Alabama is set to perform the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday.
Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis.
Miller was to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.
Ah yes - the world’s moral compass - the pinnacle of western civilisation killing people they have securely locked up where they can’t be a danger to the public… for what - revenge?
Look at the money being spent to satiate this thirst for blood compared to keeping them locked up - or shudder making any attempt to rehabilitate people to be a productive member of society.
“Miller was to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.”
Shouldn’t this be considered “cruel and unusual punishment?”
“We’re killing you now. This is the end for you. Here comes the needle. Actually wait, nevermind, go back to your cell and wait another few years.”
I guess they would argue that it wasn’t intentional?
I mean, killing prisoners is cruel and unusual in a civilised society.
Cruel yes, unusual not by definition. It’s precedented and quite usual.
Indeed. We’re definitely a fucked up bunch of vindictive asshats here…
Our whole system of judgment and punishment is purely punitive, the pain is the point. There’s nothing “corrective” about our “correction facilities” (jails/prisons)
The US death penalty is so bizarre.
“We desperately want to kill these probably-guilty people, we want it to appear humane while simultaneously lacking any humanity, and no one wants to be involved in any way because we acknowledge that it’s pretty much murder which is the crime we’re punishing these poor bastards for”
Other countries still doing this, which I don’t condone, at least own it. “We think these guys are scum and we’re going to end them by chopping their heads off. No you may not watch.”
Hell if someone who kills someone I love is sentenced to death…I’ll own that shit. Give me the axe, I’ll chop off the head myself.
Would that bring your loved one back?
And the Bible being a justification for state executions is such a horrible excuse.
We could justify all sorts of other wacky things with a messy collection of ancient tales.
The key story for Christians is that a man was unjustly executed by religious authorities and the state even though he was without sin. This unjust sacrifice atones for all of humanities sin. So kinda hard to justify execution from a Christian perspective if you actually believe that stuff.
And the Bible being a justification for state executions is such a horrible excuse.
Which part of the Bible allow that? Is it this “an eye for an eye” thing? And if yes, do those people referring to it also honor the other verses in Leviticus (i.e. not eat shrimp)?
No, and they’ll use the Bible to justify that too.
Or execution vans in China
Would love it if we just stopped the government sanctioned murders.
That’s why governments exist - for societal sanctioned killing. And you will never get away from that.
The rest of the modern world enters the chat.
War enters the chat.
What is an army?
the state as an entity exists to prevent the outbreak of class war, it regularly does this violently, and people are often killed without the need for the death penalty.
You should read Lenin’s State and Revolution, at least the first chapter
Everyone has an army.
Their own or someone elses.
Kind of negates civilized. Because defensive war wouldn’t be necessary if everyone were civilized and didn’t treat others as less than.
And if pigs had wings they could fly.
Aint going to happen as long as psycopaths like for example putin can get in power.
I knew someone would bring this up. There’s some question if Russians in certain regions were being treated in a civilized manner.
Power structures are indeed partly designed and in practice used by upper classes, and especially the owner class to keep their wealth and maintain the hierarchy that is beneficial to them. And this ended up being the case even in the Soviet Union.
It’s probably an oversimplification to say that is their sole purpose, but I understand why it is said that way to get the point across.
An interesting modern example of state sanctioned killing that occurs in nations that don’t necessarily have an army or legal executions. Is in some countries with lax euthanasia/assisted dying laws. Poor people who become unable to work due to disability, are often financially pressured to kill themselves through the official routes, as it can be hard or nearly impossible to survive solely on disability benefits.
Governments don’t really have much pressure to improve the situation, as it saves them, and by extension the upper classes, money. And the dead people don’t have votes to punish them with.
Maybe if we stopped seeking retribution, and seek solutions, we can get past this point. That includes punishing the poor for a system created by those who hoard resources, creating conditions of despair. If people are terminally ill and suffering, there’s no reason to deny humane euthsnsia, but writing laws that won’t be abused and codified via Congress will be messy.
