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A fallible state institution that has made many documented mistakes in the past is still given the power to murder prisoners who are in its custody and under its protection. It’s barbarous.
America is hellbent on the concept of punishing criminals over rehabilitation while also having an objectively unfair justice system. The cruelty is the point sometimes, and it’s very unfortunate that people still think this way.
The Lethal Injection idea was from interviewing a veterinarian who of course refused to implement it, as did every Medical Doctor in the USA because of fucking course nobody would touch breaking the oath in such a way with a ten foot pole. The result is a bunch of untrained amateurs carrying out the procedures and an extremely low success rate leading to unjust and unnecessary pain and trauma.
I imagine all the other methods they come up with to follow a similar series of events.
Thank you for stating the truth. I live in USA, and it hurts.
Weird stuff, Americans
I dont support the death penalty in any way (well, maybe guillotine)
Its the vengeful right wing christofascists that love it. Unfortunately, they are overrepresented in our governments.
Guillotine is almost certainly worse than hypoxia; having nerves severed is agonizing. Having almost all of them severed would be insanely painful.
That said, what if we just didn’t kill people. That would be cool.
I think they more mean the removal of corruption, not necessarily literally beheadings.
At least I hope if they’re going to call the death penalty bad in principle. IMO, it’s good in principle, but completely untennable in practice in such an insanely flawed system working with just as flawed laws. I’m not sure a defensible system could exist. Not with modern humans.
The irony of being too bad to properly purge the bad…
If the nerves connected to the brain are severed, how can someone even know they’re in pain? (Also, they die immediately.)
FYI, they were making a joke about complacent, exploitative rich people, e.g. the French Revolution.
“Immediately” is 4-10 seconds.
I think the sudden blood pressure going to zero would probably end conscious awareness fairly quick
“fairly quick” is 4 to 10 seconds.
I bet you could recite the whole alphabet in that amount of time
They wouldn’t know it if you did damage to the body after that time. They absolutely would know that the severed end of the spinal cord that remained connected to the brainwas sending very loud pain signals for the brief time they remained conscious.
Idk, i think France had the right idea before Robespierre took over
Front accounts of when the guillotine was used often and publicly, there was seemingly voluntary movement for up to two minutes. Imagine the hell that is searing pain from nerves cut and exposed to air while you black out screaming silent and breathless.
Dropping a 2 ton weight made of tungsten onto someone’s head is about as instant and painless as possible. We can kill better, we have had the technology.
Dropping a 2 ton weight made of tungsten onto someone’s head is about as instant and painless as possible. We can kill better, we have had the technology.
Are we talking about the mashinator?
Is it fair to argue that this is being done by the government, not the Americans themselves?
Not really, in the States it still happens in, it is very much supported by the “people”.
Just the pro life crowd being inhumane. Nothing to see here.
To be fair, insofar as execution methods go, nitrogen asphyxiation is far far far and away the most humane.
So, like, it is an improvement? It’s less inhumane than they were being at any rate?
Considered too cruel to be used by vets because of the clear signs of distress shown in animals to which it was administered. But this guy says it’s good enough for humans!
It’s important that a prisoner not just be killed, but can feel themselves dying, apparently.
I understand why you would think this seems peaceful. But we have no idea whether it is, anyone claiming otherwise is bullshitting or lying, and the entire idea of “humane” execution is an oxymoron to begin with.
Considered too cruel to be used by vets because of the clear signs of distress shown in animals to which it was administered.
Could you provide a reference for this? According to the Wikipedia article on inert gas asphyxiation:
Diving animals such as rats and minks and burrowing animals are sensitive to low-oxygen atmospheres and (unlike humans) will avoid them, making purely hypoxic techniques possibly inhumane[citation needed] for them.
This makes sense, but there’s also a [citation needed] there. And even if true, it explicitly draws a distinction between these sorts of animals and humans, which the rest of the article is quite emphatic do not have sensitivity to low oxygen.
They were possibly confusing nitrogen with carbon dioxide. CO2 will definitely lead to distress in high concentrations, and has been used in some slaughterhouses.
The fucking US Veterinary Association published that it is only approved for pigs and even then recommends sedating the animal first because of observations of extreme distress. This is widely published – find it if you want, I don’t care at this point. Wikipedia is not going to undermine the countless medical organizations who all objected or condemned this shit. So sick of the wikipedia PhDs in this thread claiming to know what none of the doctors or medical researchers do.
