This definitly paints the execution as if it were cruel. But isn't there a lot of evidence that nitrogen hypoxia works be one of the most peaceful ways to die? Not that I works recommend watching it.
This definitly paints the execution as if it were cruel. But isn't there a lot of evidence that nitrogen hypoxia works be one of the most peaceful ways to die? Not that I works recommend watching it.
The most peaceful ways to die are probably things like an explosive device strapped to the head. If you get rid of the head fast the person probably won't even notice. Also probably far less...
The most peaceful ways to die are probably things like an explosive device strapped to the head. If you get rid of the head fast the person probably won't even notice. Also probably far less likely than modern methods to end up torturing a person in their last moments. Or like a guillotine but with a 1-ton-block that gets accelerated to crush the head, if a guillotine isn't good enough already.
Of course, people who are already pro-death-penalty probably care more about cleanliness and neatness and an appearance of peacefulness than they actually care about making it painless. Source: the circus of "humane" methods they keep trying to invent and failing instead of using basic but less pretty methods.
My comment might sound a little over-the-top. That's cause I'm strongly anti-execution (but not primarily for this reason).
Peaceful for the person being killed, but maybe somewhat traumatic for the staff that have to clean up. I feel like their suffering should be taken into account at least, or even more, than the...
explosive device strapped to the head
Peaceful for the person being killed, but maybe somewhat traumatic for the staff that have to clean up. I feel like their suffering should be taken into account at least, or even more, than the executed.
There's truth to that, but I see that as yet another reason to avoid executions entirely rather than a reason to partake in the circus. If you can't kill someone humanely without traumatising...
There's truth to that, but I see that as yet another reason to avoid executions entirely rather than a reason to partake in the circus. If you can't kill someone humanely without traumatising others and can't keep other people at peace without being inhumane then why do it at all?
Well, I don't necessarily support capital punishment due to a variety of factors such as inequity in sentencing and wrongful convictions, but if states are going to do it then we should try to do...
Well, I don't necessarily support capital punishment due to a variety of factors such as inequity in sentencing and wrongful convictions, but if states are going to do it then we should try to do them as best we can.
It's kind of similar to my anti-war stance. Sure, once you've pissed off a whole region of the world, stolen their natural resources, toppled their government, funded insurgents, sanctioned their...
It's kind of similar to my anti-war stance. Sure, once you've pissed off a whole region of the world, stolen their natural resources, toppled their government, funded insurgents, sanctioned their exports, and given them a reputation for being lower human beings then war might be inevitable. But you could also use all of the money budgeted for destabilizing the region to stabilize it instead. The problem of course is that the whole point was to destabilize that region, make them weaker, and avoid competition with them. When I say I am anti-war I mean we need to go back to the first steps and start doing the opposite. Maybe you will be forced into a violent conflict given the current state of the world. But what can the world look like 20 years into a campaign from the world superpowers to improve the quality of life of other countries?
Sorry bit of a tangent there. But if you actively tend to your population and get ahead of situations that will obviously lead to the creation of violent offenders then you won't even think to have a death penalty. Sure, some people could theoretically be innately evil and unfixable. But what about all of the people raised in poverty, by a drug addict, without a father, etc.? We can see the end result isn't going to be good, and we can see that from a mile away. The problem however is helping out the impoverished will cost money, and a lot of the people with money are intentionally throwing it around in ways that makes poor people worse off.
You have to be careful there. If you go too far down that line of logic you end up at prison abolitionism and that threatens a whole lot of people who rely on that cheap labor, those captive...
But if you actively tend to your population and get ahead of situations that will obviously lead to the creation of violent offenders then you won't even think to have a death penalty.
You have to be careful there. If you go too far down that line of logic you end up at prison abolitionism and that threatens a whole lot of people who rely on that cheap labor, those captive consumers, and that opportunity for prison gerrymandering. We can't just go around making the country better willy-nilly, we have to think of the consequences!
I think I share your stance on the death penalty, and I don’t have anything relevant to add to the conversation except that guillotine is far from instant. Medical reports from guillotine...
I think I share your stance on the death penalty, and I don’t have anything relevant to add to the conversation except that guillotine is far from instant. Medical reports from guillotine executions from about a century ago reveal that a person’s decapitated head is still responsive for maybe up to 30 seconds.
Responsive is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a situation like that when we're talking about such a unique scenario. There are a lot of severed nerves in the neck that have now lost homeostasis...
Responsive is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a situation like that when we're talking about such a unique scenario. There are a lot of severed nerves in the neck that have now lost homeostasis and feedback, and I don't think it's reasonable to infer from those reports that people are still conscious.
We know that about 10 seconds of restricted blood flow on an artery induces a loss of consciousness. We also know that big drops in blood pressure induce fainting, and decapitation results in a huge drop in pressure. So upper limit puts it at 10 seconds but it's more likely lower than that.
True, I definitely could have elaborated a bit more. From one of the reports I’ve seen, the severed head opens its eyes and makes eye contact (including pupil movement) with the doctor who said...
True, I definitely could have elaborated a bit more.
From one of the reports I’ve seen, the severed head opens its eyes and makes eye contact (including pupil movement) with the doctor who said the person’s name. It could be much simpler “sound stimulus triggers response of opening eyes” and the doctor could have been an unreliable narrator about locking eyes and pupil movement. But it fits with my pre-existing bias about “death” being a really weird concept with really fuzzy edges, as far as time and biology are concerned.
The state claims that the suffering was the result of the person holding their breath, which I suppose would trigger the CO2 reflex. I was wondering if it would be better to slowly evacuate the...
The state claims that the suffering was the result of the person holding their breath, which I suppose would trigger the CO2 reflex. I was wondering if it would be better to slowly evacuate the oxygen and CO2 from the room as a whole while replacing with nitrogen, to mitigate that.
It seems like fentanyl worked better, relative to this at least. The only concern was that at one point the subject's face turned red and they coughed.
I think a problem with nitrogen in unwilling participants is that they're always going to hold their breath, build up CO2, and then experience extreme discomfort from hypercapnia. This could also...
I think a problem with nitrogen in unwilling participants is that they're always going to hold their breath, build up CO2, and then experience extreme discomfort from hypercapnia. This could also be the case if the mask doesn't allow for the CO2 to escape and the person is rebreathing it as a result.
Anyone who has done fentanyl before, accidentally or purposefully, can tell you it's probably a pretty great way to go if done properly. You don't want to be puking or gagging, but the right dose of fentanyl can make you "fall out" immediately. Like quickly falling into a warm and restful sleep.
For sure, I’ve “done” fentanyl as part of surgery and it’s the way I’d like to go out. One minute I was conscious, the next minute I was in a new place and the surgery was finished.
For sure, I’ve “done” fentanyl as part of surgery and it’s the way I’d like to go out. One minute I was conscious, the next minute I was in a new place and the surgery was finished.
But that's how all general anaesthesia is. One moment I was joking with the staff and the next I was pulling off my gown in front of everybody because it was time to leave.
But that's how all general anaesthesia is. One moment I was joking with the staff and the next I was pulling off my gown in front of everybody because it was time to leave.
The issue is that medication manufacturers and anesthesiologists generally don't want to participate in executions. Whether because of bad PR or moral stances or both. So many methods that could...
The issue is that medication manufacturers and anesthesiologists generally don't want to participate in executions. Whether because of bad PR or moral stances or both. So many methods that could be humane - if we grant such a thing is even possible - are off the table.
Perhaps this is the biggest difference between using nitrogen asphyxiation for capital punishment instead of using it for sacing mice in the lab. The mice, as far as we know, do not have knowledge...