- Human beings are literally animals.
- Innocent animals deserve to live; murderers don’t.
- Let’s eat murderers instead of animals.
Human animals who murder other animals for food get to keep doing it —> murderers get to die for a good cause. Everyone’s happy!
First time I’ve heard veganism used to justify the death penalty.
And cannibalism!
Also not veganism
Eating meat is the opposite of veganism, fyi
Also, I’m not vegan.
You remind me of the time I was marching to protest the Iraq war in Los Angeles and, as the procession of thousands walked by, there was a guy on the sidelines with a bullhorn yelling, “HOW CAN YOU BE AGAINST WAR IF YOU’RE OKAY EATING ANIMALS?”
I’m guessing the number of people he converted to veganism after that was similar to the, I am guessing, zero people you converted to veganism with your comment.
Read the room, buddy.
I’m not vegan. But I’m also not a hypocrite.
War is bad because it consigns millions of innocent creatures to death and suffering.
Factory farming is bad because it consigns BILLIONS of innocent creatures to death and suffering per year.
How do you wrap your tiny morally imbecilic mind around the former but not the latter?
See above.
Like I said, I’m not vegan. I just enjoy acknowledging when huge numbers of people reach grossly irrational conclusions.
Sounds like Soylent Green with less steps. I’d prefer not giving wealthy industrialists more ideas.
I can be against more than one thing.
I think I can add government sanctioned prion disease to that list.
Are you okay?
I’m trying to help meat eaters out of their dilemma. They murder innocent animals but complain about killing evil animals. They eat the former but not the latter.
Ah. I see the problems: A. Wrong place 2. Wrong time D. Wrong method
I’m not vegan, by the way. I just find hypocrisy kind of gross.
mmmm prions
80 billion land animals and 200 trillion sea animals
Yeah, but most of the sea animals deserve to be eaten. Trust me, I’m a squid. Fuck those guys, they’re a bunch of Nazis. You ever read the literature flounders put out? It’s some ugly, ugly stuff.
Also, did you know that oysters are pearl-hoarders? Do you think they ever pay taxes on those pearls?
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If they must kill people I don’t understand why they don’t knock people out first. I’ve been under anesthesia for surgery; If they had killed me while under, things would’ve just stayed dark, but I never would have known.
So the lethal injection was supposed to be that, three injections: an anesthetic, a paralytic, then a chemical to kill. Firstly, anesthesia is hard to dose with a doctor much less when it’s understood that serving as an executioner is a violation of professional ethics among doctors. But also even then the person is awake when receiving the anesthesia, they know what’s happening as they’re strapped down against their will and have the IV that will kill them placed. It’s fundamentally cruel to do that.
Doctors wont do it which makes dosing tricky. More importantly drug companies won’t sell them the drugs because they don’t want their product to be associated with people being killed.
How does it make dosing tricky? Just give everybody a mega dose… what’s the worst that can happen, they die before you kill them?
“Tricky” means “ethical issues of someone who took an oath to heal and save lives doing the opposite.”
They were asking why is getting the dosing right important if the person is going to die anyway.
Anesthesiologists won’t do it. That’s why they had so much trouble executing the guy in the first place: its not a doctor doing it, just a prison guard.
They take their Hippocratic Oat seriously thankfully.
Well some of them do
More than that, it could cost your license and make you a professional pariah. But beyond that, would you be comfortable seeing your doctor has performed executions?
Are the torture doctors (including psychologists) of the last Gulf invasion still practicing?
Why would you even need a doctor? All you’d need is access to something like fentanyl and general knowledge of how to calculate a lethal dose, then just pick a dose higher than that and have a second one prepared. Other than that, they’d just need training to insert an IV or needle into a vein.
It’s a separate question from whether they should be executing anyone, but it just seems ridiculous that reliably killing someone is a hard problem. I personally think it’s based on a desire to walk a line where they are cruel to those they kill but don’t seem that way unless you look closely. Like with the first nitrogen execution, it sounded fool proof, but then they didn’t do anything to vent the CO2 and it became cruel.
