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.

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.

  • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
    28·
    11 months ago

    I’m just an armchair medic, but wouldn’t a second tube to evacuate exhaled CO2 prevent this? This feels like monumental stupidity on the side of the prison, not necessarily a flaw with nitrogen as an execution method.

    • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      Dude was unconscious almost immediately. His brain was dead but the body takes longer to go. The violent spasms was the unconscious and uninhabited body using the last of its energy, mechanically.

      This has been so dramatized it’s disgusting. The execution? Humane. The media around it? Must clearly want more suffering.

        • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          11 months ago

          Life is not black and white. You can deal in absolutes all you want, that just leaves the rest of us here to make the hard decisions, since your abdication.

          Jailing people for life is also inhumane, solitary is torture that can lead to permanent damage. But what alternatives are left with? Society didn’t ask these people to steal, attack, rape or murder. Some people just choose it. So we have to separate them from the rest of us, for the common good.

          Fwiw, I don’t favor capital punishment unless guilt is obvious for all to see - beyond a doubt. But if we have to do it, and situationally It’s appropriate (some will say it never is), we should do it as humanely as possible. Not that they necessarily deserve that, but ultimately it’s a reflection of us.

          This is all first world problems btw. If the facade falls, we’ll all see people put down with absolute disregard. We have survivors alive today from past atrocity, we aren’t even removed in the slightest. Look up the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields, I had a coworker who escaped after watching his brother chopped apart and his mother gunned down.

          Purity in your moralism is a luxury most can’t afford, unfortunately.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
            8·
            11 months ago

            Jailing people for life is also inhumane, solitary is torture that can lead to permanent damage. But what alternatives are left with?

            Rehabilitation and reeducation work camps.

            • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
              2·
              11 months ago

              For some, sure.

              I’m all for the Scandinavian model, I just don’t think the John Wayne Gacys of the world are reformable. I think some people are just not meant to live in the group. If ostracization was still a thing, then let’s do that, as if back in the day surviving the wild wasn’t effectively a death sentence. You wanna drop these people on an uninhabited Alaskan island? Sure. I’m all for it

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
                4·
                11 months ago

                We should strive for a world where we can cure psychopaths. Mental health isn’t magic. Everyone can be rehabilitated if we figure out how.

                • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
                  1·
                  11 months ago

                  I agree. But we are still left with the here and now and a situation that we didn’t ask to be in, that we (as a whole) are forced into.

                  Believe me, I think the first job of government, everyday, is to pass objective rationalization for their continued existence. I am beyond critical as a default. Criticism of authority is fundamental to any and all rights of free people. Corruption of those that make up the system should be punished at exponential rates. A police officer commiting a crime should be handled like a criminal, not an officer. Should steps be taken to mitigate and help the masses, based off medical expert advice? Absolutely, whole-heartedly.

                  I understand the arguments against capital punishment and at my core i agree, but in the end we still have this shit show we didn’t want to be in to deal with. In an analogy, I don’t think blaming the garbage collectors will make people produce less garbage. Let’s do the things to fix it, across the board, but that doesn’t mean leaving the obvious garbage out to rot and fester in the street.

    • KISSmyOS@feddit.de
      7·
      11 months ago

      Anesthesizing someone is difficult and you need the right drugs. No licensed doctor is allowed nor willing to do it, and no company making the drugs agrees to its use for killing people.

    • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
      11·
      11 months ago

      Holy fuck you’re not kidding. I assumed when you said that it was going to be just shit all over the place. The ads weren’t super intrusive? It was easy to read? But when I got down to the bottom there was shit about a homeopathy treatment for neuropathy that has left scientists speechless.

      How the fuck was that on AP

    • robocall@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      11 months ago

      while I agree that guillotine is a more humane method of execution, we could also consider ending the death penalty completely.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    4·
    11 months ago

    Oh my. I didn’t realise that it’s actually horrible for the person. Imagine grasping for air for 15 minutes! It must be horrible! That guy had a good reason to be scared of going away like that!