I think a problem with nitrogen in unwilling participants is that they're always going to hold their breath, build up CO2, and then experience extreme discomfort from hypercapnia.
Perhaps this is the biggest difference between using nitrogen asphyxiation for capital punishment instead of using it for sacing mice in the lab. The mice, as far as we know, do not have knowledge of their impending demise, so they do not try to beat the system and do fall out peacefully. Humans, with our attachment to our bodies, will cause ourselves suffering with our attempts to fight.
I'm trying to come up with a way to do this humanely, but I just keep coming up blank. For awhile I was thinking, if they did want a humane method, they could still use nitrogen. Place the...
I'm trying to come up with a way to do this humanely, but I just keep coming up blank. For awhile I was thinking, if they did want a humane method, they could still use nitrogen. Place the prisoner in an air-tight cell. Then just wait until they fall asleep. Once asleep, turn on the nitrogen gas. But then I thought, that then becomes its own form of torture. You'll have condemned prisoners stretching out their executions for days, fighting against the inevitable, trying to stay awake for as long as they possibly can. A firing squad is merciful in comparison.
I think one conclusion then is that there is no such thing as a humane execution. It's a fiction we've created to modernize an outdated and unnecessary practice.
I think one conclusion then is that there is no such thing as a humane execution. It's a fiction we've created to modernize an outdated and unnecessary practice.
I don't know if it can be called humane, but a bullet in the right place, or a guillatine or a tap on the head with a sledgehammer could be very quickly over.
I don't know if it can be called humane, but a bullet in the right place, or a guillatine or a tap on the head with a sledgehammer could be very quickly over.
That might be more painless, but overall it is not humane for everyone involved — the prisoner, the executioner, the victim, the family. I think it does something to a society to allow the state...
That might be more painless, but overall it is not humane for everyone involved — the prisoner, the executioner, the victim, the family. I think it does something to a society to allow the state to take a life like that, especially when our system for condemning someone is as fallible as it is. The whole practice, not just the final act, is inhumane.
I don't support the death penalty generally because it's not productive, it's not efficient, it doesn't necessarily fix anything or solve anything. I don't think it benefits society, it just...
I don't support the death penalty generally because it's not productive, it's not efficient, it doesn't necessarily fix anything or solve anything. I don't think it benefits society, it just enables and reinforces bloodlust.
I personally find the idea that death can't be reversed to be a somewhat weak argument, time can't be reversed either, though I understand why others feel that way. I just don't find it to be particularly more moral that a society can keep someone imprisoned for their entire life when in some instances they are innocent, than if they had killed them. In both instances the state stole that person's life. Yeah I understand that some people may only lose 20-30 years of their life and get out with 10-20 years left of life and some chump change for being wrongly imprisoned, if they even get that, but there's almost certainly a whole lot more people that never get their wrongful convictions overturned.
I'm sure many people would see it as twisted, but I find it's more responsible to view a life taken either way as equal, because it puts that much more importance on getting it right whether you plan on keeping them imprisoned for the rest of their life or killing them.
Me personally, if I was wrongfully convicted to life for something I didn't do, I'd rather have a swift death instead (though I realize the death penalty process as it is commonly today in the US is anything but swift). Dangling the slimmest of hope over my head that I might somehow eventually ever get it overturned but probability says I likely never will is its own form of torture. That's not even considering the state of US prisons and the conditions one has to live under all that time.
I don't think we're the ones to make that decision. It's easy to declare someone's life as not worth living, but the only ones who can really make that decision are those whose lives you're...
I'm sure many people would see it as twisted, but I find it's more responsible to view a life taken either way as equal, because it puts that much more importance on getting it right whether you plan on keeping them imprisoned for the rest of their life or killing them.
I don't think we're the ones to make that decision. It's easy to declare someone's life as not worth living, but the only ones who can really make that decision are those whose lives you're considering giving up. And you might even think that if you were in that position, you would prefer death.
But we have no need to speculate here; we can make actual observations. What we do know is that people on death row tend to fight to delay their execution for as long as possible. Even the man in this nitrogen execution fought against his fate literally with his last dying breath. He did not go quietly into that good night.
We see that people who are actually on death row continue to push for clemency and commutation of their sentence. They do this knowing full well the best they can hope for is an alternative sentence of life without parole. They're spending years, sometimes decades, on appeal, knowing that the best they can hope for is never getting out of jail again.
This shows that people, even those in prison for life, still find some value in their existence. And really that shouldn't be surprising; people have lived historically in all sorts of standards of living. A person in jail today will typically enjoy a material standard of living far beyond that of Medieval peasant, (though the peasant certainly had more freedom, even if bound to the land.) A person in jail today has access to better food, medicine, shelter, and accommodations than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. And those people found meaning. While prisoners lack freedom, slavery was also the norm through most of human history, and plenty of slaves, despite their horrible condition, did find some ways to bring meaning to their lives.
People in prison can find meaning. They can read, they can learn. They can get in physical shape. They can spend their days doing what they can to help and mentor others. If I committed some horrible act and were given a life sentence, I would try to find such a role as a mentor. Educate others on their rights and provide guidance, hopefully to prevent the others there from walking the same road I did. (Although, again, this is just the perspective of someone who hasn't served time, so this may be very naive.)
So, in summary, is it possible that if you were given a life sentence, you would actually prefer a quick execution? Possibly. But this contradicts the actual evidence we see before us. People actually on death row push for commutation of their sentence to life without parole, but there are very few people facing either life or death that are begging judges to give them the death penalty. It's easy to say you would prefer to die, but when you're actually in that situation, you may realize that your life, diminished though it may be, still has some purpose and is still worth living.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an oncologist. He said that most of his colleagues see people suffer and say that if it happened to them they would prefer to die quickly. But then,...
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an oncologist. He said that most of his colleagues see people suffer and say that if it happened to them they would prefer to die quickly. But then, when it does happen to them, they fight it as hard as they can. The survival instinct is strong.
Yeah, it reminds me of a saying I read somewhere. "You always die in the present." It's easy, when you're healthy, to say, "oh, I would certainly go for assisted suicide if I got a terminal...
Yeah, it reminds me of a saying I read somewhere. "You always die in the present." It's easy, when you're healthy, to say, "oh, I would certainly go for assisted suicide if I got a terminal diagnosis." But saying it, and actually doing it, are very different things. One is a deed for a nebulous far off hypothetical future. The other is a very real fact in the here and now. And people can get used to a lot; they can even get used to a lot of pain.
That's something I worry about in terms of dementia. I think I wouldn't want to live once my mind is gone. However, when do you make the call and go for assisted suicide? There may never actually be a point where you can consciously say, "this suffering is too much, I'm ready to go." My grandfather was like that; he suffered a long slow decline from Alzheimer's. He was a mathematician; he worked as a community college professor his whole career. He earned his very living with his mind. And that's what he slowly lost. By the time they finally had to put him in a home, it was only after several incidents of him being found wandering outside naked and filthy. I would never want to live like that.
But again, he never had a moment where things were clearly unbearable. In fact, he kept in good spirits the entire time, right up until he was so far gone he couldn't maintain consciousness. Towards the end, he had no idea who any of us were, but he was still clearly happy and always in a good mood. He reached a point where he, when he was well, would have been aghast about. But there was never a day where, if he had been interested in assisted suicide, that he could say, "I'm miserable, in unbearable pain, and ready to go."