Yeah the “just given them X” is how they got into a mess botching executions.
Killing people realibly and quickly has been perfectly fixed for centuries but they want to make a barbaric act look civilized, clean, even clinical.
A guillotine would be cheaper, perfectly reliable, quick, painless, fittingly antiquated looking for an antiquated practice. But it makes a mess and conjures images of angry Frenchmen getting rid of the ruling elite.
I hope all Americans come one day to realize how horrible, ineffective and unnecessary state mandated executions are.
⚕️🌾
First… uhhhhhh… do harm I guess
That’s what lethal injection is for. But they can’t get legitimate doctors to perform an execution, so they have to just wing it with hacks, which is why they often get fucked up.
At least a firing squad is full of people who know how to shoot.
That’s what they used to do. Now they can’t obtain the drugs as no pharmaceutical company or pharmacy wants to be associated with murder…
Only it often didn’t work properly because no medically trained person will participate. Nor should they because they must “do no harm”. So most of the time, the guards have no idea how to tell if someone is reacting to pain and don’t understand the actual effects of the drugs.
I’m sorry, that’s too humane.
Per the John Oliver episode on the death penalty, there’s substantial evidence that murder by nitrogen suffocation is extremely painful.
Edit: the episode and timestamp in question. Nitrogen hypoxia (edit: at least as it’s being performed by these ass-backward hicks) is not painless as some commenters are suggesting. Section lasts from about 23:00 to 24:45. An excerpt from the Wikipedia article properly sourced to the Associated Press, BBC News, and the Montgomery Advertiser (local Alabama newspaper):
Though the State Attorney General said afterward that Smith’s execution showed that nitrogen hypoxia was an “effective and humane method of execution”, several people watching the execution reported that Smith “thrashed violently on the gurney” for several minutes, with his death reportedly occurring 10 minutes after the nitrogen was administered to the chamber. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the use.
And to be clear, the only reason these sick fucks are using nitrogen is because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to source
potassium chloridethe barbituate and paralytic for lethal injections because the optics for companies supplying them is abysmal.This is simply not true. Nitrogen is not the issue, CO2 is. If you breathe too much CO2, your body panicks.
So do it properly and the worst you get is a slight headache. But since you are „high“, you don’t care anymore.
Nitrogen has become this Schrödingers gas.
When used in executions it’s extremely painful and terrible. When used for assisted Euthanasia it’s calm and painless.
So what is it? Not arguing that death penalty is fine. But the debate of the method shouldn’t be riddled with lies as it poisons the debate climate.
In the case of the first nitrogen execution, they did dick all to vent away the carbon dioxide he was exhaling, so it eventually saturated the gas he was able to breathe and his lungs wouldn’t have been able to get rid of any more. When you hold your breath, the discomfort and urge to breathe again comes from the CO2 buildup rather than the lack of oxygen.
If the exhaled gas gets vented properly, then there’s no discomfort. That they didn’t get this part right for the execution suggests malice, or at the very least extreme negligence because it doesn’t take expertise to understand this, just a little bit of depth in knowing how suffocation works. Which you’d figure people designing and carrying out an execution would seek.
A big part of it was scientific illiteracy. There was talk at the time about “protecting the prison officers from exposure to the gas”.
They were treating it like a poison.
Which adds stupidity to the malice.
Assuming that “concern” was in good faith in the first place. I believe it was a bad faith pretext for not venting the gas because it’s a well known fact that nitrogen makes up a significant portion of the atmosphere. If they were really worried about the nitrogen displacing enough oxygen to be dangerous, I can think of several ways to eliminate that risk even if I play along and accept that it’s possible.
- Vent the room. Or use a large room and a fan.
- Place oxygen meters in the room that sound an alarm if oxygen drops below 20%.
- Give oxygen masks to anyone who needs to be in the room.