Were you aware that humans aren’t a subject of authority of the US Veterinary Association?
Still waiting on that reference, BTW.
Love that you had the time to get your degree from wikipedia but couldn’t plug “veterinary association nitrogen asphyxiation” into a search engine and click the first, second, or third result.
For me, the first are a couple of UN articles about the subject that contain all of this information. But you couldn’t be bothered to look this up because you can only do wikipedia “research” that confirms your priors, not that might contradict them.
Again, human medicine is not an area that the US Veterinary Association should be having much to say about.
You claim to have a reference, why aren’t you pasting it? Surely that’s easier than rambling on about it.
It’s more humane than lethal injection, the only other way we do it, which I think is the argument here
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Trying to +1 you but the comment won’t load right when I click
Yeah, shit you’re right
Lethal injection with heroin or carfentanyl would be pretty humane I would say
That’s a completely separate argument than the comment you replied to was making.
Humans don’t have low oxygen sensitivity. That’s pretty well established fact. Nitrogen asphyxiation is basically “little bit dizzy -> pass out -> dead.”
It is absolutely, certainly, no question more humane than any other method of execution.
Note, I don’t say that it is humane, just that it’s more humane. And I’d much prefer that, if an execution is going to happen, it be as humane as possible.
Oh, you’ve done it? Tell me about your specific medical expertise that is greater than… basically every medical organization that has spoken on the subject. Is your expertise also that you read a wikipedia page?
Pretty much everything real on the subject is about industrial accidents, which are not really analagous, or from the few examples of euthanasia with nitrogen pods – and the information provided by Dr. Philip Nitschke who researched the actual N2 aspyxiation euthanasia devices and who publicly said the Alabama method was not like that at all and was likely to cause significant pain and distress.
~22 minutes is now being reported, with the guy struggling, gasping, resisting, fighting, trying not to die. Fighting for his life on the gurney. This method provides no guarantees, no timelines, and DEFINITELY is not the nonsense people are describing about “gentle sleep” or whatever the fuck.
I suspect you and the people in this thread have exactly the same level of expertise as the Al lawmakers and agencies that allowed this to happen: bullshit none.
I thought, hmm, maybe this guy is right, and there is some body of research that says nitrogen asphyxiation is actually painful, so I tried to find a source to that fact. I couldn’t find a single one.
I found many saying the Alabama protocols for administering it were bad, and could prolong the process.
I found many saying that leakages were dangerous, as the other people in the room might die of nitrogen asphyxiation without even knowing it was happening.
I’ve read that the man being executed really really would like to not be executed, and is fighting tooth and nail to prevent it, leading to thrashing about on the gurney.
I’ve found sources saying that testing out novel execution methods on inmates is by definition torture, and cruel and unusual punishment.
But I can’t find a single source that claims the process is physically painful. Maybe I’m wrong, and if so, I’d love to know. Can you link me something that says so? I mean this very sincerely. I’d like to be corrected if so.
But all I can find are those things listed above. Nothing at all that I can find that implies that nitrogen asphyxiation is anything other than unnoticeable to the person it kills.
But that IS the point. We don’t know. It isn’t studied – cannot be studied ethically.
It is presumed to be painless based on unrelated case studies. And so people are proudly and confidently stepping forward to say “ignore the situations where it causes apparent pain and distress (animal examples), we’ll just use very different industrial accidents where we THINK it maybe was painless but have no way to know and will use that to declare it is painless.”
Meanwhile this guy struggled to live for over 20 minutes tied to a gurney.
You have a belief without evidence. You have to prove it. And we both know it is not going to happen because the research doesn’t exist and would be unethical.
But people die from nitrogen asphyxiation all the time. It’s in fact well studied that it is so deadly because it can kill you without you even knowing there is a problem. This is widely accepted as fact.
And we know that animals sense oxygen presence differently than humans. I can’t find a single reputable source saying otherwise. All admit that humans don’t sense oxygen deprivation the same way many other animals do.
And yes, this man struggled for 20min on a gurney. Just like he did when they tried to give him a lethal injection. They never even got the needle in for that one. Dude didn’t want to die, which is super reasonable. Of course he struggled. It doesn’t mean the method of execution was painful.