For some terminal illnesses, that isn't a problem. If you have terminal bone cancer and your mind is fine, you can just wait until your pain is unbearable. You don't have to willingly give up any good or bearable days. But with mental maladies, by the time you are in a condition where life is unbearable, you may not have the facilities to recognize what a horrible situation you are in. And you will no longer have the capacity to give informed consent. If you want to use assisted suicide to avoid the worst effects of dementia, it means going for assisted suicide even when you still have some bearable time ahead of you.
It's the nature of being alive, you have a drive to continue staying alive almost no matter the circumstances. Of course almost no one wants to die in any given situation, even bad ones. It's...
So, in summary, is it possible that if you were given a life sentence, you would actually prefer a quick execution? Possibly. But this contradicts the actual evidence we see before us. People actually on death row push for commutation of their sentence to life without parole, but there are very few people facing either life or death that are begging judges to give them the death penalty. It's easy to say you would prefer to die, but when you're actually in that situation, you may realize that your life, diminished though it may be, still has some purpose and is still worth living.
It's the nature of being alive, you have a drive to continue staying alive almost no matter the circumstances.
Of course almost no one wants to die in any given situation, even bad ones. It's built into us over millions of years of evolution. That doesn't mean that for me personally, I can't recognize that rationally I can weigh factors and make a decision ahead of time without the survival instinct overriding rational thought. So even if I were ever given the misfortune of being in that situation and I was fighting to have my death penalty commuted, I view that as less valid than my prior wishes that were based on rational thought. It's more of a philosophical argument than anything else at that point because in practice you'd run into a different issue of determining when someone would be capable of preventing their own future revocation of consent, which is a whole different thing.
Just to be clear, I did specify that particular hypothetical was me personally, not to be confused with how anyone else would feel about that, so I am not trying to say that because I feel that way anyone else should.
Some of my arguments are also based on what I think my fellow citizens might actually find convincing. However, I think some people are completely broken with unregulated aggression and impulse...
Some of my arguments are also based on what I think my fellow citizens might actually find convincing. However, I think some people are completely broken with unregulated aggression and impulse control failure. Those people, if they could be accurately identified, I would happily execute, after they had committed atrocities, but only if identification could be certain.
I agree. I do appreciate the argument that the death penalty is bad simply because the justice system is fallible, and it is if nothing else easy to defend, but I find a little upsetting the...
I agree. I do appreciate the argument that the death penalty is bad simply because the justice system is fallible, and it is if nothing else easy to defend, but I find a little upsetting the implication is that it would be okay to kill people under some circumstances if we could have perfect confidence of their wrongdoing.
In your opinion, is human life infinitely valuable, in real monetary terms? Is every life worth every possible expense to preserve? If so, I'm happy to accept my infinite cash money from you...
In your opinion, is human life infinitely valuable, in real monetary terms? Is every life worth every possible expense to preserve?
If so, I'm happy to accept my infinite cash money from you whenever you're ready to cut that check.
If not, how much is a life worth? If someone has and will again harm the world or the people around them, how much cost should they be free to inflict on others? If you want to restrain or change them, how much money are you willing to spend restraining or changing them? We live in a world of limited resources, and democratic governments (at least theoretically) pool those shared resources for the benefit of their citizens. Every prisoner is a loss to society, because they have limited ability to contribute on top of the cost to society to manage their incarceration.
I'm personally strongly in favor of a much clearer focus on rehabilitation rather than incarceration, and a more robust social safety net to help people avoid ever needing to be in situations where they turn to crime. But for the people who will never be able to safely live among others without causing harm? If I had faith in the infallibility of the justice system? Give them the axe. There's lots of humans. Paying to keep someone in a box for 40 years because they can't ever be trusted out among others but also being unwilling to end their life seems like the worst of both worlds.
You seem to be unaware of the fact that the death penalty is actually more expensive than life imprisonment due to the extensive legal processes that it entails.
You seem to be unaware of the fact that the death penalty is actually more expensive than life imprisonment due to the extensive legal processes that it entails.
To be fair to their argument - which has a lot of other pretty big holes in it - the premise of their comment is if they had faith in the infallibility of the justice system. If the justice system...
To be fair to their argument - which has a lot of other pretty big holes in it - the premise of their comment is if they had faith in the infallibility of the justice system. If the justice system were infallible, you wouldn't need any appeals, which would save most of that money.
This is a difficult question to answer, because you're imposing a particular framing of the problem. You speak of 'real monetary terms', but money has no intrinsic worth. I don't espouse...
This is a difficult question to answer, because you're imposing a particular framing of the problem. You speak of 'real monetary terms', but money has no intrinsic worth. I don't espouse utilitarianism; I'm not interested in trying to come up with a single scale against which everything can be measured. I take it as a matter of policy that killing people is bad. Of course there is such a thing as compromise or sacrifice. I think sacrificing one's life for others' is noble. I think killing in self defence is probably justified. I could probably be convinced about assisted suicide. But things must be considered in context.
Paying to keep someone in a box for 40 years because they can't ever be trusted out among others but also being unwilling to end their life seems like the worst of both worlds.
Maybe we should do better by people than 'keeping them in a box'? I mean, we have social welfare programs for people who are unable to work or live independently. I think many people agree that, in many countries, such programs are not expansive enough. We should hope for as many people as possible to live lives that are as rich and fulfilling as possible. Is that different in the case of people for whom the reason they can't live independently is that, when they do, they end up raping or killing a lot of people? I mean, it seriously squicks me out—I would have extreme reservations about being friends with such a person, or even being in their vicinity—but I think an answer in the positive is simply retributionism.
If such people comprised a significant proportion of the population, then we would have serious problems to contend with—I seriously question the wisdom of any policy which advocates killing a significant proportion of one's population. In fact, it's a very small number of inmates who are on the death row, and so the cost of caring for them is, in the grand scheme of things, not very significant.
I won't say that human life is infinitely valuable, because I can think of too many counter examples. (E.g. What if they're in a persistent vegetative state, or in constant excruciating pain and...
I won't say that human life is infinitely valuable, because I can think of too many counter examples. (E.g. What if they're in a persistent vegetative state, or in constant excruciating pain and they want to die?), but I certainly don't think we should be going around killing people out of cheapness. (And just because I have that value doesn't mean that anyone owes you anything, even if we had it, unless you can show us how you're going to use it to save lives, and even then we would believe that the government owes you that money and taxes should be raised commensurately, I could go on but I won't.). We can pay for it by cutting costs to tank building, ending drug related incarcerations and treating drug offenses as the health issue that they are, reducing sentences on property crimes, reforming the justice system such that people aren't forced/manipulated into taking guilty pleas for reasons other than being guilty and prosecutors are not incentivized to convict as many people as possible which would commensurately lower the prison population, taking it out of police budgets, and a million other changes that would make society better in the process.
Norway spends about 3 times what America spends on housing prisoners, but their rates of crime and recidivism are substantially lower than ours. They have about 54 per 1000 people incarcerated, while the United States has 531. Assuming that we were 1/3 as successful as they were at reducing the need to incarcerate people, that would cover the cost. There are too many variables to determine if we could reduce our prison populations by that much or more, and what the other necessary safety nets would cost, but I absolutely do think that living in that world is infinitely valuable. Is one human life worth all of the money our government has? Maybe not. Are hundreds of thousands? Is making the entire country better worth all of that money? Of course it is. That's what we gave it to them for.
I don't support capital punishment, but with several countries having legalized assisted suicide it seems like a medically validated protocol exists. Additionally, opium overdose like with heroin...
