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.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    1046·
    9 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
        72·
        9 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·
          9 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·
              9 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
                23·
                9 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
                  31·
                  9 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.

                  • Tja@programming.dev
                    12·
                    9 months ago

                    Every claim needs to be sourced/proved, except axioms. Mathematicians had to prove that 1+1=2, and it was not easy.

      • JizzmasterD@lemmy.ca
        53·
        9 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
      34·
      9 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
        9·
        9 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
          12·
          9 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·
            9 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.