Instead they went with the stupidest and most cruel option. Make sure there’s no ventilation on the mask, and that it had a tight seal before turning on the gas. A gas they were treating like a deadly poison.
And since there was no ventilation at all, there was no gas flow. There was no oxygen displacement. Just the CO2 buildup.
Ah yeah that would be cruel as fuck. Are they doing anything different this time or are they going to torture someone else to death?
Having seen firsthand what happens when someone unknowingly enters a hypoxic enclosed space, I think the difference is foreknowledge. Thrashing sounds like acidosis from holding one’s breath. I was helping an acquaintance work on his old steel boat. There was a watertight compartment. The risk of steel-enclosed spaces is that rusty steel in an enclosed space can consume all of the oxygen, leaving only nitrogen rich air.
He opened the hatch and, before I could stop him, he just strode on in like it was nothing. He was unconscious before I could get to him, maybe ten seconds. Fortunately, he was near enough to the hatch that I could just reach in and grab him, rather than trying to find an air tank and regulator, and then put it on.
He recovered just fine, but had a terrible headache. He didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t thrash. There was no drama. He walked in and fell unconscious. Lucky for him it was a small space, so the bulkheads kept him from doing a full header into the steel deck.
When you take a deep breath of it and die the death you’ve been wanting it’s painless. When you want to live your entire body thrashes in pain akin to drowning as you struggle to not breathe in.
This is part of the problem with “humane” execution. If you slip it into meals without prisoner knowledge death row prisoners will starve themselves to death. Start nitrogen bagging sleeping prisoners and they’ll do everything in their power to never sleep. These people want to live and have an intense instinct to survive by any means. Suicidal people can often overcome it, but everyone else will generally endure any pain for a tiny amount of time.
I think the difference is that right-to-die advocates have gone to insane lengths to ensure beyond a reasonable doubt that their setups which administer the lethal substance do so painlessly, so as to ensure that the person willingly choosing to die spends their last few moments not in pain anymore.
Prisons don’t seem to have the same standard in mind with their own setups. If anything, they seem to want to maximize suffering for the sake of the spectacle they’ve arranged the execution around.
Do suicide pods vent CO²?
Nitrogen Hypoxia will render you unconscious in under a minute when its almost pure n2 and exhaust is accounted for to remove co2. The last execution was done on such a sloppily manner you seriously have to question if the procedure was done in such a way that to ensure maximum suffering. The mask used didn’t allow co2 to be vented away, their method of execution was only one step up from wrapping a bag around his head.
A proper way to do it, probably not done because cost and some stupid unnecessary procedure, would be to construct a booth around a chair with exhaust fans near the base and a supply of pure n2 coming from the top. If the o2 and co2 can be removed quickly enough the body can’t tell its not getting enough to breath and loss of consciousness can happen quickly with death following in minutes. Smarter Every Day has a video on Hypoxia where Dusten, the content creator, is an altitude simulator where they are lowering the air pressure to simulate high altitude and by extension just a few short steps from a death chamber. The host goes through several stages of hypoxia and had to be told point blank to put his oxygen mask back on several times before he risks passing out. At no point does he show signs of pain or distress and if anything acting almost like hes high.
Building a chamber like this for executions would have been far more humane but they didn’t want to put more thought or money into it than strangling a guy so instead you get that botch job Alabama used.
“Hey, should we use any of the ready to go setups the right-to-die people have put considerable thought in to?”
“No, let’s just wing it with shit we already have. What could go wrong?”
Also because at that point you’ve let Alabama have a dedicated gas chamber which is obviously a bad idea
potassium chloride is just sodium-free salt, I can get it at my supermarket, the issue is getting the other 2 drugs for the cocktail
If done properly it should be completely painless and almost unnoticeable. I have a feeling they’re fucking these up on purpose.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by plain old dumbfuckery. These podunk inbreds may do it for kicks (some of them are definitely malicious enough), but I think it’s pretty likely that they got someone named Cooter to do the final installation.