I don't support capital punishment, but with several countries having legalized assisted suicide it seems like a medically validated protocol exists.
Additionally, opium overdose like with heroin seems like it would create a sense of calm euphoria followed by nothing. That's just from hearing things described by recovering addicts though.
The Hippocratic Oath situation is a little different for assisted suicide than the death penalty. There is actually a vigorous debate in the medical ethics community around the ethics of doctors...
The Hippocratic Oath situation is a little different for assisted suicide than the death penalty. There is actually a vigorous debate in the medical ethics community around the ethics of doctors helping with assisted suicide. There, it's a lot more ambiguous, because with assisted suicide, doctors are relieving pain. A good argument can be made that helping someone avoid a doomed fight against a horrible terminal illness is completely compatible with "do no harm." And ultimately, consent is the big one. In assisted suicide, doctors themselves don't perform the actual killing, the patient does. They set up the equipment and give the person a button to get the chemicals flowing; or they prepare a lethal concoction the person can drink. It's entirely voluntary and only given to people of sound mind who can give full informed consent. It's the exact opposite of an execution, given to an unwilling individual, who is healthy and still has years of good life ahead of them. Now, some, perhaps most, doctors still want nothing to do with assisted suicide, and will refuse to participate in it out of principle. They don't want to get anywhere near the moral grey line, and fair enough. But executions? As far as the Hippocratic Oath goes, it's unambiguous. It is an unambiguous violation of the Hippocratic Oath for a doctor to participate in an execution. They would likely lose their medical license if they did so.
I didn't suggest that doctors would perform the execution, but that states could simply use the same legally approved method as that which is used in assisted suicide. Edit: to be clear, I'm not...
I didn't suggest that doctors would perform the execution, but that states could simply use the same legally approved method as that which is used in assisted suicide.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying the department of corrections would piggyback on the legal authority; that would require a separate legislative act. But rather, we would expect that a medical protocol would minimize harm; thus using the same protocol authorized under appropriate legislative action would in theory result in less suffering than current methods.
Those protocols you're mentioning require doctors be involved. Some random schlub can't just set up an assisted suicide clinic in their basement. There are very strict standards requiring the...
Those protocols you're mentioning require doctors be involved. Some random schlub can't just set up an assisted suicide clinic in their basement. There are very strict standards requiring the participation of licensed doctors, therapists, etc. The department of prisons can't just adopt the assisted suicide protocols, as those protocols require doctors.
This is important because no court would approve of just having prison wardens carry just carry out the assisted suicide protocol; it would be cruel and unusual punishment.
But really, the bigger problem is just getting the fentanyl. The whole reason these states are looking into nitrogen as an option is that drug makers refuse to sell them drugs for lethal injections. They would do the same for fentanyl. And while states could try to use fentanyl seized from drug busts, no court would approve that. Executing people with medications of unknown provenance, of unknown quality, made in some illegal drug lab? That is beyond a shadow of a doubt cruel and unusual punishment. Courts do not accept, "well, he's going to die anyway," as an excuse for shoddy and potentially torturous execution methods.
Fentanyl would actually be a great execution method, but just getting it would be the problem. And the courts wouldn't accept adopting an assisted suicide protocol, as the participation of a licensed doctor, a licensed therapist, and the dying person themselves are all inseparable parts of that protocol. Wardens larping as doctors are not capable legally of performing the same protocol.
I suppose I disagree. Most states have their legislature create a law establishing the authority to use specific methods. Alabama could take the procedure using a nitrogen chamber, or fentanyl, or...
I suppose I disagree. Most states have their legislature create a law establishing the authority to use specific methods. Alabama could take the procedure using a nitrogen chamber, or fentanyl, or anything else, and create the statutory authority for the department of corrections to use it.
Lethal injection already requires the use of drugs and medical equipment, not by doctors, and the courts consistently uphold the statutory authority to do so granted by the legislature.
I sit on a medical IRB and know quite well that no doctor would involve themselves in executions. But there is nothing stopping the use of the same methods used to be established by legislative acts, other than fears of implying past executions were cruel or unusual.
Here is a NYT article discussing some of the activities around authorizing execution methods in different states and some excerpts.
In general, states prefer to tinker with their existing execution protocols rather than try something new, said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University Law School. “States will stick to the same method as long as they possibly can, because if they change, they’re conceding that there’s been a problem,” she said.
Even states that have considered less common methods of capital punishment have been hesitant to use them. In 2021, the South Carolina legislature authorized execution by electric chair or firing squad but then passed a law shielding the identities of drug companies and officials involved in executions from public view, making it easier to obtain the needed drugs. The state then announced that it was prepared to resume lethal injections.
In 2018, the director of the Oklahoma prison system announced that the state would start using nitrogen gas, complaining that he had spent his time in office on a “mad hunt” for lethal injection drugs that involved having to converse with “seedy individuals” and make calls to the “back streets of the Indian subcontinent.”
Like seemingly everyone else, I'm against the death penalty, but you could combine that with a choice: Stay in prison for as long as you like and get the nitrogen routine when you're ready. You...
Like seemingly everyone else, I'm against the death penalty, but you could combine that with a choice: Stay in prison for as long as you like and get the nitrogen routine when you're ready. You could even combine that with anesthesia.
But it probably won't satisfy the people who are in favor of the death penalty because murderers would get a nicer death than everyone else. We need to find better ways to deal with our mortality overall.
Deceive the convicted. Tell them the nitrogen is in the breathing mask supplied in their airtight room. Then just quietly flood the room with nitrogen. Of course, the difficult part is keeping up...
Deceive the convicted. Tell them the nitrogen is in the breathing mask supplied in their airtight room. Then just quietly flood the room with nitrogen. Of course, the difficult part is keeping up the farce once those people watching it start talking. As in, deceiving the 1st convict is trivial, deceiving the 10th not so much.
Or, vacuum chamber. I'm reminded of SmarterEveryDay's ride in a vacuum chamber. Granted, he was in a safe environment, so much more relaxed and comfortable, but he was basically out of his mind without knowing he was out of his mind. And no way of keeping the air in the lungs under those circumstances, I think, so fighting it and thus causing pain to yourself doesn't actually help at all.
The problem with fentanyl is getting it. Actual pharmaceutical companies have been refusing to sell drugs to states that practice the death penalty. This is the entire reason they were trying the...
The problem with fentanyl is getting it. Actual pharmaceutical companies have been refusing to sell drugs to states that practice the death penalty. This is the entire reason they were trying the nitrogen execution in the first place. No legitimate pharma company is going to sell you fentanyl for executions. And they might refuse to sell fentanyl at all to the state prison agency, thus actually endangering the healthcare of living prisoners.
Sure, the state has plenty of fentanyl they've captured from drug busts, but that's useless for this purpose. First, most of that is being held as evidence. Taking bits of it just messes with the provenance of those drugs and can hurt the state on convictions and appeals. Second, more crucially, no court would approve of it. You're talking fentanyl made in an illicit drug lab somewhere. It hardly meets even the most basic standards of drug certification and FDA approval. You have no idea how pure it is, what might be in it, etc. Sure, the state could use some of the seized fentanyl, then try and get it somehow tested and verified safe. However, then you need the help of a big outside lab for that, and you start running into problems finding people who are trained to do that work that will be willing to do it. If they were anyone in the medical field, such testing might violate he Hippocratic Oath. There's a reason actual doctors don't participate in executions.
