State’s ‘slow and agonizing’ execution of Kenneth Smith using an untested method labeled as cruel by experts and advocates
Smith’s execution by “nitrogen hypoxia” took around 22 minutes, according to media witnesses, who were led into a viewing room at the William C Holman correctional facility in Atmore shortly before 8 pm local time.
This isn’t a poisonous gas we’re talking about. Air is 78% nitrogen… A leak is of little concern unless it’s somehow so large that it’s displacing oxygen enough to cause oxygen deprivation.
A blade for throat-slitting feels like it’d be a larger danger to those administering, never mind the clean-up/biohazard concerns.
This isn’t a poisonous gas we’re talking about. Air is 78% nitrogen
Apparently it’s deadly enough to kill at least 1 guy. You also can’t see it.
I would say the risk of a gas spreading and affecting more than an intended target is greater than the risk someone will accidentally stab themselves in the head.
You raise a good point about fluids, but I think the danger from that can be mitigated with protective clothing to a greater degree than the next safest (for the administrator) option of a bullet can have its inherent danger of exploding at or near the wrong place be mitigated.
Idk that I agree with Nitrogen leaks being a big concern - I don’t know enough for certain to say one way or another really - but supposing they are a risk, regardless I think the biggest risk to the executioners or viewers is the psychological one.
Even convulsions after death that truly aren’t experienced by the convict can still greatly disturb the people who see them. Plus, in general, the psychological toll of systematically killing people who can’t fight back as one’s ‘mundane’ job. It’s gotta fuck people up. Maybe along the lines of how drone pilots - who effectively go to war, but who aren’t surrounded by fellow soldiers all the time like regular soldiers, but instead who go home every to friends and family who aren’t at war, causing prolonged feelings of alienation and separation that tend to hit regular soldiers only after they come home from deployment - end up with a lot of ptsd problems.
That’s great, and there’s nothing wrong with those of us who feel that the death penalty is immoral. But as long as we are still committing some executions, I’d at least rather we try not to torture people while we do it.
There are plenty of ways to die without suffering, the most popular one being a morphine overdose, used in plenty of hospices when they give a patient a button to self-medicate until they pass out/away.
People, even whole families, keep dying in their sleep from CO poisoning every winter all over the world… and there are several other ways, some more accidental, some less.
If they really wanted to kill without torturing, they would’ve done it.
There are plenty of ways to die without suffering, the most popular one being a morphine overdose, used in plenty of hospices when they give a patient a button to self-medicate until they pass out/away.
Self medicate. The inherent difference is execution involves an unwilling participant.
People, even whole families, keep dying in their sleep from CO poisoning every winter all over the world…
Those people are not strapped down in prison.
If they really wanted to kill without torturing, they would’ve done it.
That isn’t possible. The very act of execution is torture.
That got me thinking: If euthanasia was legal, should prisoners be given the option? Or would that lead to them being mistreated to push them into euthanasia to save the taxpayer incarceration costs?
If euthanasia was legal, should prisoners be given the option?
I have no idea how to square the inherent coercion of either capitalism or incarceration (or often both) affecting the choice but everyone has the right to end their own existence whenever they want.
I think you’re right. If psychological torture is torture - and if things alont the lines of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and so on amount to such - then the psychological experience of being condemned to death, then while in prison fighting through appeal after appeal after appeal for years and being condemened again and again but still having that small sliver of hope, then finally (for those who aren’t ruled innocent or insane somewhere in that process) being marched to your end, must be torture too. Compared to that, a few moments of pain at the very end seems so small as to be beside the point.
Any improvement is an improvement, but there keep on being these news stories about “aha, we have finally found the way to do this painlessly!” that repeatedly don’t end up panning out for one reason or another. Even this relatively small improvement in the lot of death row convicts seems totally illusive.
TBH I am following the news on this because a cheap, legal and easy way out of I get dementia would be reassuring.
