Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Cruel? Nitrogen asphyxiation is probably one of the most painless, gentle ways to go.
Your trigger that you can’t breathe is a buildup of carbon dioxide. But as you can still exhale, you feel no panic. You just slowly drift unconscious and die. I’d take it over most causes of death.
Execution is cruel, regardless of method.
I’m against the death penalty but if I ever murder a load of people then I’d like to be able able to freely choose death by nitrogen over a life in prison
You know what else is cruel? People killing other people. And the former continuing to live despite their cruelty.
The only rub against execution to me is the risk of executing the innocent. But that is not the concern here. There is no dispute this guy is guilty.
Capital punishment is government sanctioned killing. Outside of war, the government should not have the power to kill anyone.
Let them rot in prison. It’s cheaper anyway.
Abolish capital punishment.
Except them rotting in prison is cruel and unusual punishment. No, they get shelter, 3 meals a day, healthcare when they need it, and even recreation.
And I’m anti-war. It’s ok for innocents to fight and kill each other, but not to kill murderers?
The government shouldn’t be sanctioning killing. Period.
Other than Japan, the US is the only Western country left with this primitive, revenge-based way of looking at crime and punishment. Yet, the US continues to be the most violent country of them all and the murder capital of the Western world.
Usually, when something doesn’t work, we try something else. Time for the US to try something else.
The US is likely more violent due to a combination of corrupt capitalism and lead poisoning.
We do need to try something else, but that something else is in terms of economics, infrastructure, and healthcare, not punishment.
I definitely agree there, especially in healthcare. What an awful mess in the US when you look at how successful other countries are with universal healthcare.
But I will just never accept capital punishment. It’s such an awful way to seek revenge. It’s especially surprising that conservatives love the concept of government power extending to killing its own citizens. And evangelicals who are commanded by Jesus himself to turn the other cheek and seek forgiveness. I know they are backward on many things, but this seems particularly egregious.
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Right, so why is that not a total disqualifier then? Even if the risk is fleeting small, there is no taking it back. If it came out later on, dead is dead. Combining that with the fact that executions are obv a psychological cluster fuck for everyone who deals with it, especially the one executed, and the fact that it takes a lot of resources every trial because it’s such an unusually cruel punishment, the arguments for it are dwindling.
Also
Right but we’re not voting someone in office who can eliminate all homicides in the United States. Things are different for execution.
We could also talk about how this “well tough shit” opinion always fucks over positive and healthy change, but that’s probably the least impactful argument for the folks who still bank on executions as some sort of greater good.
Read the rest of what I said. There is no doubt here. I do think the death penalty should require a higher standard of guilt. But some people, through their actions, simply have forfeited their right to live.
Glad to have it straight from the moral arbiter of the universe, someone who feels they can personally determine, from a safe distance, whether someone has forfeited their life. Otherwise I’d be seriously worried the state was carrying out a horribly immoral practice that regularly results in murder of innocents in order to deliver, at best, the short-lived false victory of vengeance, for the low priceof permanently extinguishing of a human life. Which I’ll remind you doesn’t bring back their victims.
I am allowed moral opinion, same as you.
Doesn’t ‘people killing other people’ include the state killing people? I don’t see how vengeance for a murder solves anything.
No
Why doesn’t it include that?
Because they are carrying out a judgement. We don’t toss prison guards in jail for false imprisonment. We don’t send IRS agents to jail for theft.
Opinion 👆.
Fact: it’s necessary to remove certain people who are prone to violence and incapable of rehabilitation. If you have such a problem with execution, then volunteer your time, money, and home to accommodate a violent psychopath with you forever.
Fact: when we sentence people to death we get it wrong one time in three
Fact: executing someone is more expensive than keeping them in prison for life
Wait why is it more expensive?
https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/
The long appeals process we use to try to not execute the innocent costs a lot. It would be cheaper to just imprison them.
Ah, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s lots of inexpensive, humane ways to dispatch a human. How methods like electrocution and lethal cocktail injection were decided on is difficult to understand. Nitrogen, though, is probably the nicest way it could be done. Relatively cheap too, and with zero chance of failure.
