Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.
The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
Surgical tech here… why not just use Propofol? It’s the shit we use to put people to sleep for surgery.
It kicks in FAST - when the anesthesiologist pushes that stuff, it can literally take like 5-10 seconds for the patients to go unconscious.
So… for the death penalty, hit em with the normal dosage to put them to sleep, then once they’re confirmed unconscious, push the rest of the bottle… or a liter of gasoline… or chuck em out the window; it doesn’t matter, as they’ll be 100% unaware of the actual method of death.
Edit - turns out there’s a lot of good reasons we don’t just use Propofol - see comments below. Thanks for the insight, all!
The real answer is that the makers of Propofol specifically don’t want you to use it to kill people.
Furthermore, if the US does use Propofol to execute anyone it will likely find itself suffering a shortage of Propofol to use as an anaesthetic in future.
@vithigar
Because the people selling it don’t want to deal with the association with lethal injections
They used to use thiopental, which is similar to propofol, with similar onset, both as an anesthesic and for lethal injection. Manufacturers stopped producing it because its use was controversial. Now it’s not even available for anesthesia. It would suck if the same thing happened to propofol.
There you have it, qualified medical professionals refuse (and are not allowed to anyway because of the oath) to participate in executions. So the people administring whatever concoction is made are not medically trained nor usually even particularily knowledgable on the subject. And yes, this has caused a series of botched executions, to the extent that the most bloodthirsty states are looking at smimpler ways to execute. Hence this aricle.
They already render the prisoner unconcious when they administer the lethal injection. It’s not 100% effective though, thus the search for a method that doesn’t have the potential to horrify onlookers.
Because using your drug to kill people isn’t the best way to convince the public is perfectly safe. There would be a hundred TikToks talking about how anesthesiologists want to murder you with propofol and then claim you died accidentally on the operating table. Who are you going to believe, actual “doctors” or highly qualified TikTok influencers?
Yeah, no drug company wants to deal with that. That’s why governments have had difficulty sourcing these drugs and instead have been resorting to black market dealers.
Because the idea of it being a punishment, rather than remediation or simply mitigation, looms over all North American discussions about sentencing.
If they aren’t miserable then it’s not a punishment.
In the case of Propofol they did want to use it but were basically banned by the drug company.
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But… the whole reason we are having this discussion is because people are trying to make the process less miserable in their final moments.
Just imagining the reverse, if they used propofol commonly for executions and then you go for a surgery and the doctor informs you that you’ll be getting the same stuff they use for executions, but don’t worry it’s a milder dose
I mean, they DO use midazolam and the same paralytics for lethal injection that are also commonly used for anesthesia, just in a lower dose.