I don’t have a belief without evidence. I have a belief based on accounts of people accidentally exposed to high nitrogen environments.
And while I certainly agree that it’s unethical to study nitrogen asphyxiation by trying to kill people with it, that’s not the only way to study the effects of breathing nitrogen on the human body. We study accidents and suicide attempts after the fact. We in fact can learn about things that kill people without actively and purposely killing people with them.
Any suggestions for alternatives? The poor unfortunate souls on death row salute you. Can’t cause them any distress now. I’m sure their victims got the same consideration.
Good thing executing prisoners never gets the wrong people and always makes the victims whole.
I would not say executing innocents is a good thing. I understand your compassion though. It speaks well to you. Unfortunately there is usually no being made whole when it comes to tragedy. I believe the bar for proving guilt when the death penalty is involved is quite high. I have seen the cases of the few exonerated from death row and I am thankful for that. There are people out there fighting for those wrongly accused. However, there are many more clear cut open and shut cases of those not deserving to exist among their fellow man who have done things to the innocent that are hard to even read.
Oh the bar is quite high. No problem then, it will only be a small number of definitely innocent people we murder.
How about we can execute people, but if they’re later exonerated every single person involved in the execution themselves gets executed automatically. I think that may enforce a high enough standard for me.
That made me chuckle. However it seems to go against the premise of your argument. Kill more to prevent the killing of one? I’m afraid there is no good solution. Maybe neuralink will one day allow us to read the memories of those accused for definite convictions.
The very idea that violence demands violence in response is terrible for humankind.
I don’t know if you can call any execution method even remotely humane.
Even if you know it isn’t going to hurt, you still know you’re going to die. There’s no escaping that part.
I didn’t say it was. I said it was more humane.
If an execution is going to happen, I think doing it in the most humane way possible is better than torturing them to death. That’s a positive switch, even if it’s still bad.
People keep saying this, but it seems like this execution proved that it’s not true.
How so? Cause the dude was vigorously fighting the guys holding a mask to his face to try and stop them from killing him? I don’t think that’s evidence that nitrogen asphyxiation is painful. Dude did the same thing with the lethal injection, and they never even managed to get the needle in.
the humane part, to me, is the struggle.
The inhumane part is putting someone through that and saying, “Good job.”
Oh, for sure. And I agree that the death penalty is fundamentally inhumane. I also understand that justice is hard to manage and measure. Idk, I’m drunk and not paid enough to have to make hard decisions like that, and for that I’m very much appreciative. :)
To be fair, killing a blank slate is different than killing a guy everybody wants dead
2 problems here. Firstly a fetus is not alive so can’t be killed. Secondly I didn’t want that guy dead.
Hi, pro-choice mathematician who’s done biology work here. Fetuses are alive. Fetuses are composed of living tissues. If a fetus was not alive, it wouldn’t grow. If a fetus doesn’t grow it can’t be born. You will never win an argument with an anti-abortion nutjob if you get basic facts wrong. The reason a fetus doesn’t have the same moral weight as the human it needs to live off of is because fetuses aren’t sapient.
Strongly recommend not using this argument, or any of the ones showing up in this sub-thread. No one is going to be convinced on any of this. The people trying to ban abortion will never, ever be convinced by arguments about when life begins – and will likely just become more certain that the pro choice crowd are full of callous monsters that don’t grant dignity to life.
Read A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis. It is the argument.
In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is alive/a human/has a soul/whatever. You can grant that it is a full human being with rights from the beginning, even. Our ethical rules place autonomy of your own body hierarchically higher than preserving the life of someone else. That must be true or else it would be perfectly reasonable to harvest extra organs from people without their consent, take any or all property from citizens without cause to give to the needy, or draft individuals into whatever charitable work you wanted with no due process. There are very strict limits on how much charity a person can be mandated to participate in, and that limit is usually down to transient circumstances and taxes. It certainly does not dive into your flesh.
The state has no business enforcing control over decisions an individual makes about the contents of their own uterus, even if those decisions may lead to a death.
Whether or not it is RIGHT or GOOD to get an abortion doesn’t even matter and, frankly, isn’t worth debating. That is a subjective question. All that matters is whether the state is allowed to step in and prevent it from happening – and they aren’t.