This information is brought to you by a drunk that looks like he could be named Cooter. Or possibly Cletus.
While I certainly subscribe to Hanlon’s Razor, there’s definitely indications that some people think that causing additional suffering before death is wholly righteous. As though said inflicted suffering serves any real purpose beyond their fantasy. Very primitive, yet very human.
Mother Teresa vibes?
CO2 buildup is the part that cause pain, panic, and visceral reaction. There’s a reason they purge CO2 from the assisted suicide pods that also completely surround the body in an air-tight enclosure.
The violent reaction can be explained by a buildup of CO2 which is partially how the body signals the brain to breathe more and heavier. This is not usually observed with inert gas deaths which is why industrial inert gas accidents often have people passing out and dying without even noticing.
Is there? I’ve always heard that inert gas asphyxiation is basically unnoticeable, which is why it’s so deadly in accidents, especially when people try to rescue someone and fall victim themselves.
The human body doesn’t have a “low oxygen” sense, only a “high CO2” sense, so nitrogen and other gases shouldn’t trigger the feeling of suffocation.
You are correct
But these chuckle fucks want to save money.
They don’t flood a whole room with nitrogen, they just use an oxygen mask that’s flowing a lot if nitrogen.
The person is still breathing in a lot of what they exhale, which makes it very painful for them
I found two case studies of people using face masks to commit suicide, and more using plastic bags, and it seemed to work for them. I think it can be done painlessly, but clearly Alabama is being Alabama.
For the record, I’m against the death penalty entirely, but if we’re going to do it it should be done properly. This is cruelty.
People wanting to kill themselves probably take care to do it.
People who want to die also embrace rather than resist. You could od prisoners on opiates and even addicts will attempt to thrash around so much they’re at risk of bleeding out. These are people who want to live.
Isn’t nitrogen suffocation how the Swiss death pod works?
The difference is the intent of the person, and the way the nitrogen is applied.
In the case of the pod, you have someone who has likely been in pain or some kind of suffering for a long time who is keen for death to release them from their suffering.
In the case of an execution you have someone desperate not to die, by any means possible.
The guy they executed held his breath for a long time, then thrashed around trying to dislodge the mask, managed to get some free air through the improperly sealed mask, and then maybe had a seizure from the lack of oxygen and desperation. The whole thing is just fucked basically.
There’s some reason why they don’t want to use a pod or chamber type set up, although I don’t recall what that reason is.
Inventors of the “Sarco” capsule would seem to disagree with you.
Yeah, I would tentatively agree that nitrogen hypoxia when performed correctly is in fact painless (although we’re also talking about the same Sarco that just got several people arrested by running afoul of Switzerland’s product safety and chemical laws on the first ever test of their capsule). Of course here, whatever method Alabama is using is not painless and caused its first victim intense, prolonged suffering.
Alabama is doing it wrong.
Inventor of the Sarco unit
In 2024, Nitschke appeared in an Alabama court as an expert witness to oppose the state’s plan to execute convicted killer Kenneth Smith using a mask-and-gas technique incorporating nitrogen.[76] Nitschke testified that the mask-and-gas approach had been rejected decades ago because it was unreliable, and that Smith could be “horribly maimed without a complete seal between mask and face” leading to incomplete cerebral hypoxia and a resultant vegetative state.[76] Nitschke said that nitrogen must be delivered correctly to work as intended. Nitschke said the Alabama nitrogen hypoxia method was “quick and nasty” and ignored the possibilities of vomiting and air leakage.
Wow do they really still use potassium cyanide? WTF. What’s next, mustard gas chambers?
Nope, sorry, I just misspoke. I meant to say potassium chloride, but my brain defaulted to the last NileRed video I watched.
Nitrogen suffocattion isn’t painless if it’s done completely of nitrogen.
You’re talking about regular oxygen suffocattion caused by decreasing the oxygen available over time.
What you’ve essentially said is “the guillotine is immoral because if you cut 1/10th of the way through, then 1/9th of the way through, then 1/8th and so on… Then it’s REAL painful!!!”
