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Oklahoma Says It Will Now Use Nitrogen Gas As Its Backup Method of Execution
schwit1 writes Yesterday, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin signed into law a bill that approves the use of nitrogen gas for executions in the state. The method, which would effectively asphyxiate death row inmates by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen through a gas mask, is meant to be the primary alternative to lethal injection, the Washington Post reports.
Fallin and other supporters of the procedure say it's pain-free and effective, noting that the nitrogen would render inmates unconscious within ten seconds and kill them in minutes. It's also cheap: state representatives say the method only requires a nitrogen tank and a gas mask, but financial analysts say its impossible to give precise figures, the Post reports.
Oklahoma's primary execution method is still lethal injection, but the state's procedure is currently under review by the Supreme Court. Earlier this week, Tennessee suspended executions statewide following challenges to its own lethal injection protocol.
Fallin and other supporters of the procedure say it's pain-free and effective, noting that the nitrogen would render inmates unconscious within ten seconds and kill them in minutes. It's also cheap: state representatives say the method only requires a nitrogen tank and a gas mask, but financial analysts say its impossible to give precise figures, the Post reports.
Oklahoma's primary execution method is still lethal injection, but the state's procedure is currently under review by the Supreme Court. Earlier this week, Tennessee suspended executions statewide following challenges to its own lethal injection protocol.
We kill people because they kill people. So who kills the people who kill people because they killed people when we find out they didn't actually kill anyone?
Anesthesia is essentially what is being done, only on a larger scale. The problem is the companies who make the drugs do not allow them to be used for executions.
As to pain and discomfort, the Constitution forbids it so no, you can't use a chainsaw.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's a pretty good method to die (not that I'm a huge fan of capital punishment). Wikipedia says Right-to-die groups recommend this form of suicide as certain, fast, and painless, according to a 2007 study.
The problem with using anesthesia is that organizations (the largest of which is the EU) forbids selling anything used in executions. So states that use anesthetics to execute the condemned will find they may be then unable to purchase the same anesthetics for use in hospitals. Nitrogen, being ~80% of the atmosphere, can't possibly be restricted.
FWIW I am completely against capital punishment, and for why one need look no further than the recent admission by the FBI that they were biased to decide a match in forensic hair analysis, which may have led to up to 14 wrongful executions. However some barbaric states are just going to continue to do it anyways, so they may as well do is as humanely as possible.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
"Does anyone doubt that the Tsarneavs were responsible for killing and maiming dozens? Timothy Mcveigh?"
It's a little hard to ask him what he thinks about the Tsarneavs these days.
supreme court: guise the combination of drain-o and bug spray you used to kill someone is...unorthodox...we're going to need to review it so until then you might suspend executions. ...
Oklahoma: never fear! we've found that firing squads are extremely effective! executions can continue!
supreme court: jesus guys...no..thats not the point. the point is, you know, you at least make an attempt to reflect on the nature of capital punishment and the repercussions morally and financially of a system in
Oklahoma:Nitrogen gas! shall be used in a highly controlled and technological manner in order to...
supreme court: FFS guys....youre going to off people with the gas that car dealerships use to mark up lemons?
Oklahoma: The gun from Star Trek Into Darkness will henceforeth be legally permitted in the administration of justice! for this we will...
supreme court: ok...that one doesnt even exist...
Good people go to bed earlier.
But the blood in your brain will keep you alive another 5-7 seconds of agonizing pain as you watch your headless body slump to the floor. Not exactly humane.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Put them in jail instead.
It's cheaper and a wrongful conviction can be reversed.
The majority of countries no longer have the death penalty.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The problem with using anesthesia is that organizations (the largest of which is the EU) forbids selling anything used in executions. So states that use anesthetics to execute the condemned will find they may be then unable to purchase the same anesthetics for use in hospitals.
Which leads to an obvious question: Isn't the U.S. capable of producing its own anesthetics? At least the ones used for executions which should no longer be covered by patents?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Yes, that would be very noble.
It doesn't work the same as holding your breath.
When you breath a gas containing no oxygen, oxygen streams out of your blood, as it is lower oxygen than the blood, and that is how the blood 'knows' to dump oxygen.
This means that what's coming out of the lungs is largely deoxygenated blood, not oxygenated.
This rapidly causes unconsciousness - much faster than just holding your breath.
It's a not uncommon industrial accident.
You don't really notice it - there is no shortness of breath, you simply feel a bit woozy one breath, and then are unconscious the next, and the next breath may not happen.