The only thing marking a clear difference between a fetus and any other person is the fetus’s need of the womb to live. And unfortunately for the fetus, one person’s need of some service to live is not sufficient to enslave another.
Arguments with unreasonable people aren’t won by making the unreasonable person change their mind they’re won by showing the audience that the person is unreasonable, which in turn shows their word can’t be trusted.
I don’t think any undecided audience will be convinced by this “mass of cells”-style argument either. But to someone who DOES worry that it is a ‘person’ being aborted, hearing someone else dismiss that life makes it seem like the pro-choice people are callous and uncaring.
If you’re arguing for an audience, all the more reason to be explicit and clear about the underlying ethical conviction rather than just a subjective opinion about what is and isn’t life. How this is about a person’s right to make the right choice for themselves, privately.
Either that or talk about the pain and hardship brought on by pregnancy, especially pregnancy caused by violence, and the benefit the abortion can provide. That can also be pretty compelling.
You would have a hard time convincing me that a newborn was a sapient being.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point.
1 - it’s still stopping the existence of an organism and preventing a human life from happening after it already started to happen. Call it not killing something, but we’re basically arguing semantics. I’m pro choice, but I mean, own what you are doing. It’s not exactly preventative it’s reactive.
2 - idk and idc who this hitman guy is, I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way. Someone an overwhelming majority of people would have no problem with being killed. Someone who has demonstrated we permanently need out of society and has spread suffering. I’m anti death penalty, but not because there’s any love lost with those people - only because we convict and kill the wrong people sometimes.
we’re basically arguing semantics
Well yes, but you referred to terminating a pregnancy as “killing a blank slate”. The use of the term “killing” has obvious emotional connotations which you were co-opting to support your position. If you’re going to do that then you need to be prepared to defend the appropriateness of that particular verb.
I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way. Someone an overwhelming majority of people would have no problem with being killed.
You’re assuming that people generally support killing repugnant criminals, which is not the case. There are some truly awful people in the world, and they may well “deserve” to die, but I do not wish them dead. I think you may find that this is a fairly commonly held position in contemporary society.
Yea, once someone rapes a child and tortures 3 people for hours before burning down a house, I’m philosophically fine with killing them. I didn’t think that part was too much of a hot take.
Fair enough about you perceiving a connotation about the verbage, but also, it’s killing something lol. If what I just did to this ant in my kitchen was killing it, then it’s what’s happening to that fetus.
You said “a guy everyone wants dead” which is obviously never going to be true.
I’m sure this sounds odd to you, but in contemporary society it kind of is a hot take to want someone dead.
The ant is an ant. A fetus isn’t a human.
it’s still stopping the existence of an organism and preventing a human life from happening after it already started to happen.
That part I highlighted is a subject of debate, and since it hinges on opinions about the definitions of words rather than anything with a clear-cut objective measure it’s a debate that’s not going to be settled any time soon.
I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way
What a good thing that the state never, ever incorrectly convicts people of having done those things.
When the cells form together and start developing, a human life has begun to form. If it’s “alive” you can argue about and whatever. But you can’t debate that first sentence any more than you can debate that once you put a pot of water on a hi burner, you’ve started to boil some water. Have some fucking balls and admit what you’re doing when you terminate a pregnancy. If I crack an egg I just killed a chicken. If I didn’t kill a chicken, by way of semantics, I still caused a chicken that would exist to not exist, what the hell are you supposed to call that?
And the thing about the death penalty, I literally said that in my comment. I brought that up as the reason why I’m against it. So thanks for restating it more sarcastically.
If I didn’t kill a chicken, by way of semantics, I still caused a chicken that would exist to not exist, what the hell are you supposed to call that?
What if two chickens are about to copulate, and I separate them before they get a chance to get it on? I just prevented a future chicken from existing, so did I just kill it?
This is what I mean about this being a semantic debate. There’s no way to objectively measure the “chickenness” of something, especially not in the grey area that lies between disorganized atoms and a fully-formed hen. I don’t think an egg is literally a chicken, at least not early in the chicken fetus’ development. At some point it becomes one, but nailing down the exact moment is not something that’s amenable to rigorous definition. We’re never going to have a scanner that we can train on a developing egg and have it go “ping!” The moment the chicken threshold has been passed.
Have some fucking balls
Not if I can help it.
and admit what you’re doing when you terminate a pregnancy.