Ultimately, fentanyl has the same problem as all other pharmaceutical methods of execution have, just getting a hold of the stuff. From the state's perspective, the biggest advantage of a nitrogen execution is that the materials are trivial to acquire. You can get nitrogen at any welding or dive shop. Or if worst comes to worst, the state can just build a small atmospheric nitrogen concentration machine right on the prison grounds. There's zero chance of anyone cutting off the state's nitrogen supply; it's literally 3/4 of the atmosphere. You just need some simple pumps and cooling/distillation process to concentrate the atmospheric nitrogen to a level where breathing it is fatal. You don't even have to worry as much about plaintiffs challenging it on grounds of the quality of death agent; you can't argue cruel and unusual punishment based on the prospect of impurities. If the nitrogen being used in an execution is just concentrated from the atmosphere, then there's nothing the condemned prisoner is breathing that those watching aren't. They're just breathing the same air with the oxygen removed.
Maybe lowering thr pressure in the room would be better? I've seen videos of pilot training where they very quickly become so loopy that they don't even get what's happening. Like one where the...
Maybe lowering thr pressure in the room would be better? I've seen videos of pilot training where they very quickly become so loopy that they don't even get what's happening. Like one where the trainer was telling the person they needed to secure their mask again or they would lose consciousness and die, but they were just laughing like it was a joke.
That's what I've read as well, that it is generally seen as painless and peaceful, but there are a variety of factors to account for. He was wearing a mask, which maybe others are more...
That's what I've read as well, that it is generally seen as painless and peaceful, but there are a variety of factors to account for.
He was wearing a mask, which maybe others are more knowledgeable about than I am on these matters, but a person isn't just inhaling nitrogen, they're exhaling carbon dioxide initially. Meaning there would need to be a way for the carbon dioxide to be moved away to avoid being mixed in with the nitrogen. Perhaps with sufficient nitrogen intake maybe that isn't supposed to matter, I have no idea. My understanding is that excessive carbon dioxide would lead to someone feeling like they're not able to breathe and possibly lead to what the witnesses describe.
I think some other article I read had gotten a quote from a guy who had invented a "suicide pod" that used nitrogen, and that guy was seemingly a little concerned at least about the usage of a mask but the statements they got from the guy were a little light on details. The "suicide pod" that he invented would in theory limit the risk of carbon dioxide inhalation because there would be more room for the gas to disperse, which is where I'm not sure if the mask has ways of addressing.
From Internet Theoreticians I heard that body positioning is also an issue. Didn't watch the video and don't want to, but I think the idea is that the head should be elevated so that CO2 flows...
From Internet Theoreticians I heard that body positioning is also an issue.
Didn't watch the video and don't want to, but I think the idea is that the head should be elevated so that CO2 flows down when exhaling so that the person is inhaling pure nitrogen.
The body doesn't know there's anything wrong with breathing in nitrogen, we do it all the time, just in smaller doses (70% or something of what we breathe in is nitrogen).
CO2 on the other hand will cause an instant panic reaction because that's bad and the body knows it.
If I got this right, a normal oxygen mask has holes to let CO2 and excess O2 out and let air in to mix with the oxygen. If they were to remove those holes without realizing their function of...
If I got this right, a normal oxygen mask has holes to let CO2 and excess O2 out and let air in to mix with the oxygen. If they were to remove those holes without realizing their function of removing CO2 then CO2 would have no way to escape. I saw a picture of the mask, but it didn't show enough to see how it works.
Yeah, the suicide pod would pool CO2 at your feet and you'd pass long before it piled up high enough to affect you.
It is. The body's receptors aren't for lack of oxygen, but overabundance of CO2. There are actually several possible gasses that can be used to do this - it was a common cause of death in mines...
It is. The body's receptors aren't for lack of oxygen, but overabundance of CO2. There are actually several possible gasses that can be used to do this - it was a common cause of death in mines and tunneling when stumbling on pockets of trapped gas - but nitrogen is common, readily available, and not otherwise potentially dangerous.
This definitly paints the execution as if it were cruel. But isn't there a lot of evidence that nitrogen hypoxia works be one of the most peaceful ways to die? Not that I works recommend watching it.
The most peaceful ways to die are probably things like an explosive device strapped to the head. If you get rid of the head fast the person probably won't even notice. Also probably far less likely than modern methods to end up torturing a person in their last moments. Or like a guillotine but with a 1-ton-block that gets accelerated to crush the head, if a guillotine isn't good enough already.
Of course, people who are already pro-death-penalty probably care more about cleanliness and neatness and an appearance of peacefulness than they actually care about making it painless. Source: the circus of "humane" methods they keep trying to invent and failing instead of using basic but less pretty methods.
My comment might sound a little over-the-top. That's cause I'm strongly anti-execution (but not primarily for this reason).
Peaceful for the person being killed, but maybe somewhat traumatic for the staff that have to clean up. I feel like their suffering should be taken into account at least, or even more, than the executed.
There's truth to that, but I see that as yet another reason to avoid executions entirely rather than a reason to partake in the circus. If you can't kill someone humanely without traumatising others and can't keep other people at peace without being inhumane then why do it at all?
Well, I don't necessarily support capital punishment due to a variety of factors such as inequity in sentencing and wrongful convictions, but if states are going to do it then we should try to do them as best we can.
It's kind of similar to my anti-war stance. Sure, once you've pissed off a whole region of the world, stolen their natural resources, toppled their government, funded insurgents, sanctioned their exports, and given them a reputation for being lower human beings then war might be inevitable. But you could also use all of the money budgeted for destabilizing the region to stabilize it instead. The problem of course is that the whole point was to destabilize that region, make them weaker, and avoid competition with them. When I say I am anti-war I mean we need to go back to the first steps and start doing the opposite. Maybe you will be forced into a violent conflict given the current state of the world. But what can the world look like 20 years into a campaign from the world superpowers to improve the quality of life of other countries?
Sorry bit of a tangent there. But if you actively tend to your population and get ahead of situations that will obviously lead to the creation of violent offenders then you won't even think to have a death penalty. Sure, some people could theoretically be innately evil and unfixable. But what about all of the people raised in poverty, by a drug addict, without a father, etc.? We can see the end result isn't going to be good, and we can see that from a mile away. The problem however is helping out the impoverished will cost money, and a lot of the people with money are intentionally throwing it around in ways that makes poor people worse off.
You have to be careful there. If you go too far down that line of logic you end up at prison abolitionism and that threatens a whole lot of people who rely on that cheap labor, those captive consumers, and that opportunity for prison gerrymandering. We can't just go around making the country better willy-nilly, we have to think of the consequences!
Your comment reminded me of this ol' Onion piece
I think I share your stance on the death penalty, and I don’t have anything relevant to add to the conversation except that guillotine is far from instant. Medical reports from guillotine executions from about a century ago reveal that a person’s decapitated head is still responsive for maybe up to 30 seconds.
Responsive is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a situation like that when we're talking about such a unique scenario. There are a lot of severed nerves in the neck that have now lost homeostasis and feedback, and I don't think it's reasonable to infer from those reports that people are still conscious.
We know that about 10 seconds of restricted blood flow on an artery induces a loss of consciousness. We also know that big drops in blood pressure induce fainting, and decapitation results in a huge drop in pressure. So upper limit puts it at 10 seconds but it's more likely lower than that.
True, I definitely could have elaborated a bit more.
From one of the reports I’ve seen, the severed head opens its eyes and makes eye contact (including pupil movement) with the doctor who said the person’s name. It could be much simpler “sound stimulus triggers response of opening eyes” and the doctor could have been an unreliable narrator about locking eyes and pupil movement. But it fits with my pre-existing bias about “death” being a really weird concept with really fuzzy edges, as far as time and biology are concerned.
