Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney Thursday and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method.
The Alabama attorney general’s office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” But what exactly Smith, 58, will feel after the warden switches on the gas is unknown, some doctors and critics say.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
Keller, who was not involved in developing the Alabama protocol, said the plan is to “eliminate all of the oxygen from the air” that Smith is breathing by replacing it with nitrogen.
How is that fixed by using a drug cocktail? Seems like any method of execution will scare the person being executed.
A drug cocktail, the electric chair, lethal injection, and any form of execution is going to cause distress. Distress is worse than just being scared because distress actually causes the body to feel as if it is being harmed whether it is or isn’t. The longer the process takes, the worse the distress.
The electric chair is probably the worst because you get the distress and ridiculous levels of pain. Same with the gas chamber. Lethal injection, if done right, reduces the pain but still has the distress. But they fuck that up so it ends up being both as well.
This new thing will be fucked up like lethal injection because the people doing the executions are incompetent. But even if they did it perfectly the person knows they will be dying and it isn’t significantly different from suffocation because they will still have the same distress.