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Nitrogen hypoxia sounds like one of the best ways to die, without pain or panic, but I completely understand why no company wants to be the supplier of the means of executing people. Small volume, small profits, extreme controversy. What’s to want there?
Sure. If it was done correctly and we could trust the justice system to not kill innocent people. However they figured out the cruelest way to do it and SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they're innocent because it might hurt the court's reputation of they back down.
SCOTUS ruled we have to kill innocent people even if all the evidence says they're innocent because it might hurt the court's reputation of they back down.
I'm not familiar with this. Is this something that actually happened?
yes more then once. Most recently the supreme court ruled you can't bring new evidence to an areal. Why? because it would undermine the state right to be sure of their decision. Also note that the most successful way to win an appeal on a criminal case was to bring new evidence that showed your defense did not do their job or the prosecution withheld evidence that showed your innocence.
I believe they're referencing this:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that state prisoners have no constitutional right to present new evidence in federal court to support their claims that they were represented at trial and on appeal in state courts by unqualified or otherwise deficient lawyers. The vote was 6-to-3, along ideological lines.
. . .
On Monday Thomas wrote the majority decision hollowing out that 2012 ruling on behalf of the court's new six-justice conservative super majority.
He said that federal courts may not hear "new evidence" obtained after conviction to show how deficient the trial or appellate lawyer in state court was. To allow such evidence to be presented in federal court, he said, "encourages prisoners to sandbag state courts," depriving the states of "the finality that is essential to both the retributive and deterrent function of criminal law."
. . .
Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision "perverse," and "illogical." The Sixth Amendment "guarantees criminal defendants the right to effective assistance of counsel at trial," she said. "Today, however, the court hamstrings the federal courts' authority to safeguard that right."
This is so from 2022.
It's called "finality".
The idea that it's more Important that the process is followed and then stops at some point than that justice is achieved.
Same reason they barred introduction of new evidence when appealing from state court to federal, giving potentially corrupt state courts full power to block exculpatory evidence to deny someone justice because the federal courts must uphold the verdict if the evidence which was accepted indicates guilt under the state law. Same thing if the prosecutor knows of evidence of innocence and withholds or, or if the evidence only turns up after the trial. You get only one chance and then you're screwed.
Shinn V Ramirez, 2022.
They were arguing ineffective counsel post conviction because evidence wasn't submitted that could have shown Ramirez was innocent. Lower courts agreed, citing previous SCOTUS rulings. SCOTUS decided federal courts must be bound by the original evidence only.
Money Quote -
Two of those costs are particularly relevant here. First, a federal order to retry or release a state prisoner overrides the State’s sovereign power to enforce “societal norms through criminal law.” Calderon v. Thompson, 523 U. S. 538, 556.
Second, federal intervention imposes significant costs on state criminal justice systems. See, e.g., Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U. S. 72, 90. Pp. 6–8.
(Separated for clarity)
Personally I love how they say we need to respect a state's right to enforce social norms. With the death penalty. Because those are equivalent things. Betty doesn't like to mow her lawn. She likes to let her neighbor Lucy do it. Off to the chair for her! Okay jokes aside what they mean is their power to make laws, enforce laws, and have a court system.
And then it's too expensive? Really? I'm not going to be surprised when we end up with the purge only instead of being everywhere it's actually when the air raid siren goes off during yard time at the prison.
Media witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for about ten minutes. He shook and writhed for about two minutes on the gurney, followed by about five minutes of heavy breathing.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226936713/alabama-execution-kenneth-smith
Because they did in the worst way possible. All Alabama had to do was flood a sealed room with nitrogen and the execution would have been fairly "unremarkable". Instead they forced a has mask on Smith that required his cooperation to function properly, didn't have a one-way valve to remove exhaled gas, causing CO2 to build up in the tiny mask.
A haircut is also a painless and quick procedure, but that doesn't mean your barber can't be incompetent and totally fuck up your scalp.
Especially if the American Barber Association has a rule that none of its members may participate in the haircut; and scissor manufacturers all refuse to sell to you. So you end up having it done by a random person who doesn't mind ignoring what every barber says, using a pair of rusty scissors the sherrif was able to find at a garage sale.
