Transcript
Alabama suffocated a man to death in a gas chamber tonight after starving him so he wouldn't choke on his own vomit as they did it. And this was deemed perfectly legal by multiple courts in the vaunted American legal system.
That's what happens when you value institutions over people.
Link for more info: https://www.reuters.com/legal/alabama-prepares-carry-out-first-execution-by-nitrogen-asphyxiation-2024-01-25/
He wasn't "starved", it says right there in the article that he was given his last meal this morning (Thursday) and allowed no solids after 10am because he suffered from nausea and was worried he'd vomit.
It's okay to be anti-execution but you don't have to make shit up to be inflammatory, there's plenty of other valid reasons to be against execution but making sure a man doesn't choke on his own vomit isn't one of them.
Plus they're trying to say he suffocated like it was torture, no they used nitrogen specifically so it didn't activate the body's panic response to lack of oxygen. He just fell asleep.
Edit: he didn't just fall asleep because he probably held his breath, according to the article, which I didnt read. In my defense I had a news app blocker on (clearly barely working)
And the reason that works is that your body doesn't actually detect low oxygen. When you hold your breath for a long time, the sensation comes from high CO2 levels. That's one reason that working in a hydrogen or helium airship is dangerous, because there can be a leak and you won't even notice until passing out.
Shout out to Project Hail Mary for educating millions about this.
Also he specifically requested that they used nitrogen over other methods.
He later changed his request to death by firing squad, but I suspect that may have been a delaying tactic rather than an actual preference.
Which is so much better than injectables, which ARE torture. They get injected with a tranq first so they don't show signs of struggle or pain when the actual death shot is given.
If fentanyl is so cheap, available, and deadly, why don’t they just use that? Probably because they want their pound of flesh.
eyewitness accounts disagree
"Smith’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, who’d previously expressed concern that the method could be inhumane, witnessed the execution and described it in more graphic terms, saying it was 'the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.'
Smith, wearing a tight-fitting mask that covered his entire face, convulsed when the gas was turned on, 'popped up on the gurney' repeatedly, and gasped, heaved and spat, Hood said.
'It was absolutely horrific,' he said."
"Smith, who was on a gurney, appeared conscious for “several minutes into the execution,” and “shook and writhed” for about two minutes after that, media witnesses said in a joint report."
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/us/alabama-execution-nitrogen-what-we-know/index.html
Witnesses described writhing:
They think he was holding his breath, so the CO2 concentration in his blood would have risen. Between the CO2 build up and just knowing you are about to be killed, it's not surprising he started panicking and writhing.
That's what people miss when touting nitrogen asphyxiation as humane. It's only humane if the person being killed willingly gives themselves over to the process and takes nice deep breaths. If they're not willing to die of course they're still going to resist to the best of their abilities and try and get the mask off.
They should just fill his chamber up with nitrogen on a random day of the week while he's asleep
At least part of that was attributed to him holding his breath for as long as possible once they started administrating the gas.
I totally get the impulse, but breathing in nitrogen wasn’t the thing that would harm him. It’s just lack of oxygen, which holding your breath isn’t going to help.
Legal execution is fucking sickening, It’s horrifying that we did that to him.
What's even more sickening is him stabbing that woman to death, can you imagine how much fear and pain she went through?
Yes, and 2 wrongs make a right of course. /s
Or maybe it's about vengeance and not about paying a due to society?
It is about vengeance and also about not perpetually providing room and board for someone who lost their rights when they decided to take someone else's rights to life away.
Edit: why would they have an inalienable right to life, even if it is a meager life in prison, if they decided they can takeinnocent people's lives for their own deranged reasons?
That's easy to answer. Justice is not perfect, and sooner or later you will execute an innocent person. We know this has happened in the UK, because DNA evidence proved that the person couldn't have been there, and they would have been released had they not been executed.
Death is final and you don't just respawn at your bed, so this is the worst possible outcome. Abolishing the death penalty avoids this terrible situation, and yes it means you keep people like this alive until their natural death, but it also maximises the chance that new evidence can be found that proves that person didn't in fact commit the crime.
Sure I'm sympathetic to that argument. I've recently looked up lists of some of the people that most likely were found innocent post execution.
But what if we had stricter criteria. What about the people we are absolutely certain, with witnesses and camera footage, are guilty of murder? I'm specifically thinking of people like Nikolas Cruz, a school shooter who killed 17?
That's the dilemma. The thing is, when we last executed an innocent, we believed we had absolute incontrovertible proof. We have always known a death sentence to be final.
Maybe this argument will win the day: The value of human life is so high, and the execution of an innocent is so terrible, that we convert the death sentence to life imprisonment for the benefit of all those that will later be proven innocent. And yes this means some genuine criminals will live, but that is a better price to pay than executing even one innocent. The death penalty will ALWAYS have some collateral damage, and the only way to avoid that is to abolish it.
In Cruz's case of course another significant aspect is the lack of sensible gun control. But you Americans value guns more than you value kids, and until that changes you'll be stuck with your Cruzes. Killing Cruz for a systemic failure is no solution.
Then it's still a bad idea because of the literal cost to taxpayers.
Life in prison is $70,000 per year (paid by taxpayers, of course).
The legal battle around the death penalty is around $1.12 million, also paid around taxpayers
https://www.cato.org/blog/financial-implications-death-penalty
That's 14 times more expensive.
