? Isn’t then a perfectly good time to lie? If you know for sure that the death penalty is evil (which doesn’t seem too big a leap given the facts), then it’s wrong not to lie to people to get them to stop it. Otherwise you’d be saying that your own morality outweighs the humanity of others. If it results in no death penalty, it was a good action. People act like the ends aren’t justifying the means in 99.99% of cases. It is notable specifically when the ends do not justify the means. If the ends are preventing murder, and the means is lying, there is no question whether lying is justified.
If a person lies to me I’m not going to believe them next time they attempt to engage with me.
Seems like a pretty small price to pay to prevent murder. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you’re a bad person if you’re not willing to pay that price.