Terminating. A pregnancy. Stopping the process that until it completes has not resulted in a human life.
Cold water is not boiling water until it’s boiling water.
A fetus has no more rights to occupy a uterus than a sperm cell has not to be ejaculated into a sock, regardless what it could potentially have been were it allowed to’ve been part of a cream pie.
preventing a human life from happening
So is jerking off into a tissue
after it already started to happen.
and would need a human host to continue happening to which it (not being a person and not having rights) has no rights to which would superseded said human’s right to bodily autonomy.
only because we convict and kill the wrong people sometimes.
You shouldn’t kill “the right people” either. Killing captive people is wrong.
Any rights a fetus has are outweighed by the mother’s right to bodily autonomy.
When it comes to mixed bag news this is as mixed as it gets. If we’re gonna execute people, we can at least do it as humanely as possible.
Yup. Morality and efficacy of the death penalty left totally aside for the moment, I’m shocked it took this long to use nitrogen instead of the clusterfuck cocktail that’s tortured so many people to death.
One of my state senators introduced a bill that’d let inmates choose execution by a firing squad made up of members of the legislature. Like ‘If you want to kill them so bad, you pull the damn trigger.’
Isn’t going anywhere but I like the sentiment. Real Ned Stark energy.
While that “sounds” good in theory. Many gun nut conservatives (of which many of the legislators come from) would actually welcome the chance to kill another human without representations…
There’s an argument that if you make it less violent, then people will be more willing to accept execution as a valid punishment.
That ignores, of course, that execution favorability has been dropping for 100+ years despite the methods becoming (or at least attempting to become) more humane.
Why? If we’re killing people, then who cares how they go? They won’t remember. Only we will remember.
Is this better because we feel less guilt when they don’t scream?
What matters in anyone’s life? Why do you care if I tie your hands together, hang you by a hook in my basement, and punch you in the dick repeatedly every day for 20 years? One day you will die and won’t remember so why does it matter?
But until I die, it matters. Because that is all any of us have, the time until death.
But if death is imminent, and you stick a finger in my butt, who will know or care but you?
Just because someone’s death is imminent doesn’t mean we should torture them, or else why bother keeping this society going? Any society that treats its terminal members that way is certainly not a society worth keeping around.
If you care that much, maybe we should just not kill them. Seems weird to care how they die, but not that they die.
Correct, we should not kill them.
Which this isn’t, in my opinion. It’s just nicer for the killer and the onlookers. But it’s not a dignified death. If you’re gonna kill people in the name of justice, let them stand up and shoot them.
If you can’t stomach seeing or doing that, then maybe that should tell you something about the death penalty in general.I would WAY rather drift off to sleep forever than be shot to death.
And how do you know that is the experience, here? When most medical experts say clearly they have no idea whether this is peaceful or torture, how are you so confident it is the former?
According to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, in humans, “breathing an oxygen deficient atmosphere can have serious and immediate effects, including unconsciousness after only one or two breaths. The exposed person has no warning and cannot sense that the oxygen level is too low.” In the US, at least 80 people died from accidental nitrogen asphyxiation between 1992 and 2002. Hazards with inert gases and the risks of asphyxiation are well-established.
It would be a bit less terrible a method if it actually worked that way. Still depraved, but slightly less.
But it doesn’t. Took 30 minutes for the guy to die, supposedly.
Vets swore off using this technique a while ago because of how clearly-distressed animals were when it was performed on them.
There’s a big difference between the kind of freak industrial accident you’re describing and intentional administration via a mask. And either way, we literally do not know if it is peace or torture.
It took 30 minutes for them to declare him dead. Only a few minutes for his breathing to stop entirely. I don’t think they had them hooked up to an EEG, so they just left him on the nitrogen for long enough to make sure it would be effective and then declared him dead.
I’ll agree that dying against your will is torture. And for animals that have time to know something is wrong and can’t escape it, they’re going to be distressed. I’m curious about the discrepancy between why this reportedly took so long when work safety experts warn that a couple of breaths of an oxygen deficient atmosphere can induce unconsciousness.
But I’m only answering the question of why we would think this is painless and then assertion that we can’t know. It sure sounds like we do know. But I’ll stay open minded and keep reading.
The article said that the guy held his breath for as long as possible. It really would be torture to be strapped down and know that the next breath you take will kill you. Even if the actual experience is completely painless, trying to hold your breath as long as you can in order to stay alive for just a few more seconds sounds like a nightmare.