    … And it’s totally not an act made to stop this type of execution. It’s not like hypoxia is undetectable by the body, as the gasping reflex is driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the lungs, not the lack of oxygen. Nor is it like the subject had any beef against the type of execution.

    Come on. This is just fear mongering at this point

      • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
        4·
        11 months ago

        Sure, but as far as methods this is considered the ideal to the point of being how most people advocate for legal assisted suicide.

        If youre going to legally kill someone, this is the way to do so humanely.

        • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
          10·
          11 months ago

          Not this way, they had no method to remove the carbon dioxide from his lungs.

          It would have been trivial if they used existing methodology, but they didn’t bother to emulate it.

            • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
              8·
              11 months ago

              They just filled the air he was breathing with nitrogen instead of cycling it through his airspace… They needed a larger volume of gas to keep the amount of CO2 low enough

              • valaramech@kbin.social
                2·
                11 months ago

                I’ve seen this claim made multiple times but the articles in question make no mention of it - including this one, unless I’m blind. Do you have a source for this claim?

                • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
                  3·
                  11 months ago

                  It’s not a claim that needs sourced. You put out a certain amount of CO2. Breathing that into a larger volume results in lower CO2 density.

                  If you have a cup of water that full, pouring that into a swimming pool does not result in a full swimming pool.

      • JizzmasterD@lemmy.ca
        4·
        11 months ago

        I don’t know. The older I get the more I feel that locking someone a confined space with a bunch of other unintegratables, essentially indefinitely, is less humane. I keep thinking society needs to have some skin in the game making these decisions. Seems like there’s more of that with something decisive like capital punishment than locking someone in an out of the way cage and forgetting about them.

        Maybe this was more of an !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world post tho.

    • valaramech@kbin.social
      3·
      11 months ago

      From the Wikipedia article on Inert Gas Asphyxiation:

      When humans breathe in an asphyxiant gas, such as pure nitrogen, helium, neon, argon, methane, or any other physiologically inert gas, they exhale carbon dioxide without re-supplying oxygen.

      This leads to asphyxiation (death from lack of oxygen) without the painful and traumatic feeling of suffocation (the hypercapnic alarm response, which in humans arises mostly from carbon dioxide levels rising)

      Unconsciousness in cases of accidental asphyxia can occur within one minute.

      Loss of consciousness may be accompanied by convulsions[9] and is followed by cyanosis and cardiac arrest.

      tl;dr - literally everything that happened in the execution was precisely as expected. Smith did not suffer and was not conscious after the first few minutes of the procedure.

      • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
        10·
        11 months ago

        asphyxiation (death from lack of oxygen) without the painful and traumatic feeling of suffocation (the hypercapnic alarm response

        So this would be fine, but he did have symptoms consistent with hypercapnia, as described in the link you provided

        In severe hypercapnia (generally greater than 10 kPa or 75 mmHg), symptomatology progresses to disorientation, panic, hyperventilation, convulsions, unconsciousness, and eventually death.[8][9]

        They needed a larger breathable volume to diffuse the carbon dioxide present to keep the man from suffering.

        They botched it.

        • valaramech@kbin.social
          1·
          11 months ago

          Considering both include convulsions and cardiac arrest can be accompanied by agonal breathing, I don’t think you can definitively state this.

          Smith also resisted breathing for as long as he could at the beginning of the procedure and I think that needs to be taken into account. I won’t say they absolutely didn’t botch his execution, but I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence to that effect.

          • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
            4·
            11 months ago

            Smith’s lawyers disagree, and seek a court-ordered halt to the second execution attempt, scheduled for 6 p.m. on Thursday. They say the new method, particularly the repurposing of a respirator mask, could easily go wrong if the mask’s seal is imperfect and oxygen seeps in.

            Nitrogen has been advocated for by the right-to-die movement, and used successfully in assisted suicides but is more commonly deployed using a nitrogen-filled hood over the head.

            Smith’s lawyers have also complained about Alabama’s decision to not perform the test outlined in the mask manufacturer’s manual to ensure an airtight seal.

            Unless they published their methodology, which they refused to do, we won’t have any compelling evidence.