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.
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.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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also because at that point you’ve let Alabama have a dedicated gas chamber which is obviously a bad idea
Isn’t nitrogen suffocation how the Swiss death pod works?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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Well some of them do
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?
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.
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.
I’m sorry, that’s too humane.
“ Pro-Life my ass
Pro-Life ~until birth~
Hooray. Are they going to totally fuck it up again like last time?
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.
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.
Stop bringing logic to their murdering.
It ruins it.
Look at you Alabama! What a progressive state! We’re proud of you ya little innovator!
Jarvis? So this guy is Ultron?