The expense is in achieving that blistering 70% correctness rate, not in the way the condemned are killed.
It’s not the method that’s expensive, it’s the appeals process, supposedly to stop innocent people from being executed. And even with all of the appeals, innocent people have still been executed.
Shitty take. There are more than two options here, and suggesting otherwise is using an either-or fallacy as a bad way to try to win an argument.
Opinion 👆.
Fact: punishments can be reversed, if the punished stays alive. Any percentage of unjust executions is irredeemable. Also, there is a lot of evidence that abolishing the death penalty either does not affect the crime rate, or it has a positive effect (see link below).
More opinion: executions have no place in a society that highly values human rights because killing people is the exact opposite of humane. If you think prisoners are monsters and you could never end up in there, watch a documentary about it. If you see what some ppl went through, you know how easy anyone can end up there.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT50/015/2008/en/
That’s as silly a comment as “if you think Native Americans were wronged, give your house to one,” something else I’ve heard people say. Societal wrongs are not solved by individuals.
Somehow all the countries that don’t allow capital punishment find ways to deal with extremely violent people and don’t have murderers running amok.
Russia be like…
Kinda funny that you label the comment you replied to as opinion and then proceeded to dress your own (shitty) opinion up as fact.
Also opinion 👆
Exactly, the headline is just trying to get people to react.
It’s people’s that want to ban the death penalty. They have already have succeeded in getting pharmaceutical companies to stop providing the drugs traditionally used.
Nitrogen, though, would be hard to ban. There is plenty of it, and it is cheap and easy to isolate. So they are arguing hard that it shouldn’t be accepted before they can prove how painlessly effective it can be.
There’s a BBC documentary about it, I think this one:
It’s been a long time since I watched it, but I think the inert gas route is very pleasant. He even gets slightly high/happy from it.
Key takeaways:
edit: found it:
https://www.documentarytube.com/videos/how-to-kill-a-human-being-2/
Rendered unconcious within 15 seconds, dead within a minute.
In testing pigs would happily stick their heads in a space with pure nitrogen and munch on apples till they lost consciousness, fell over, then stick their heads back in the space with nitrogen to eat some more apples.
What kind of apples asking for a friend
Do you like apples?
Well yeah if we wanted it to be happy and comfortable we’ve had morphine for over a century
Yeah, compared to injecting horrifically painful substances, I don’t see why this is controversial.
It’s even better than that. Hypoxia causes feelings of euphoria! You get high, pass out, and die. It’s the best way to go, IMO.
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It’s human medical experimentation as a punishment that’s cruel and unusual.
It’s not experimentation. People have already died, even accidentally, from inert gas asphyxiation.
If we didn’t study it for this purpose in human subjects before him, it’s experimentation. Reproducing something that has occurred organically in a new context is absolutely experimentation. I don’t know how I can make this simpler.
It’s hardly an experiment if you know the results.
But by that definition, every method was “experimental” at some point. Lethal injection, firing squad, electric chair, gas chamber, hanging, the guillotine, the breaking wheel, being drawn and quartered, scaphism, whatever method had to be done for the first time once. And I would take nitrogen asphyxiation over any of those. Hell, when I start suffering, I sincerely hope that option is available to me so I can go out on my own terms.
Yes. It’s true that every technology was once experimental. But how experiments are done is important. And I certainly hope we’ve moved forward morally since we started executing people. We’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, not use them to justify future ones.
The prisoner volunteered. I’m not sure what better circumstances we could get.
I really think death penalty opponents just don’t want to break the seal. Right now the idea that it’s “experimental” is the only argument against it. Prove it works, and it will quickly become the go-to method.
Opposition got their biggest victory when they got drug companies to stop providing the traditional 3 drug cocktail that has worked for decades. Now they argue every other method is either cruel and unusual (new drugs or older methods) our too experimental (inert gas asphyxiation or opioid overdose) when those latter methods are likely far more humane and much harder to stop up the supply.
Death penalty opponents oppose death penalty…more at 11
Then oppose it rather than make disingenuous arguments.