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.
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.