No shit.
I hear ramping up electrocution over a 20 minute period is also not great.
“ Pro-Life my ass
Pro-Life ~until birth~
Hooray. Are they going to totally fuck it up again like last time?
You know it!!
banjo music intensifies
You know CO (carbon monoxide) is treated just like oxygen by the body but the brain doesn’t realize it’s not getting the oxygen you just pass out. It’s the reason why people die by accident, the body just breaths like normal.
Same thing for nitrogen, or any gas besides CO2. The human body has no way to detect oxygen. It can only detect CO2.
Not relevant to the argument at hand, but the body does have low O2 detection. I’ve held my breath with a pulse oximeter on before, and while high CO2 makes you panic, when you get to about 87% your body has a response I would describe as “breathe, mother fucker” which is hard to ignore. COPD patients often regulate using this hypoxic drive.
If you hold your breath the CO2 accumulates in your blood, making it acidic and triggering the “breathe, mother fucker” reflex.
You need to exhale the CO2 without inhaling O2 for the body to not realize it.
Stop bringing logic to their murdering.
It ruins it.
“Murder” is an illegal killing. This is not an illegal killing. It’s also not an immoral killing, but that’s a separate conversation.
It’s also not an immoral killing, but that’s a separate conversation.
Actually, let’s have that conversation.
I have two questions for you:
- Do you believe it can ever be moral to take an innocent person’s life?
- Do you believe that our judicial system has never wrongly convicted an innocent person and sentenced them to death?
If the answer to those questions is no, then I do not understand how you could ever say the death penalty can be moral.
If you answered yes to the first, you’re a monster. If you answered yes to the second, you’re hopelessly naive.
- Do you believe it can ever be moral to take an innocent person’s life?
Absolutely not. But you’ll agree this guy is not innocent.
- Do you believe that our judicial system has never wrongly convicted an innocent person and sentenced them to death?
That line of reasoning would be paralyzing. There’s a high chance that you’ll kill an innocent person while driving, but you’re still driving. I suppose the alternative is even worse.
Absolutely not. But you’ll agree this guy is not innocent. At all.
Perhaps. But the question of the death penalty is larger than just this guy.
That line of reasoning would be paralyzing. There’s a reasonably high chance that you’ll kill an innocent person while driving, but you’re still driving. I suppose the alternative is even worse.
And there, I suppose, is the difference between you and me. You are willing to murder people, some portion of whom you know are not murderers, because somehow you’ve decided that their deaths are worth it in this instance. I am not. I find the murder of even one innocent immoral. And frankly, in a democratic system where the state acts on behalf of the people, we all have that innocent blood on our hands. We are all murderers; we are made that way by the state. Should we all, then, die?
You’re also comparing accidents to deliberate acts in order to justify their murder. Those two things should not be conflated. No execution is an accident.
- Killing innocent people is wrong.
- The death penalty has a chance of killing innocent people.
- Therefore, the death penalty is wrong.
Versus:
- Killing innocent people is wrong.
- Driving a car has a chance of killing innocent people.
- Therefore, driving a car is wrong.
Clearly, this argument is not sound. You’ll need to come up with another.
For a more nuanced discussion on this topic I’d recommend a modern Ethics textbook, such as Shafer-Landau’s Living Ethics, which breaks down arguments over the death penalty to their syllogistic form.
EDIT: more examples.
- Killing innocent people is wrong.
- Practicing medicine has a well known chance of killing innocent people.
- Therefore, practicing medicine is wrong.
Etcetera
When I set out to drive, or paraglide, I do not set out to kill a person.
If I were to execute the death penalty, I would set out to kill a person.
Intent matters.
Look at you Alabama! What a progressive state! We’re proud of you ya little innovator!
We have those MAID pods in Canada, why not just buy a few of them? Not cruel enough?
After the other one, I’d be very afraid.
Jarvis? So this guy is Ultron?
