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.
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.
Doesn’t ‘people killing other people’ include the state killing people? I don’t see how vengeance for a murder solves anything.
Then why aren’t you advocating for executing those that execute killers? After all, they kill people. But I’m going to assume that you think those killers are okay.
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.
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/
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
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.
Human medical experimentation on prisoners is cruel and unusual in and of itself. However well you personally think execution by nitrogen would go (and I doubt you’d volunteer), people on death row have a right to know we’re not trying novel execution methods on them. Maybe if what we’re doing doesn’t actually benefit anyone more than prison would and is considered so barbaric that European manufacturers won’t supply us with the drugs we need to do it, we should stop.
The mania for execution led Arizona to refurbish its gas chamber and reverse-engineer a Zyklon B equivalent.* That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. How about you?
*https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents
There’s no experiment necessary in proving nitrogen as a silent and painless killer. Scuba divers have done all of the experiments for us, mostly by accident.
Imprisonment is barbaric.
If someone has done something so bad that they should be locked up for life then they should be dispatched not kept as some kind of morbid pet of the state. If you murdered a bunch of people (mass killing of serial style) you need not waste any more of our air. If you rape you should be killed too. If you’ve gotten yourself on death row fuck your rights.
If you imprison an innocent, they can be freed. Execution takes away that possibility. And we have absolutely, provably, executed innocent people. I hope that never happens to you, but if life were a play, it would certainly make for some dramatic irony.
If you kept an innocent man imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life then you were a thousand times more cruel than had you executed him. I would prefer death over rotting in prison hoping to find the last shred of decency in the american judicial system that had already imprisoned me. All of your arguments are romantic and foolish.
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.
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 return 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.
Capital is cruel and trying again after they failed the first time is exceptionally cruel
I’d take a firing squad or an enormous hydraulic press tbh. If I were to be an innocent stuck with a death penalty I’d be happy to know somebody will have to clean up a messy pile of guts after my quick death.
The whole point of using gas or chemicals for the death isnt to make the punishment humane - the death penalty is not humane in any way - its to make it easier on the people doing the killing. No mess, no fuss.
Citation needed
Is there a citation on the necessity of citations? Surely someone in the academic world has written such a work, if not several.
If you are purporting this to be fact, yes, it requires proof. Of this is just your opinion, fine, but your opinion of the motives of others doesn’t carry much weight.
I say the same but to your “citation needed”.
It is well established that they are trying to make it more humane.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/can-executions-be-more-humane/388249/
I’m sorry, I’m intending to be kinda silly, but also honestly curious, bc I’ve been in academia.
My original remark had nothing to do with the greater context of this thread and discussion. It was specifically to your “needs citation” comment.
You’re claiming that the other person should include a citation, declaring the fact that there should be a citation.
I’m saying, do you have a citation of a study or logical proof or something that objectively claims that statements of fact should be accompanied by a citation of said fact.
It’s human medical experimentation as a punishment that’s cruel and unusual.