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'Astonishingly cruel': Alabama seeks to test execution method on death row 'guinea pig'
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
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If something is banned everywhere except those specific states, there's a 100% likelihood that it's so heinous that it should never be allowed anywhere under any circumstances.
Euthanasia advocates are generally a compassionate bunch, and nitrogen asphyxiation has been proposed numerous times in that space. I don't think it's fair to vilify its usage just because you look down upon the states that have legalized it's usage in this capacity.
I've also personally blacked out from a lack of oxygen, and I can tell you it was far too sudden for me to comprehend I was about to die, let alone process potential pain.
I am against capital punishment, but if we're going to do it, the current methods are far too brutal. We need to be accepting of new alternatives, especially ones that historically have been effective in other contexts.
And never approved, for clearly stated reasons.
It's not that my reason for opposing state-sanctioned torture murder is that I don't like those states. While I'm sure there are some positive aspects of two of those states, there's no one thing that those three have in common with ONLY each other that isn't awful.
It's like how Orban and Mohdi are both amongst the worst tyrants in the world, but they agree on very little. That loving Putin is one of the few things they both do is very fitting. Likewise with these three states and nitrogen torture murder.
I mean how many progressive stars have the death penalty? Most of the pushback towards it is because you could never design an ethical test, and that prisons might make a mistake (such as impure nitrogen).
Lethal injections have a 7% failure rate, so at least 1 in every 14 executions are already botched.
These are the same arguments that got the electric chair, and lethal injection approved. So unless we are going back to a firing line (which is practically painless, just messy), why not try to make it more ethical?
So what you're saying is, because we know that all the other methods of state murder are inhumane, we should try one we know fuckall about on the extremely slim chance that it MIGHT be any less cruel.
There's nothing ethical about murdering humans in the first place and doing it in new completely unknown ways that might be worse and doctors are warning will probably be excruciating makes it much LESS ethical. Maybe we should try NOT murdering for a while, see how we feel about things being more civilized and less dehumanising.
I mean you’re objectively correct, but those states don’t seem like they’re gonna stop capital punishment anytime soon. If current death row inmates ask to be executed by nitrogen, I don’t think there is any harm in trying.
Doesn't your back hurt from constantly moving those goalposts?
Inmates are not asking to be murdered in an untested way that will most likely be excruciating.
The corrupt and callous governments of three of the worst states want to use nitrogen because it's cheap, it's plentiful and that's all they care about.
As for "no harm in trying" , what part of "unknown but likely to be excruciating" is it that you fail to understand? Is it that long word at the end? It means roughly "very painful, much ow" 🙄
With the death penalty they approve methods. They don’t ban methods.
It’s an important distinction. Nitrogen is not banned in other states. It’s not approved.
It’s used for euthanasia because it’s less painful
I’m against the death penalty but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be humane.
In this case, that's a distinction without consequence. It's the exact same thing with the direction reversed.
Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably the gentlest and most comfortable method of executing someone I can think of.
There's a funny quirk of human physiology: we don't have a mechanism for feeling hungry for oxygen. The desperate and painful sensation of needing to breathe fresh air? That's your need to expel CO2. Cinching a Hefty bag (not sponsored) around your neck is a miserable experience because you're poisoning yourself with your own carbon dioxide. Let the bag leak around your neck, and inflate it with a constant supply of inert gas - like helium, or argon, or nitrogen - and you won't notice yourself dying. I recommend helium; it'll make your last words that much more hilarious.
Reason I know this: I'm a flight instructor; you want to go somewhere where there's not enough oxygen? Get in a plane and go about 30,000 feet straight up. You don't feel that panicky "I can't breathe" sensation up there because you can freely exhale CO2, but there's not enough oxygen to keep your body working for long.
It is my understanding that among the states that still practice the death penalty, the methods that the law authorizes are lethal injection, electric chair, cyanide gas, hanging and firing squad, and the last two are technicalities that haven't been repealed yet. Compared to these methods, inert gas hypoxia is a lot more comfy. The electric chair and cyanide gas are proper horrifying, lethal injection is supposed to be humane on the theory that they anesthetize you before chemically stopping your heart...except no actual anesthesiologist wants anything to do with it, so they get some random guy to do it and they pretty much always botch it. It's not hard to flood a room with nitrogen, though.
The cruelty in this subject is found in these particular states executing people often enough to worry about it.
You must not be very imaginative, then. Look to Dignitas, the Swiss nonprofit organization providing physician-assisted suicide. If oxygen deprivation was really the gentlest and most comfortable method of ending a human life, don't you think that's what they would do?
Putting aside for a moment the fact that killing someone on purpose against their will is and always will be murder regardless of whether it's the government doing it, these three states don't want to use nitrogen because it's a gentle method. Everyone with actual medical expertise asked about it say it probably isn't.
They want to use nitrogen because it's cheap and because it's plentiful enough that people of better morals and ethics than themselves can't keep them from getting it. Those are the actual reasons no matter their pseudoscientific claims backed up by no evidence.