Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.
The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.
Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
Isn’t that how we’re doing the death penalty anyway? We’re trying to find a “painless” way to kill someone, but is there ever really a painless way to do this? I’d imagine even if I’m sitting in a massage chair with classical music playing it wouldn’t matter if I knew that half an hour from now I wouldn’t be leaving the room.
And we can’t really ask doctors because doctors have taken an oath to “do no harm.”
The death penalty is just a punishment no one wants to do (well, okay, I’m sure there are plenty of people that have no problem with it), but we’ve told ourselves that we have to do it.
Not only are there plenty of people who have no problem with it, there’s plenty of people who will be upset the killing wasn’t more barbaric.
And it’s pure blood-lust. They know the criminal can never reoffend. They know the death won’t bring back the victims or bring peace to their family. They know it won’t stop other people committing the same crime. They weren’t impacted by the crime in the slightest and don’t seem to have any real compassion for those who were.
But they want to see the criminals fry anyway.
Threads like this make it extremely clear the the reason the western world isn’t executing women in soccer stadiums is because the people who make those decisions said “no”, not because it wouldn’t draw a crowd.
Yup, if this takes off, we can absolutely expect people to start complaining that death row criminals are getting off easy.
People will pull out the usual excuses for cruelty in our criminal justice system “well, their victim didn’t get a peaceful death!” and shit like that. As though making the perpetrator (and it’s always a possibility that they were falsely convicted) suffer an agonizing death will retroactively lessen the victims stuffering.
Its sick, but it’s absolutely going to happen.
This isn’t experimentation and it isn’t new. I fucking hate this talking point. It’s a well-established, safe, and potentially harmless method, unlike the shit we were doing before.
Still doesn’t make it right.
I’ll admit, it’s an improvement over previous methods, though that’s not saying much. Everything’s normal, breathing fine, until lights out!
My objection to the death penalty is that sooner or later, it’s inevitable, the law will fuck it up and execute innocent people. Some people just can’t do adulting around this. Sooner or later, a crime happens, people clamor for blood, the state rounds up the wrong guy and railroads him.
Wether a country still has a death penalty ot not is a pretty good indicator for how civilised it is.
Most socially developed countries abolished it over the course of the past 100 years.
Another indicator is whether the people in a country still divide the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized” countries.
It is a spectrum.
But i hope you dont want to argue that falsely convicting and killing people, using botched methods involving a lot of pain and suffering can be considered civilised.
Every country can be considered uncivilized in its own way.
So… a spectrum.
No, a spectrum implies that a country can “more” or “less” civilized. But there is no civilizometer capable of such a determination.
It’s the same reason why countries do not lie on a spectrum when judging whether they have “beautiful” or “ugly” inhabitants. Any attempt at a ranking is hopelessly biased.
Or just subjective.