I mean, the citation is, to start with, not a medical organization. They’re reporting on workplace incidents, essentially, and making big assumptions. Also no mentioned of the violent seizures.
Also, not to be captain obvious, but reports of the experience, definitionally, come from people who survived, which is another layer of it being a vastly different experience than dying that may not even be terribly analogous. Surviving it might mean a biologically different process happened to you than not surviving it.
There’s a huge difference between an industrial accident and an execution. One of them is being done on purpose. An industrial accident may be someone running into a room flooded by the N2 fire suppression system, expecting nothing was wrong, taking a few deep breaths, and suddenly blacking out. Sudden, unexpected, unprepared, confused. The prisoner knows its coming, it’s being administered on a schedule, and might not be too keen on the whole thing. The guy in this case, for example, was strapped down to a gurney and had the mask tied to his head, allegedly. Not being surprised means it is a lot less likely to work in that sudden, shocking way even all-else being equal, which it isn’t.
Again, the medical experts I’ve seen interviewed all shrug at the question. They do not know. And even if knowing its coming isn’t an issue, the best evidence of using it for deliberate execution we have was the great distress it apparently caused animals.
Did you read the article?
By all reports death by nitrogen is death by induced seizure, which sounds like what happened.
I did read the article. He was holding his breath and shaking around.
Death by nitrogen hypoxia isn’t something we invented for executions. I don’t know why news articles are pretending that it’s this brand new untested method of killing people.
I wonder if the shaking around was an attempt to break the mask’s seal. Maybe this method could be improved by using one of those assisted suicide nitrogen pods.
He was holding his breath and shaking around.
Which kind of shows it isn’t all that humane, doesn’t it? He was desperately trying to cling to life.
I mean, there’s nothing humane about killing someone who knows what’s happening and doesn’t want to die.
If my life were ever going to be ended in an intentional manner, this is the method I would choose.
Yea but it’s still better than the ‘lets paralyze you so we feel humane and have your veins be lava for 12 hours as you disintegrate’ evolved option we use.
I’m right there with you though, how the fuck is it that we don’t just put people under like before surgery, and then cut off their access to oxygen? Or a quick gunshot, or a shot with that cattle killing gun? The whole thing is so fucking stupid to me
I’m against the death penalty personally, but the whole thing is so unbelievably absurd to me.
Also, obligatory ayyyy Alabama represent, we made BBC News again
how the fuck is it that we don’t just put people under like before surgery
You need meds for that, and a qualified anesthesiologist.
And for anyone who doesn’t put the dots together: a doctor cannot intentionally kill someone. It is the most profound ethics violation everywhere I am aware.
Even in places where there is medical euthanasia, the person must do it to themselves by e.g., pushing a button and someone who is incompetent to do so is ineligible for that euthanasia.
I’m sure there are shady places where this isn’t the rule. But those same places, I suspect, are a lot more practical about execution than all this pseudo-humane “medical execution” crapola.
I think the best way to go, besides snu-snu (nothing will top that method), is to IV enough carfentanil to kill an entire city into the person. Even those with massive opioid tolerances can’t withstand a dose like that. It’s why the fentanyl epidemic was so deadly here.
Makes sense to me (in a world where we’re doing the death penalty. I’m against it, it’s just a ‘if you’re gonna do it, what the hell are y’all doing it that way for’).
Someone rocked my world by pointing out they can’t get doctors involved because of their oaths, which I guess makes sense. But its also still another unbelievably absurd element of this
I’d go for the nitrogen thing, plus a massive dose of mushrooms just to set the mood.
Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, was at Smith’s side for the execution, and said prison officials in the room “were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went.” “What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life,” Hood, attending his fifth execution in the last 15 months, told reporters. “We saw minutes of someone heaving back and forth. We saw spit. We saw all sorts of stuff from his mouth develop on the mask. We saw this mask tied to the gurney, and him ripping his head forward over and over and over again.”
All our technological advances as a society and this is the best we can do?
Everyone who would actually know what they are doing in executions (doctors, pharmaceutical companies, veteranarians) have looked at it and said “this is barbaric in concept, no matter how humanely you do it, we will have no part in it”. What you are left with is people without the relevent expertise, who do not have a problem with the barbarism, figuring out how to do it.