You weren't breathing pure helium. You were breathing "balloon gas," which is a mixture of helium and normal, breathable room air. The oxygen in the mixture was keeping you conscious.
Helium is an expensive substance and you don't need pure helium in a balloon to give it lift. By cutting the helium with air, the balloon outfit is able to make their expensive resource last much longer.
I have had two friends overcome by nitrogen on two different occasions in industrial situations. Fortunately there were people to pull them out of the atmosphere and get them breathing again. In both cases there first words were along the lines of "What am I doing on the floor?"
Which leads to an obvious question: Isn't the U.S. capable of producing its own anesthetics? At least the ones used for executions which should no longer be covered by patents?
Sure they could, but there's basically no market for it.
The established European companies have the legitimate-medical-uses market sown up, so that just leaves the killing-people market, which is really damn small, so they'd never even make back their investment, much less make a profit on it.
It would be possible to whomp up a government-owned corporation or government division to do it and not care about the cost, but the free market mania that the Republicans running the states that still do executions subscribe to probably wouldn't allow that or even have it occur to them.
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Instructions unclear - accidentally ate the whole thing. Having dreamy thoughts about how big I am getting.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
People these days are looking for the perfect mix of humane and sanitary.
I don't think anyone cares about "humane and sanitary". The people that want it abolished, want it abolished completely. The people in favor, tend to think shooting or hanging are fine. So we have "humane and sanitary" as a compromise that nobody really wants.
the breathing reflex is based on CO2 . Breathing pure nitrogen would reduce CO2 so as to satisfy that mechanism , but not providing the O2 survival requires. O2 in the blood is used up quickly, that is why we need to breathe constantly.
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at what point will enough of the world forbid capital punishment will it become an "unusual" way of dealing with crime?
It is already unusual. There are only three main groups that still execute people:
1. Muslims
2. East Asians.
3. Americans.
This page has a map.
Oh please; they just realized how the drugs were being used? Decades of repeated, public use and some executive finally picked up a newspaper? Give me a break. What actually happened is that they periodically reevaluated the amount of money they made off sales versus the PR hit they took for making those sales and eventually the numbers tipped in a new direction.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The people in favor, tend to think shooting or hanging are fine.
This isn't entirely correct.
1) Hangings and firing squads aren't error-proof and that bothers some who favor the death penalty.
2) There is something to be said for sanitary: The condemned prisoner's family didn't do anything wrong. Denying them a decent-looking body to bury is something that the state should avoid if possible. However, if the only legal (as determined by the SCOTUS) methods of execution result in a body that needs a lot of cleanup by the undertaker, that's tough cookies for the family.
Having said all of this, I'm generally against the death penalty as it is applied in the United States:
* Too many US states allow people to be condemned under the "law of parties," "murder during the commission of another felony," and for murders by people with no previous convictions for crimes that could have gotten them long prison terms. In almost all if not all of these cases, life-without-parole is a much more civilized punishment than death.
* Too many US states also don't disallow the death penalty if there were mitigating circumstances like an IQ only slightly higher than that of a mentally retarded person, a person who is young or immature but legally an adult, a person who is under the undue influence of someone else, mild- to-moderate mental impairments that would clearly benefit from the help of a mental health professional but which do not rise to the level of legal insanity, and the like.
When a jury condemns someone to die, they are basically saying "we give up on you as a human being." I'm almost never willing to do this. In the few cases where I am, it says that I am less civilized than I would like to be.
Assuming the guilty person has no extenuating circumstances, I am willing to recognize my lack of civility and recommend a death sentence for the principal actors (i.e. ringleader, top-lieutenants, and if they were truly free agents, the trigger-men) for things like large-scale "crimes against humanity" (dare I invoke Godwin's Law?) and for premeditated murder for the purpose of corrupting justice, such as to kill or intimidate a witness in a criminal case or intimidate other police (the ones who weren't killed) into resigning or looking the other way. I can also see it for people who commit (or arrange for) a murder while serving a life-without-parole sentence or while "on the run" after escaping prison while they are serving a life-without-parole sentence, on the grounds that without the threat of the death penalty they would be "free" to murder under the theory that "if you are willing to do the time, you are free to do the crime."
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The Nitrogen (or any asphyxiation that doesn't involve the buildup of Carbon Dioxide) method involves turning off the brain's ability to feel pain as prelude to death.