Legal is irrelevant if the method is successful. What are they gonna do, throw your corpse in prison?
Second, I wouldn’t follow news on state murder to determine how to go out yourself but as a bit of free advice apparently they put just enough oxygen in those helium canisters consumers can buy to stop people doing what you’re thinking that way.
…they put just enough oxygen in those helium canisters consumers can buy to stop people…
I’m not so sure that’s true… At least, I know for certain it wasn’t true for at least one brand of consumer grade helium canisters sold in the US, around 12 or 13 years ago.
In the early 2010s, I worked the day shift as an EMT for a small town ambulance company. One morning, right as I was clocking in for the 5am shift change, a call came in for an adult male unresponsive. My partner and I didn’t think much of it - it was a college town and we worked the Friday morning shift, so it wasn’t unusual to get early calls for drunk frat kids passed out in a yard from the Thirsty Thursday parties - don’t get me wrong, these were often serious situations, but run of the mill stuff for the job. So we told the overnight volunteers to go home, jumped in the rig and got on our way to the scene.
I started to get a bad feeling on the way over though, because it was at the local fishing pier, which was in a park - kind of a scenic place, not really near the college - but my partner played it down, said rush week had just finished so it’s probably some pledge bullshit or something.
We arrive at the park, pull into the parking lot, and see the police lights off to the right - the dock is off to the left, with a small beach to the right, with the parking lot overlooking the coast - the police officer has back against the trunk of a grey Nissan, thumbs in his vest, head hung low - looks up at the ambulance makes eye contact with me and shakes his head.
We get out of the rig, ask him what’s going on, he tells us that we’ll need to pronounce, and it isn’t pretty.
I walk around the driver side of the car and see a kid in the front seat. He couldn’t have been older than 20. There was a clear plastic bag over his head, the edges pulled taught to his neck with a length of string tied in a bow, the bag mostly inflated so it wasn’t touching his face. There was one end of a tube inside the bag, held in place with an extra knot from the string. The other end traced back to a tank sitting on the front passenger seat, still in its cardboard box with pictures of happy children playing with balloons on the side. There was a bottle of brown liquor in the cupholder.
I’ll never forget the blank stare of his semi-open eyes, set in his young, handsomely featured, yet now lifeless face - his skin the ashen, mottled, and pale blue-grey color of the recently deceased.
It was immediately obvious this young man had parked there for one last nice view of either a sunset or sunrise, drank up some courage, donned his gear, and drifted off to a final sleep.
I stood there only for a moment, but it felt like an eternity passed as I absorbed the emotional intensity of what had transpired there. I regained my sense of composure with the crack of my partner shattering the driver-door’s window, saw him reach to check for a pulse, turning his head away after a moment while waiting for the full, painfully requisite 60 seconds, pronounced him dead, and we were back in the truck on our way back to the station.
I’m still not right from that call.
I really hope things have changed, and that manufacturers are required to add oxygen or bitter compounds or something that prevent this kind of thing from happening.
If you’ve read down this far, I thank you. Writing this out was helpful for me to process - I took a few minor liberties in writing this story, mostly to obfuscate potential recognition, and for dramatic effect - but made no changes to what I felt and saw in my description of that scene.
And lastly, if you’re struggling with your mental health or substances - you’re not alone. This world can be hard and cruel, terribly isolating and dark - but there is warmth and kindness too. If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. You are loved. You will be missed by the ones who love you. If you’re in crisis, and there’s someone you know and trust, call them and talk to them. If they cant talk or don’t pick up, or if there’s no one you feel you can trust, call a crisis prevention hotline any time, any day, and they will listen to you with the utmost respect, dignity, and empathy.
[Most other countries]
Call your local emergency line, most often it’s 112 if you’re outside of North America - they will direct you to help if you’re in need.
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There is inherently no safe way to kill someone and no method should be pursued regardless. Killing captive people is wrong.
When I say safe, I mean to the ones administering. Obviously it’s not so safe for the one dying.