State sanctioned murder with torture included for free. They did it the conservative Christian way…
I also read that they starved him first so he won’t choke on the food if he vomits it out.
No, the best we can do is the guillotine, but people don’t like severed heads.
Or just shooting someone in the head with a high caliber rifle is probably better. Maybe it’s an urban legend, but I’ve heard the brain can survive for a few seconds after being beheaded. Best to just destroy the brain as instantly as possible.
It’s not the best we can do. It’s what sadistic people choose to do.
.
so cheap
“We’re giving out longer prison sentences and cutting taxes and budgets, make it work.” - Red state legislatures every two years
why can’t they just give them an insane amount of opiates rather than all this odd shit
(if we have to kill people, which we shouldn’t)
I know a lot of people die accidentally this way, but I wonder if it’s always peaceful. I had to take oxys once and - granted, the dose was minuscule - I experienced some pretty intense paradoxical effects for a while before I noticed any degree of sedation. Would giving 100x guarantee immediate sedation and respiratory shutdown, or would they be convulsing and puking everywhere on their way out?
You know that sleepyness where you literally cannot keep your eyes open and keep dozing off? That’s what an opioid overdose is like. If you gave someone a bunch of morphine, they’d fall asleep and soon after stop breathing.
Some people experience different levels of nausea from different kinds of opioids, so some level of discomfort will exist in some percent of the population without either testing out the different opioids on the prisoner or giving them an anti-nausea drug.
In November 2022, Alabama officials aborted his execution by lethal injection after struggling for hours to insert an intravenous line’s needle in his body.
In Smith’s second and final trip to the execution chamber on Thursday, executioners restrained him in a gurney and strapped a commercial industrial-safety respirator mask to his face. A canister of pure nitrogen was attached to the mask
This doesn’t sound very professional!?
Someone else mentioned in another comment here that medical professionals can’t purposely kill someone because of their oath, so I’m guessing the people administering these execution methods are literally unqualified to do them.
I’d argue that a doctor would also be unqualified, since their entire qualification revolves around not killing people.
But yeah, one major problem with the death penalty is that it is carried out by people who have no education or training in that matter.
No one goes to school to learn the trade of an executioner.
Professionals won’t participate because that’d break their hippocratic oath. That just leaves schmucks like me and you to try to figure it out.
What’s the professional way to kill somebody?
Hunt them for sport, with live drone footage on multiple streaming portals.
Slowly with a life sentence. Takes a bit though, whatever number of years they have left.
Call Barry
I don’t see what’s wrong.
I used to draw blood and was pretty competent when conditions were right but I was sometimes surprised by how hard was to find someone’s veins. It wasn’t uncommon to try several times and have the person complain that both their arms hurt from all the needling. lol
And as far as the method of execution goes with the respirator mask, it sounds very standard as far as the “exit bag” method goes. I’d even say that it’s a step up from a plastic bag over one’s head.
I’m just wondering why not use one of the assisted suicide nitrogen pods.
Who knows, honestly, but my guess is that besides costs and practical reasons, they didn’t want to make a bigger scandal. I think their main concern is that these people are very pro-death so long as it’s not under people’s own terms and the pods seem like a symbol of that. How neat it would’ve been if they had used the pod, though!
Came here to ask the same question. Are the pods more effective (aka quicker/less traumatic) or do they have the same results?
deleted by creator
I think the Christian way involves lions. Or inadequate healthcare.
Lions were how Christian’s were killed in the Roman games before whatshisass converted
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night
Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you’ve a date in Constantinople
She’ll be waiting in Istanbul
I thought that’s stoning to death. The brutality is key.
You have to be sinless to chuck the first stone, so the early church would drag people off and stab them in the alley. (Incidentally, this was how Jews took care of it at the time because Roman’s kind of frowned on other people getting in on it,)
When the church became a power… they switched to burnings, hangings and other “creative” ways to torture people to death.
32 minutes. Huh.
That is a long time to know someone is murdering you.
Civilized countries don’t execute criminals and somehow don’t experience more criminality or unacceptably high incarceration costs as a result. Capital punishment is an outdated cultural practice like slavery, genital mutilation or child brides and has nothing to do with the administration of justice. It is cultural and nothing else. They like the killing. They believe in the killing. It has no other purpose.
