- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.
Executions are barbaric period
Sure, but as far as methods this is considered the ideal to the point of being how most people advocate for legal assisted suicide.
If youre going to legally kill someone, this is the way to do so humanely.
Not this way, they had no method to remove the carbon dioxide from his lungs.
It would have been trivial if they used existing methodology, but they didn’t bother to emulate it.
A pure nitrogen environment does not prevent the exhalation of carbon dioxide (source).
They just filled the air he was breathing with nitrogen instead of cycling it through his airspace… They needed a larger volume of gas to keep the amount of CO2 low enough
I’ve seen this claim made multiple times but the articles in question make no mention of it - including this one, unless I’m blind. Do you have a source for this claim?
I don’t know. The older I get the more I feel that locking someone a confined space with a bunch of other unintegratables, essentially indefinitely, is less humane. I keep thinking society needs to have some skin in the game making these decisions. Seems like there’s more of that with something decisive like capital punishment than locking someone in an out of the way cage and forgetting about them.
Maybe this was more of an !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world post tho.