Gas can leak out and kill people. Gas is also invisible.
Were administrator safety one’s sole concern you got to think a blade to the throat beats out gas. As in Kashrut or Halal butchering.
This isn’t a poisonous gas we’re talking about. Air is 78% nitrogen… A leak is of little concern unless it’s somehow so large that it’s displacing oxygen enough to cause oxygen deprivation.
A blade for throat-slitting feels like it’d be a larger danger to those administering, never mind the clean-up/biohazard concerns.
Apparently it’s deadly enough to kill at least 1 guy. You also can’t see it.
I would say the risk of a gas spreading and affecting more than an intended target is greater than the risk someone will accidentally stab themselves in the head.
You raise a good point about fluids, but I think the danger from that can be mitigated with protective clothing to a greater degree than the next safest (for the administrator) option of a bullet can have its inherent danger of exploding at or near the wrong place be mitigated.
Idk that I agree with Nitrogen leaks being a big concern - I don’t know enough for certain to say one way or another really - but supposing they are a risk, regardless I think the biggest risk to the executioners or viewers is the psychological one.
Even convulsions after death that truly aren’t experienced by the convict can still greatly disturb the people who see them. Plus, in general, the psychological toll of systematically killing people who can’t fight back as one’s ‘mundane’ job. It’s gotta fuck people up. Maybe along the lines of how drone pilots - who effectively go to war, but who aren’t surrounded by fellow soldiers all the time like regular soldiers, but instead who go home every to friends and family who aren’t at war, causing prolonged feelings of alienation and separation that tend to hit regular soldiers only after they come home from deployment - end up with a lot of ptsd problems.
That’s great, and there’s nothing wrong with those of us who feel that the death penalty is immoral. But as long as we are still committing some executions, I’d at least rather we try not to torture people while we do it.
There is no way to accomplish that. Execution is inherently cruel and there is no non-tortuous way to carry it out.
There are plenty of ways to die without suffering, the most popular one being a morphine overdose, used in plenty of hospices when they give a patient a button to self-medicate until they pass out/away.
People, even whole families, keep dying in their sleep from CO poisoning every winter all over the world… and there are several other ways, some more accidental, some less.
If they really wanted to kill without torturing, they would’ve done it.
Self medicate. The inherent difference is execution involves an unwilling participant.
Those people are not strapped down in prison.
That isn’t possible. The very act of execution is torture.
That got me thinking: If euthanasia was legal, should prisoners be given the option? Or would that lead to them being mistreated to push them into euthanasia to save the taxpayer incarceration costs?
I have no idea how to square the inherent coercion of either capitalism or incarceration (or often both) affecting the choice but everyone has the right to end their own existence whenever they want.
If you look at #RoboDebt in Australia, it could be argued that the unemployed were hooked to death saying as it lead to several suicides.
I think you’re right. If psychological torture is torture - and if things alont the lines of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and so on amount to such - then the psychological experience of being condemned to death, then while in prison fighting through appeal after appeal after appeal for years and being condemened again and again but still having that small sliver of hope, then finally (for those who aren’t ruled innocent or insane somewhere in that process) being marched to your end, must be torture too. Compared to that, a few moments of pain at the very end seems so small as to be beside the point.
Any improvement is an improvement, but there keep on being these news stories about “aha, we have finally found the way to do this painlessly!” that repeatedly don’t end up panning out for one reason or another. Even this relatively small improvement in the lot of death row convicts seems totally illusive.
TBH I am following the news on this because a cheap, legal and easy way out of I get dementia would be reassuring.
Legal is irrelevant if the method is successful. What are they gonna do, throw your corpse in prison?
Second, I wouldn’t follow news on state murder to determine how to go out yourself but as a bit of free advice apparently they put just enough oxygen in those helium canisters consumers can buy to stop people doing what you’re thinking that way.
Haha, true. Nevertheless I meant legal as in easy to acquire the means.