Given the terrible fuckups that we see in executions recently, it's reasonable to assume that almost anything that can be screwed up, will be screwed up, and this one seems a lot simpler than some three needle solution using drugs you can't get made by anonymous compounding pharmacists you can't find with quality you can't test for administered by doctors that aren't trained. No, none of those things HAVE to happen, but they seem to keep happening.
This sort of execution method sidesteps those problems. But, why do we suspect it is painless? Mostly because people who recover from accidental exposure to Nitrogen generally report being utterly surprised.
In practice, it may be more humane to administer a sedative or even anesthesia beforehand. But acquiring those seems to be the problem in the first place: still, more options would likely be available than in the classic "three drug combination" of lethal injection, where an anesthetic (hopefully) dulls the pain, while a paralytic agent stops breathing (which causes pain) and a heart stopping agent stops the heart (which causes pain).
If they don't go this route, you'll likely see a condemned man struggling to hold his breath as long as he can, trying to avoid death, and eventually losing consciousness, inhaling, regaining consciousness for a moment to flail, and then dying. One thing that's missing from all the real life accounts is that almost everyone who gets into trouble with nitrogen or another oxygen displacing agent doesn't realize that they are in danger until it is too late or almost so, and as such the reports of painlessness are definitely flavored by that fact.
Nitrogen really is a good method. I learned about its use in this area when I read about 2 NASA(?) engineers who died right after a fuel tank was flushed with nitrogen. One walked into the middle of it for whatever reason and then collapsed, then the second went in to see what was wrong and he collapsed. They say it brings a bit of euphoria and then eternal sleep.
CO2 works fine too, but the hand flapping and increased respiration attempts aren't real pretty to watch (though worrying about the aesthetics of how you kill someone is, um, just fucking weird). CO also works just fine - no hand flapping or straining to breath, but it also has aesthetic "issues".
Note: I don't support state sanctioned murder - if for no other reason than the abysmal record the US has for justice - even when the condemned was actually guilty of the crime, the crime was arguably that of the state, not the condemned (homeowner shoots unarmed petty thief, petty thief that is not shot dead is convicted). I doubt there are many people outside the US that don't believe there is something extremely wrong with the self-appointed moral guardian of the world (life imprisonment for a joint, fines for giving out food, secret trade agreements that breach US sponsored International Human rights, etc, etc).
If you can't bear to kill your 'criminal' by ripping off their heads with a rope tied to the back of a F100 you're just putting lipstick on a pig and calling it pretty. And yes, there really are a large number of US 'citizens' that'd like (Facebook style) the F100 method (sadly it's not unique to the US), just look at the comments on /. from people cheering the idea of prison rape, or the human hemorrhoid that gets all excited at the idea of using liquid nitrogen and a hammer for state executions. On second thought - maybe state execution is the answer, just not for the people you put inside the cells of your prisons with the world's highest percentage of incarceration[*1].
Disclaimer: I spent part of my youth in Missouri (pronounced "misery") within sight of Monsanto - it's not Denmark that reeks of something seriously rotten.
[*1] I know.. (sigh), those that deny their ugly blood lust will point to statistically insignificant data from countries with populations of less than 100K, and simultaneously justify their own countries imprisonment rate, and their "right" to armed self-defense - whilst remaining blind to all the inherent contradictions. i.e. if your prison and justice system worked your 'citizens' wouldn't need guns, and you'd have the safest nation on earth. Roll on the triumph of optimism over experience like the Sherman tank of freedom, and whenever you lose a hand - double up.
But apparently our whole supply of it is made by one company in Germany, which hasdthreatened to withhold the entire US supply if it keeps being used for executions.
It's not just that they threatened to: it's flat out illegal for them under EU (and therefore German---since they ratified the treaty) law. They risk criminal sanctions for doing so.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you can't bear to kill your 'criminal' by ripping off their heads with a rope tied to the back of a F100 you're just putting lipstick on a pig and calling it pretty.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment. Even if you're against capital punishment you can still recognize the reality of the current situation and desire a better form of execution.
It's quite simple, if you yourself were to be executed which method would you think is more humane? CO2 buildup is an extremely painful way to die, not just merely "aesthetics." CO poisoning is as well.
In studies (google for them), nitrogen (or another inert gas) has been shown to be one of the most humane ways to kill any mammal.
I, in fact, hope this sets a precedent and that states move to nitrogen gas as the primary method of execution. At least then the innocent people we kill wouldn't have to suffer while it's done.