There are tons of things I would see the state spend money on rather than literally killing people. In the case of this, maybe mental health help for the victims.
Well one way to lower it is to settle law around the death penalty it seems. And they attribute part of the cost to battling chemical manufacturers, which could be moot with how cheap and easy it is to acquire nitrogen or even carbon monoxide.
Also if it's 70,000 a year to house an inmate... if an inmate is jailed for 20 years before death, total cost is 1.4 million. If an inmate is jailed at 20 and lives for another 60 years, that's 4.2 million.
So taking out a very young inmate would theoretically save the state about 3 million if they live until a natural age. Ted Kaczynski lived until 81 and absolutely deserved death.
Or you could just not kill people.
From amnesty USA. https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost/
And he did die. Does that not satisfy you?
Kidding, but it's not a matter of deserves. It's about the states power in relation to their citizens. The state shouldn't have the power over life and death, because power corrupts. Cases like this: https://innocenceproject.org/melissa-lucio-9-facts-innocent-woman-facing-execution/
The poor woman was interrogated for 5 hours straight by police into confessing her "crime", while pregnant with twins, after which she was sentenced to death (still alive btw, lawsuits still ongoing and sucking up taxpayer money, even 13 years later.). One of the influential things in her death was the District Attorney who was attempting to be reelected on a "tough on crime" platform.
Of course, you made an argument about "what if we require really, really hard evidence"... but what evidence is greater than a confession? What if evidence is fudged? There can never be a guarantee, and we should design our systems to account for human error... or malice.
Prison should be a place to rehabilitate people first, and a place to remove dangerous people from society second. Not a political platform, like the death penalty is so often.
The death penalty is the ultimate form of virtue signaling. An expensive way to remove someone from society, when life in prison would have the same effects, relatively. Everybody dies eventually, no need to waste money on killing people early when we could be spending money on keeping people alive.
Yes, I think that should be illegal too! You’d have to be absolutely mental to want to kill someone.
"Writhing" (or maybe just convulsions that looked like writhing considering the restraints) after he no longer appeared to be conscious. NAD but my guess is this was a hypoxic seizure, an event of which he couldn't possibly have been aware.
Edit: Assuming I'm right, and if we ever get to the point where this is proven to be a "humane" form of execution, then the convulsions could reasonably be prevented with muscle relaxing drugs the same way they're are prevented during surgery or lethal injection... But I'd rather we just get to the point where we see the whole concept of retributive justice as inhumane.
This is pretty surprising, everything I've read indicates that he should indeed have been out in seconds. I wonder if the mask was a bad fit or the nitrogen wasn't pure?
Definitely not seconds. If that were the case, simply holding your breath for a few seconds would be enough to make you pass out. That myth comes from chokeholds, which are not the same thing, and (when done properly) don’t actually stop the person from breathing. Instead, they put pressure on the arteries, to cut off the brain’s blood supply directly.
Actual asphyxiation takes several minutes, as the oxygen in your blood is slowly consumed. For nitrogen asphyxiation, you get a wicked endorphin high as your brain realizes it’s low on oxygen and releases endorphins to try and keep you awake. (Side note, this is why autoerotic asphyxiation is a thing. People do it intentionally to get that endorphin release and make orgasms more powerful.) But your sense of suffocation actually comes from high amounts of carbonic acid in your blood; Carbonic acid is from CO2, (it’s also what gives carbonated drinks that characteristic bitter taste, and is why flat soda tastes cloyingly sweet without the bitter carbonic acid to counter the sweetness.) Since the CO2 never builds up in your system, you never get the sense of suffocation. You just get that euphoric endorphin high, then you fall asleep.
Nitrogen asphyxiation is actually how I’d prefer to go out, if I got to choose. Like if I were in a lot of pain in my elder years and simply wanted to die, nitrogen asphyxiation is how I’d want to do it. But I also recognize that at that point it would be a choice, not something the state is forcing upon me. This dude was forced into it, which means there’s a much higher chance of him panicking regardless of the method.
This is actually not totally correct, take a look at @MyEdgyAlt@sh.itjust.works’s thoughtful reply to my comment below!
It’s definitely not just seconds. Think about how long you can hold your breath, you’d be conscious for at least that long. You start getting brain damage after like 4 minutes without oxygen, and can live for maybe 6 minutes.
Edit: I’m wrong here! See the reply for why.
I don’t think this is quite right. Read up on “time of useful consciousness”. I think if you exhale the air in your lungs and inhale oxygen-free air you’ll be out much faster than if you just held your breath. I’m not entirely sure if total pressure matters or partial pressure matters, but I’m quite sure that there will be some similar effect. I have found some claims that the partial pressure is the major factor, so breathing pure nitrogen seems like it would incapacitate someone faster than holding their breath does, because the nitrogen is actively removing oxygen from their blood.
You are totally right. I looked into it a bit, the mistake I made was assuming that we’re more efficient at extracting oxygen from the air than we actually are. A held breath contains quite a lot of usable oxygen, which we can extract over minutes of time. Breathing in nitrogen would rapidly replace that still fairly-oxygenated air with pure nitrogen, and evidently our blood doesn’t carry more than a few seconds worth of oxygen.
Thanks for the gentle correction!
Also leaving out the fact that the executed and his lawyer both said this method was preferential to lethal injection.
As soon as I read starving I thought that person was an idiot