Do you live a place where that describes a gun?
No. Australia. But if you have a change of mind a split second before pulling the trigger you risk surviving with horrific injury.
My state of NSW last year legalized euthanasia so I suppose the means are accessible. I’m not going to care about expense if it ever gets to that.
I’m not so sure that’s true… At least, I know for certain it wasn’t true for at least one brand of consumer grade helium canisters sold in the US, around 12 or 13 years ago.
In the early 2010s, I worked the day shift as an EMT for a small town ambulance company. One morning, right as I was clocking in for the 5am shift change, a call came in for an adult male unresponsive. My partner and I didn’t think much of it - it was a college town and we worked the Friday morning shift, so it wasn’t unusual to get early calls for drunk frat kids passed out in a yard from the Thirsty Thursday parties - don’t get me wrong, these were often serious situations, but run of the mill stuff for the job. So we told the overnight volunteers to go home, jumped in the rig and got on our way to the scene.
I started to get a bad feeling on the way over though, because it was at the local fishing pier, which was in a park - kind of a scenic place, not really near the college - but my partner played it down, said rush week had just finished so it’s probably some pledge bullshit or something.
We arrive at the park, pull into the parking lot, and see the police lights off to the right - the dock is off to the left, with a small beach to the right, with the parking lot overlooking the coast - the police officer has back against the trunk of a grey Nissan, thumbs in his vest, head hung low - looks up at the ambulance makes eye contact with me and shakes his head.
We get out of the rig, ask him what’s going on, he tells us that we’ll need to pronounce, and it isn’t pretty.
I walk around the driver side of the car and see a kid in the front seat. He couldn’t have been older than 20. There was a clear plastic bag over his head, the edges pulled taught to his neck with a length of string tied in a bow, the bag mostly inflated so it wasn’t touching his face. There was one end of a tube inside the bag, held in place with an extra knot from the string. The other end traced back to a tank sitting on the front passenger seat, still in its cardboard box with pictures of happy children playing with balloons on the side. There was a bottle of brown liquor in the cupholder.
I’ll never forget the blank stare of his semi-open eyes, set in his young, handsomely featured, yet now lifeless face - his skin the ashen, mottled, and pale blue-grey color of the recently deceased.
It was immediately obvious this young man had parked there for one last nice view of either a sunset or sunrise, drank up some courage, donned his gear, and drifted off to a final sleep.
I stood there only for a moment, but it felt like an eternity passed as I absorbed the emotional intensity of what had transpired there. I regained my sense of composure with the crack of my partner shattering the driver-door’s window, saw him reach to check for a pulse, turning his head away after a moment while waiting for the full, painfully requisite 60 seconds, pronounced him dead, and we were back in the truck on our way back to the station.
I’m still not right from that call.
I really hope things have changed, and that manufacturers are required to add oxygen or bitter compounds or something that prevent this kind of thing from happening.
If you’ve read down this far, I thank you. Writing this out was helpful for me to process - I took a few minor liberties in writing this story, mostly to obfuscate potential recognition, and for dramatic effect - but made no changes to what I felt and saw in my description of that scene.
And lastly, if you’re struggling with your mental health or substances - you’re not alone. This world can be hard and cruel, terribly isolating and dark - but there is warmth and kindness too. If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. You are loved. You will be missed by the ones who love you. If you’re in crisis, and there’s someone you know and trust, call them and talk to them. If they cant talk or don’t pick up, or if there’s no one you feel you can trust, call a crisis prevention hotline any time, any day, and they will listen to you with the utmost respect, dignity, and empathy.
[US and Canada] Call 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline. Call 911 for life-threatening/imminent situations. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/suicide-prevention
[Most other countries] Call your local emergency line, most often it’s 112 if you’re outside of North America - they will direct you to help if you’re in need.
Additional information: https://www.cnet.com/health/suicide-hotlines-crisis-hotlines-to-call-when-you-need-help/