The state claims that the suffering was the result of the person holding their breath, which I suppose would trigger the CO2 reflex. I was wondering if it would be better to slowly evacuate the oxygen and CO2 from the room as a whole while replacing with nitrogen, to mitigate that.
It seems like fentanyl worked better, relative to this at least. The only concern was that at one point the subject's face turned red and they coughed.
I think a problem with nitrogen in unwilling participants is that they're always going to hold their breath, build up CO2, and then experience extreme discomfort from hypercapnia. This could also be the case if the mask doesn't allow for the CO2 to escape and the person is rebreathing it as a result.
Anyone who has done fentanyl before, accidentally or purposefully, can tell you it's probably a pretty great way to go if done properly. You don't want to be puking or gagging, but the right dose of fentanyl can make you "fall out" immediately. Like quickly falling into a warm and restful sleep.
For sure, I’ve “done” fentanyl as part of surgery and it’s the way I’d like to go out. One minute I was conscious, the next minute I was in a new place and the surgery was finished.
But that's how all general anaesthesia is. One moment I was joking with the staff and the next I was pulling off my gown in front of everybody because it was time to leave.
And then three hours later you woke up in the recovery room all groggy and disoriented.
Or maybe that's just how I do general anesthesia.
The issue is that medication manufacturers and anesthesiologists generally don't want to participate in executions. Whether because of bad PR or moral stances or both. So many methods that could be humane - if we grant such a thing is even possible - are off the table.
Perhaps this is the biggest difference between using nitrogen asphyxiation for capital punishment instead of using it for sacing mice in the lab. The mice, as far as we know, do not have knowledge of their impending demise, so they do not try to beat the system and do fall out peacefully. Humans, with our attachment to our bodies, will cause ourselves suffering with our attempts to fight.
I'm trying to come up with a way to do this humanely, but I just keep coming up blank. For awhile I was thinking, if they did want a humane method, they could still use nitrogen. Place the prisoner in an air-tight cell. Then just wait until they fall asleep. Once asleep, turn on the nitrogen gas. But then I thought, that then becomes its own form of torture. You'll have condemned prisoners stretching out their executions for days, fighting against the inevitable, trying to stay awake for as long as they possibly can. A firing squad is merciful in comparison.
I think one conclusion then is that there is no such thing as a humane execution. It's a fiction we've created to modernize an outdated and unnecessary practice.
I don't know if it can be called humane, but a bullet in the right place, or a guillatine or a tap on the head with a sledgehammer could be very quickly over.
That might be more painless, but overall it is not humane for everyone involved — the prisoner, the executioner, the victim, the family. I think it does something to a society to allow the state to take a life like that, especially when our system for condemning someone is as fallible as it is. The whole practice, not just the final act, is inhumane.
I am personally against the death penalty because charging mistakes are made and death can't be reversed.
I don't support the death penalty generally because it's not productive, it's not efficient, it doesn't necessarily fix anything or solve anything. I don't think it benefits society, it just enables and reinforces bloodlust.
I personally find the idea that death can't be reversed to be a somewhat weak argument, time can't be reversed either, though I understand why others feel that way. I just don't find it to be particularly more moral that a society can keep someone imprisoned for their entire life when in some instances they are innocent, than if they had killed them. In both instances the state stole that person's life. Yeah I understand that some people may only lose 20-30 years of their life and get out with 10-20 years left of life and some chump change for being wrongly imprisoned, if they even get that, but there's almost certainly a whole lot more people that never get their wrongful convictions overturned.
I'm sure many people would see it as twisted, but I find it's more responsible to view a life taken either way as equal, because it puts that much more importance on getting it right whether you plan on keeping them imprisoned for the rest of their life or killing them.
Me personally, if I was wrongfully convicted to life for something I didn't do, I'd rather have a swift death instead (though I realize the death penalty process as it is commonly today in the US is anything but swift). Dangling the slimmest of hope over my head that I might somehow eventually ever get it overturned but probability says I likely never will is its own form of torture. That's not even considering the state of US prisons and the conditions one has to live under all that time.
I don't think we're the ones to make that decision. It's easy to declare someone's life as not worth living, but the only ones who can really make that decision are those whose lives you're considering giving up. And you might even think that if you were in that position, you would prefer death.
But we have no need to speculate here; we can make actual observations. What we do know is that people on death row tend to fight to delay their execution for as long as possible. Even the man in this nitrogen execution fought against his fate literally with his last dying breath. He did not go quietly into that good night.
We see that people who are actually on death row continue to push for clemency and commutation of their sentence. They do this knowing full well the best they can hope for is an alternative sentence of life without parole. They're spending years, sometimes decades, on appeal, knowing that the best they can hope for is never getting out of jail again.
This shows that people, even those in prison for life, still find some value in their existence. And really that shouldn't be surprising; people have lived historically in all sorts of standards of living. A person in jail today will typically enjoy a material standard of living far beyond that of Medieval peasant, (though the peasant certainly had more freedom, even if bound to the land.) A person in jail today has access to better food, medicine, shelter, and accommodations than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. And those people found meaning. While prisoners lack freedom, slavery was also the norm through most of human history, and plenty of slaves, despite their horrible condition, did find some ways to bring meaning to their lives.
People in prison can find meaning. They can read, they can learn. They can get in physical shape. They can spend their days doing what they can to help and mentor others. If I committed some horrible act and were given a life sentence, I would try to find such a role as a mentor. Educate others on their rights and provide guidance, hopefully to prevent the others there from walking the same road I did. (Although, again, this is just the perspective of someone who hasn't served time, so this may be very naive.)
So, in summary, is it possible that if you were given a life sentence, you would actually prefer a quick execution? Possibly. But this contradicts the actual evidence we see before us. People actually on death row push for commutation of their sentence to life without parole, but there are very few people facing either life or death that are begging judges to give them the death penalty. It's easy to say you would prefer to die, but when you're actually in that situation, you may realize that your life, diminished though it may be, still has some purpose and is still worth living.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an oncologist. He said that most of his colleagues see people suffer and say that if it happened to them they would prefer to die quickly. But then, when it does happen to them, they fight it as hard as they can. The survival instinct is strong.
Yeah, it reminds me of a saying I read somewhere. "You always die in the present." It's easy, when you're healthy, to say, "oh, I would certainly go for assisted suicide if I got a terminal diagnosis." But saying it, and actually doing it, are very different things. One is a deed for a nebulous far off hypothetical future. The other is a very real fact in the here and now. And people can get used to a lot; they can even get used to a lot of pain.
That's something I worry about in terms of dementia. I think I wouldn't want to live once my mind is gone. However, when do you make the call and go for assisted suicide? There may never actually be a point where you can consciously say, "this suffering is too much, I'm ready to go." My grandfather was like that; he suffered a long slow decline from Alzheimer's. He was a mathematician; he worked as a community college professor his whole career. He earned his very living with his mind. And that's what he slowly lost. By the time they finally had to put him in a home, it was only after several incidents of him being found wandering outside naked and filthy. I would never want to live like that.
But again, he never had a moment where things were clearly unbearable. In fact, he kept in good spirits the entire time, right up until he was so far gone he couldn't maintain consciousness. Towards the end, he had no idea who any of us were, but he was still clearly happy and always in a good mood. He reached a point where he, when he was well, would have been aghast about. But there was never a day where, if he had been interested in assisted suicide, that he could say, "I'm miserable, in unbearable pain, and ready to go."