Maybe at that point you shouldn’t cut the damn hair
That's the thing and something I bring up with other engineers all the time. The medical community decided to not help and the result is the government can't do it very well making it harder and harder to justify the practice. Engineers however continue to work on military tech.
We need to organize and blacklist those that help make weapons.
Yeah you need to be in a chamber where your exhaled co2 is so immediately diluted that you get no feedback from it. I believe the current attempts used normal medical masks
If "right to die" laws become more of a thing, this would be the most compassionate way of doing a home suicide kit. I wonder if the manufacturers would oppose that as well, or only executions.
Like you said, there's not much in it for them either way.
How is this more compassionate that loading someone up with an OD of morphine or something similar?
For a home kit, there's a lot less potential for abuse. You don't need hard drugs, or any abused drugs, it's just nitrogen. The person doesn't have any feeling of suffocating, they just go to sleep. Similar to why carbon monoxide poisoning is so dangerous.
Because ODing can be a rough way to die. With nitrogen hypoxia you just go to sleep and never wake up.
It sounds like a reasonable way to die when the individual doesn't know what's going on or is accepting/willing. As an execution method it's shit.
Well, disregarding the normal fear of death that would be there regardless of the method, I think the issue is the mask. It would be much better to just fill the room with N2. You can do this easilly enough by evaporating liquid N2. Of course, this would not be "medical grade" so people would complain just to complain.
We could also just not kill people. Kinda seems to be at the root of this problem.
Yeah the mask and timing is what caused that one prisoner to be in so much suffering since he knew it was going to happen imminently so he held his breath.
If it were done gradually over a period of like 30 minutes, he likely wouldn't have noticed and just drifted into unconsciousness.
AirGas, Air Products, and Matheson are the manufacturers, for anyone interested.
My job's vendor is also mentioned:
Other manufacturers of medical nitrogen in the US were more circumspect. Linde, a global multinational founded in Germany and headquartered in the UK, would not say whether it was willing to sell its product for use in US death chambers and declined to comment.
That's a yes from Linde then
Just got the optics I would really avoid "execution gas chambers" being on my product applications sheet if I were a German company.
This is an honest question. In the US we probably put down thousands of household pets each month. Many of them have their owners right there beside them holding their paw. It isn't tramatic for the pet or the owner.
How can it be this difficult for us to humanely execute a human?
Because we're kill our pets out of love, and we kill inmates out of hate. Humane treatment isn't difficult, the cruelty is intentional.
So long as were still using the barbaric practice of state-sanctioned murder, the practice itself will remain barbaric. The only solution is to eliminate the death penalty like the rest of the civilized western world.
Nitrogen is almost 80% of air so it’s hardly in short supply. Also why would you need medical grade? This is like alcohol swabs at the IV insertion site for lethal injection. They just don’t want the bad publicity of being associated, but it’s not going to stop anything.
Yeah. It is one thing when the state needs a controlled substance like execution drugs. In that case, there are only a handfull of places to get it, and they are all required to vet their purchasers anyway.
For Nitrogen, anyone who wants some can just order a canister off of Amazon and get it delivered no questions asked. Or, for a few thousand, have their own N2 generator.
Would defense lawyers raise hell about non-medical N2 being used? Sure, but they raise hell about everything; its their job. You would delay all executions for a few years while the appeals process plays out. Then end up with a final ruling saying that consumer grade N2 is good enough.
I think the death penalty should just go away but if you're going to have it I don't understand why prisons are so gong-ho about all these complicated execution methods.
Why don't they just shoot people? That would work. It simple, it's quick, and it involves cool guns, which shouldn't really be a consideration but it's the US so it is.
Nitrogen generators are relatively cheap and compact these days, so I don't see this having a huge impact if a prison really wants to go this route
Seems sensible enough. Even if you agreed that there should be a death penalty and nitrogen is a humane way to do it the tiny amount of money you could potentially make supplying it would not be worth the potential PR hit.