Alabama inmate opposes being ‘test subject’ for new nitrogen execution method

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 423 points –
Alabama inmate opposes being 'test subject' for new nitrogen execution method
apnews.com

An Alabama inmate would be the test subject for the “experimental” execution method of nitrogen hypoxia, his lawyers argued, as they asked judges to deny the state’s request to carry out his death sentence using the new method.

In a Friday court filing, attorneys for Kenneth Eugene Smith asked the Alabama Supreme Court to reject the state attorney general’s request to set an execution date for Smith using the proposed new execution method. Nitrogen gas is authorized as an execution method in three states but it has never been used to put an inmate to death.

Smith’s attorneys argued the state has disclosed little information about how nitrogen executions would work, releasing only a redacted copy of the proposed protocol.

187

You are viewing a single comment

I'll take it if he doesn't want it.

I was gonna say they could test on me, but I don't want to support the death penalty.

Unless they're pedophiles!

To make the same point in a less sarcastic way, it is a problem that just throwing the term pedophile at someone immediately ostracizes them and society is willing to condem them to effective death.

It's so bad that a jury doesn't even really need evidence to indict. Because apparently seeing one, potentially censored image is enough to cause PTSD?

I've seen people being decapitated without getting PTSD. I've seen horrible things from the Holocaust. I don't think one image is going to cause permanent damage. (I fully believe dealing with this stuff every day for years can be an issue. That's different.)

We need to drop just a bit of the hysteria.

A while back round where I live a guy was burned to death by a mob of his neighbours because people were saying he was a pedophile. Turned out he had only been taking photos of kids vandalising his garden. Oops.

Link to that news article?

Thanks for sharing, but, at the same time, I really wish it wasn't true.

They should've given the people who did it a life order with all chances of parole chewed up, spat out, burnt up and the ashes shot into oblivion before being buried 900 feet underground.

Holy fucking shit. It never once occurred to me that lynching was a thing in the modern UK. Mass stabbings? Sure. Getting mugged and beaten by gangs of teens, okay. But straight up lynching? Fuck.

I agree with you when it comes to the ostracizing problem. I would just like to remind you that not everyone is psychologically identical to you. Some (perhaps many) people CAN get PTSD by looking at a picture of a terrible crime.

I don't think a bunch of people got PTSD from 4chan 2004.

Ah yes, 4chan, full of normal, well-adjusted people

I have seen some horrible shit too. Like that girl and her male cousin rapping in a bathroom with a gun, and she winds up accidentally killing her cousin and then killing herself after she realized what she did. Yeah, never going to forget that. Don't have PTSD from it, but definitely was traumatic.

When I was 11 I saw a whole 40 minute documentary from 1945 about it and I haven't gotten PTSD from it.

WoO stupid take

Why?

Pedophiles usually don't want to be pedophiles and won't act on their desires; they're just quietly suffering from mental illness and just their existence shouldn't change someone's stance on the death penalty.

Yeah, I'm talking about the pedophile who do act on their desires.

Sorry that needs to be spelled out for you.

Glad we can both agree they deserve the death penalty.

I agree that there are some crimes so horrible that the offenders no longer deserve to live. The trouble is that I don't trust police and the courts to correctly identify the guilty all of the time. Until there's a system that can prove guilt with 100% accuracy we shouldn't have a death penalty.

Yeah. Look at I think it was either south korea or taiwan but one of them went and grabbed a dude for murder and then killed him, came out a few months later he was nowhere fucking near the crime and was completely innocent. They grabbed another dude and did the same. Wrong. Again. They never even found the actual killer.

Right? Why aren't suicide booths a thing yet?

The capitalist owners could make more profit off it, and that's literally all human civilization values. And bonus, the people the Capitalists and their doting peasant sycophants consider "lazy, socialist commies" would largely opt out, leaving them to count their shillings in peace, unopposed.

Is it about needing a homeless population that can't (easily) opt out to scare the other peasants into continuing to show up for their purposeless jobs? Or just the last thin fig leaf of the capitalists deluding themselves into believing themselves less than monstrous?

Because being trapped in this labor camp of a civilization isn't mercy. It's the opposite of mercy. Not legalizing escape isn't the same thing as valuing life, and we clearly don't. It's the same thing as an anti-abortionist claiming to value human life while opposing social programs to help the newborn and mother.