For some terminal illnesses, that isn't a problem. If you have terminal bone cancer and your mind is fine, you can just wait until your pain is unbearable. You don't have to willingly give up any good or bearable days. But with mental maladies, by the time you are in a condition where life is unbearable, you may not have the facilities to recognize what a horrible situation you are in. And you will no longer have the capacity to give informed consent. If you want to use assisted suicide to avoid the worst effects of dementia, it means going for assisted suicide even when you still have some bearable time ahead of you.
It's the nature of being alive, you have a drive to continue staying alive almost no matter the circumstances.
Of course almost no one wants to die in any given situation, even bad ones. It's built into us over millions of years of evolution. That doesn't mean that for me personally, I can't recognize that rationally I can weigh factors and make a decision ahead of time without the survival instinct overriding rational thought. So even if I were ever given the misfortune of being in that situation and I was fighting to have my death penalty commuted, I view that as less valid than my prior wishes that were based on rational thought. It's more of a philosophical argument than anything else at that point because in practice you'd run into a different issue of determining when someone would be capable of preventing their own future revocation of consent, which is a whole different thing.
Just to be clear, I did specify that particular hypothetical was me personally, not to be confused with how anyone else would feel about that, so I am not trying to say that because I feel that way anyone else should.
Some of my arguments are also based on what I think my fellow citizens might actually find convincing. However, I think some people are completely broken with unregulated aggression and impulse control failure. Those people, if they could be accurately identified, I would happily execute, after they had committed atrocities, but only if identification could be certain.
I agree. I do appreciate the argument that the death penalty is bad simply because the justice system is fallible, and it is if nothing else easy to defend, but I find a little upsetting the implication is that it would be okay to kill people under some circumstances if we could have perfect confidence of their wrongdoing.
In your opinion, is human life infinitely valuable, in real monetary terms? Is every life worth every possible expense to preserve?
If so, I'm happy to accept my infinite cash money from you whenever you're ready to cut that check.
If not, how much is a life worth? If someone has and will again harm the world or the people around them, how much cost should they be free to inflict on others? If you want to restrain or change them, how much money are you willing to spend restraining or changing them? We live in a world of limited resources, and democratic governments (at least theoretically) pool those shared resources for the benefit of their citizens. Every prisoner is a loss to society, because they have limited ability to contribute on top of the cost to society to manage their incarceration.
I'm personally strongly in favor of a much clearer focus on rehabilitation rather than incarceration, and a more robust social safety net to help people avoid ever needing to be in situations where they turn to crime. But for the people who will never be able to safely live among others without causing harm? If I had faith in the infallibility of the justice system? Give them the axe. There's lots of humans. Paying to keep someone in a box for 40 years because they can't ever be trusted out among others but also being unwilling to end their life seems like the worst of both worlds.
You seem to be unaware of the fact that the death penalty is actually more expensive than life imprisonment due to the extensive legal processes that it entails.
To be fair to their argument - which has a lot of other pretty big holes in it - the premise of their comment is if they had faith in the infallibility of the justice system. If the justice system were infallible, you wouldn't need any appeals, which would save most of that money.
This is a difficult question to answer, because you're imposing a particular framing of the problem. You speak of 'real monetary terms', but money has no intrinsic worth. I don't espouse utilitarianism; I'm not interested in trying to come up with a single scale against which everything can be measured. I take it as a matter of policy that killing people is bad. Of course there is such a thing as compromise or sacrifice. I think sacrificing one's life for others' is noble. I think killing in self defence is probably justified. I could probably be convinced about assisted suicide. But things must be considered in context.
Maybe we should do better by people than 'keeping them in a box'? I mean, we have social welfare programs for people who are unable to work or live independently. I think many people agree that, in many countries, such programs are not expansive enough. We should hope for as many people as possible to live lives that are as rich and fulfilling as possible. Is that different in the case of people for whom the reason they can't live independently is that, when they do, they end up raping or killing a lot of people? I mean, it seriously squicks me out—I would have extreme reservations about being friends with such a person, or even being in their vicinity—but I think an answer in the positive is simply retributionism.
If such people comprised a significant proportion of the population, then we would have serious problems to contend with—I seriously question the wisdom of any policy which advocates killing a significant proportion of one's population. In fact, it's a very small number of inmates who are on the death row, and so the cost of caring for them is, in the grand scheme of things, not very significant.
I won't say that human life is infinitely valuable, because I can think of too many counter examples. (E.g. What if they're in a persistent vegetative state, or in constant excruciating pain and they want to die?), but I certainly don't think we should be going around killing people out of cheapness. (And just because I have that value doesn't mean that anyone owes you anything, even if we had it, unless you can show us how you're going to use it to save lives, and even then we would believe that the government owes you that money and taxes should be raised commensurately, I could go on but I won't.). We can pay for it by cutting costs to tank building, ending drug related incarcerations and treating drug offenses as the health issue that they are, reducing sentences on property crimes, reforming the justice system such that people aren't forced/manipulated into taking guilty pleas for reasons other than being guilty and prosecutors are not incentivized to convict as many people as possible which would commensurately lower the prison population, taking it out of police budgets, and a million other changes that would make society better in the process.
Norway spends about 3 times what America spends on housing prisoners, but their rates of crime and recidivism are substantially lower than ours. They have about 54 per 1000 people incarcerated, while the United States has 531. Assuming that we were 1/3 as successful as they were at reducing the need to incarcerate people, that would cover the cost. There are too many variables to determine if we could reduce our prison populations by that much or more, and what the other necessary safety nets would cost, but I absolutely do think that living in that world is infinitely valuable. Is one human life worth all of the money our government has? Maybe not. Are hundreds of thousands? Is making the entire country better worth all of that money? Of course it is. That's what we gave it to them for.
Guillotine execution is far from instant, apparently guillotine victims’ heads can still be responsive for up to 30 seconds after decapitation.
30 seconds beats however many minutes the nitrogen process took. But I take your point.
I don't support capital punishment, but with several countries having legalized assisted suicide it seems like a medically validated protocol exists.
Additionally, opium overdose like with heroin seems like it would create a sense of calm euphoria followed by nothing. That's just from hearing things described by recovering addicts though.
The Hippocratic Oath situation is a little different for assisted suicide than the death penalty. There is actually a vigorous debate in the medical ethics community around the ethics of doctors helping with assisted suicide. There, it's a lot more ambiguous, because with assisted suicide, doctors are relieving pain. A good argument can be made that helping someone avoid a doomed fight against a horrible terminal illness is completely compatible with "do no harm." And ultimately, consent is the big one. In assisted suicide, doctors themselves don't perform the actual killing, the patient does. They set up the equipment and give the person a button to get the chemicals flowing; or they prepare a lethal concoction the person can drink. It's entirely voluntary and only given to people of sound mind who can give full informed consent. It's the exact opposite of an execution, given to an unwilling individual, who is healthy and still has years of good life ahead of them. Now, some, perhaps most, doctors still want nothing to do with assisted suicide, and will refuse to participate in it out of principle. They don't want to get anywhere near the moral grey line, and fair enough. But executions? As far as the Hippocratic Oath goes, it's unambiguous. It is an unambiguous violation of the Hippocratic Oath for a doctor to participate in an execution. They would likely lose their medical license if they did so.
I didn't suggest that doctors would perform the execution, but that states could simply use the same legally approved method as that which is used in assisted suicide.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying the department of corrections would piggyback on the legal authority; that would require a separate legislative act. But rather, we would expect that a medical protocol would minimize harm; thus using the same protocol authorized under appropriate legislative action would in theory result in less suffering than current methods.