I don’t know why much of the discussion is about the method of execution. Would it matter how they were fucking kids or beating slaves in Alabama or that they were doing those things at all? State executions are barbaric and indefensible in any form.
Richest 3rd world country
I don’t see why they do any method other than a bullet or the lance gun thing they use to kill cows/sheep/etc by launching a spike into the brain. Surely that’s the quickest and painless method right?
People have been known to survive bullets to the brain. I’m unsure of how big the lance is, but it may be survivable as well. There’s the famous story of Phineas Gage surviving having a large iron rod accidentally driven through his skull, for example.
Yeah, if we really wanted an instant-death mechanism with zero chance of any pain then we’d probably pack the victim in dynamite and vaporize them faster than nerve signals can travel.
Unfortunately people who are pro-death-penalty are often weirdly squeamish about stuff like that.
You’ve clearly thought about this. I didn’t need that visual in my head, but here we are.
Wish it wasn’t a subject that I’d have to think about but it does come up way more than it should.
On the plus side, use enough dynamite and there’d be nothing left to be squeamish about. Not even bits of teeth.
Sure, if you shoot someone in the head from 20ft or accidentally drive a rod in someone’s brain that might occasionally be a survivable event. But if you aim from closeby, with the intent of ending someones life? Chances of survival are slim to none. (With a mercy shot being an option if that’s the case)
I’m vehemently against the death penalty, but there are about a thousand ways to do it ‘better’ than the US is doing right now (it just wouldn’t be as neat/clean, which apparently is more important to the people in charge)
Have you seen the way animals are slaughtered?
I’m going to follow this advice
Quickest route to becoming vegan is discovering the cruelty done in your name.
yea I’ve done this before but couldn’t handle it, too intense for me
Quickest and least painful is probably the guillotine. Immediate drop in blood pressure to the brain might give you a few seconds of consciousness after it happens, but you’d be in too much shock to feel any pain. You wouldn’t be slowly choking to death like this fellow.
So, a gas chamber? Back to 1938, are we?
The method itself is not problematic.
I’d argue any method of killing a living being against their will is problematic…
No, you’re arguing the decision to kill a living being against their will is problematic, in which I wholeheartedly agree.
To be able to call the method problematic implies you find killing against will acceptable.
This particular method (inert gas asphyxiation) is absolutely not problematic when killing people that choose to do so: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarco_pod
Sure, but that’s not what we are talking about.
The method
What about imprisoning them against their will?
If they are danger to others, sure.
So it’s okay to torture people if they’re a danger to others, but not kill them?
If someone is eminent danger to others and there is no other option, it’s ok to kill them to in my book. But no it’s not ok to torture people at al. But I make a difference between torture and imprisonment: since I think prisoners deserve humane conditions and rehabilitation should be the goal, prison should not be like torture. If your prison is torture you doing it wrong.
What happens when people commit more crimes because the consequence of imprisonment is not enough of a deterrent?
Murder is still murder, no matter if it’s legalized.
And an execution is a premeditated murder in cold blood, even a systemic one. It’s pretty much the worst kind of murder.
And yes, every kind of murder is problematic. Using gas chambers just gives it the correct appearance: state sponsored serial murder.
Do you struggle with context, hypotheticals, or both?
You seem to have no arguments for your opinion, otherwise why would you have to resort to personal attacks?
These kinds of comments are usually the internet equivalent of a white flag.
It isn’t an opinion, though, you are simply failing to follow the conversation. I said “the method itself”, which implies that I am comparing this method to other methods and NOT discussing whether or not capital punishment is ok.
And you are not getting the point. Every method of killing people is terrible and inhumane. There is no humane way of killing people, because the very act of killing people is inhumane.
The only humane method is one that doesn’t kill or harm people.
What if they want to be killed?
Jesus fucking Christ
Strong comment, thanks.
Archive link because there is a non skippable ad block blocker.
I didn’t get any of this using uBo…
I’m on an Android phone.
Android Firefox supports uBo and many other extensions. It’s the only way I browse YouTube on my phone nowadays.
Me too, with uBo installed on Firefox.
Brave browser works well on an android phone and blocks ads without any issues (including YouTube).
The only extra steps you’ll need: Toggle off “sponsored images” on the New Tab settings. Toggle off the “Brave rewards icon” under “Appearance” settings.