Those protocols you're mentioning require doctors be involved. Some random schlub can't just set up an assisted suicide clinic in their basement. There are very strict standards requiring the participation of licensed doctors, therapists, etc. The department of prisons can't just adopt the assisted suicide protocols, as those protocols require doctors.
This is important because no court would approve of just having prison wardens carry just carry out the assisted suicide protocol; it would be cruel and unusual punishment.
But really, the bigger problem is just getting the fentanyl. The whole reason these states are looking into nitrogen as an option is that drug makers refuse to sell them drugs for lethal injections. They would do the same for fentanyl. And while states could try to use fentanyl seized from drug busts, no court would approve that. Executing people with medications of unknown provenance, of unknown quality, made in some illegal drug lab? That is beyond a shadow of a doubt cruel and unusual punishment. Courts do not accept, "well, he's going to die anyway," as an excuse for shoddy and potentially torturous execution methods.
Fentanyl would actually be a great execution method, but just getting it would be the problem. And the courts wouldn't accept adopting an assisted suicide protocol, as the participation of a licensed doctor, a licensed therapist, and the dying person themselves are all inseparable parts of that protocol. Wardens larping as doctors are not capable legally of performing the same protocol.
I suppose I disagree. Most states have their legislature create a law establishing the authority to use specific methods. Alabama could take the procedure using a nitrogen chamber, or fentanyl, or anything else, and create the statutory authority for the department of corrections to use it.
Lethal injection already requires the use of drugs and medical equipment, not by doctors, and the courts consistently uphold the statutory authority to do so granted by the legislature.
I sit on a medical IRB and know quite well that no doctor would involve themselves in executions. But there is nothing stopping the use of the same methods used to be established by legislative acts, other than fears of implying past executions were cruel or unusual.
Here is a NYT article discussing some of the activities around authorizing execution methods in different states and some excerpts.
Alabama Hails Nitrogen Gas Execution, a New Attempt to Address an Old Challenge
Like seemingly everyone else, I'm against the death penalty, but you could combine that with a choice: Stay in prison for as long as you like and get the nitrogen routine when you're ready. You could even combine that with anesthesia.
But it probably won't satisfy the people who are in favor of the death penalty because murderers would get a nicer death than everyone else. We need to find better ways to deal with our mortality overall.
Deceive the convicted. Tell them the nitrogen is in the breathing mask supplied in their airtight room. Then just quietly flood the room with nitrogen. Of course, the difficult part is keeping up the farce once those people watching it start talking. As in, deceiving the 1st convict is trivial, deceiving the 10th not so much.
Or, vacuum chamber. I'm reminded of SmarterEveryDay's ride in a vacuum chamber. Granted, he was in a safe environment, so much more relaxed and comfortable, but he was basically out of his mind without knowing he was out of his mind. And no way of keeping the air in the lungs under those circumstances, I think, so fighting it and thus causing pain to yourself doesn't actually help at all.
The problem with fentanyl is getting it. Actual pharmaceutical companies have been refusing to sell drugs to states that practice the death penalty. This is the entire reason they were trying the nitrogen execution in the first place. No legitimate pharma company is going to sell you fentanyl for executions. And they might refuse to sell fentanyl at all to the state prison agency, thus actually endangering the healthcare of living prisoners.
Sure, the state has plenty of fentanyl they've captured from drug busts, but that's useless for this purpose. First, most of that is being held as evidence. Taking bits of it just messes with the provenance of those drugs and can hurt the state on convictions and appeals. Second, more crucially, no court would approve of it. You're talking fentanyl made in an illicit drug lab somewhere. It hardly meets even the most basic standards of drug certification and FDA approval. You have no idea how pure it is, what might be in it, etc. Sure, the state could use some of the seized fentanyl, then try and get it somehow tested and verified safe. However, then you need the help of a big outside lab for that, and you start running into problems finding people who are trained to do that work that will be willing to do it. If they were anyone in the medical field, such testing might violate he Hippocratic Oath. There's a reason actual doctors don't participate in executions.
Ultimately, fentanyl has the same problem as all other pharmaceutical methods of execution have, just getting a hold of the stuff. From the state's perspective, the biggest advantage of a nitrogen execution is that the materials are trivial to acquire. You can get nitrogen at any welding or dive shop. Or if worst comes to worst, the state can just build a small atmospheric nitrogen concentration machine right on the prison grounds. There's zero chance of anyone cutting off the state's nitrogen supply; it's literally 3/4 of the atmosphere. You just need some simple pumps and cooling/distillation process to concentrate the atmospheric nitrogen to a level where breathing it is fatal. You don't even have to worry as much about plaintiffs challenging it on grounds of the quality of death agent; you can't argue cruel and unusual punishment based on the prospect of impurities. If the nitrogen being used in an execution is just concentrated from the atmosphere, then there's nothing the condemned prisoner is breathing that those watching aren't. They're just breathing the same air with the oxygen removed.
Maybe lowering thr pressure in the room would be better? I've seen videos of pilot training where they very quickly become so loopy that they don't even get what's happening. Like one where the trainer was telling the person they needed to secure their mask again or they would lose consciousness and die, but they were just laughing like it was a joke.
The optics of condemned people giggling as they drift off to death are awkward though.
It's also expensive to set up the room
Although presumably the same cost as the old gas chambers, which were in use as recently as 1999.
If they could be retrofitted
That's what I've read as well, that it is generally seen as painless and peaceful, but there are a variety of factors to account for.
He was wearing a mask, which maybe others are more knowledgeable about than I am on these matters, but a person isn't just inhaling nitrogen, they're exhaling carbon dioxide initially. Meaning there would need to be a way for the carbon dioxide to be moved away to avoid being mixed in with the nitrogen. Perhaps with sufficient nitrogen intake maybe that isn't supposed to matter, I have no idea. My understanding is that excessive carbon dioxide would lead to someone feeling like they're not able to breathe and possibly lead to what the witnesses describe.
I think some other article I read had gotten a quote from a guy who had invented a "suicide pod" that used nitrogen, and that guy was seemingly a little concerned at least about the usage of a mask but the statements they got from the guy were a little light on details. The "suicide pod" that he invented would in theory limit the risk of carbon dioxide inhalation because there would be more room for the gas to disperse, which is where I'm not sure if the mask has ways of addressing.
From Internet Theoreticians I heard that body positioning is also an issue.
Didn't watch the video and don't want to, but I think the idea is that the head should be elevated so that CO2 flows down when exhaling so that the person is inhaling pure nitrogen.
The body doesn't know there's anything wrong with breathing in nitrogen, we do it all the time, just in smaller doses (70% or something of what we breathe in is nitrogen).
CO2 on the other hand will cause an instant panic reaction because that's bad and the body knows it.
If I got this right, a normal oxygen mask has holes to let CO2 and excess O2 out and let air in to mix with the oxygen. If they were to remove those holes without realizing their function of removing CO2 then CO2 would have no way to escape. I saw a picture of the mask, but it didn't show enough to see how it works.
Yeah, the suicide pod would pool CO2 at your feet and you'd pass long before it piled up high enough to affect you.
True of nitrous oxide, which the body perceives the same as oxygen. Don’t know that’s true of straight N2.
It is. The body's receptors aren't for lack of oxygen, but overabundance of CO2. There are actually several possible gasses that can be used to do this - it was a common cause of death in mines and tunneling when stumbling on pockets of trapped gas - but nitrogen is common, readily available, and not otherwise potentially dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolutions_concerning_death_penalty_at_the_United_Nations