Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates
independent.co.uk
“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
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Correct me if Im wrong but those pods are in Sweden, and also take steps to ensure what a person exhales is quickly removed from the system to prevent rebreathing. If this had been done with one of those pods, he would have lost consciousness in minutes, the fact that he lived to struggle for long suggests this setup was not using pure nitrogen, and not accounting for exhaling. Strangling him would have been quicker, meaning he was getting oxygen somehow.
Edit: I recommend watching the Smarter Every Day episode on Hypoxia. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw the TL;DR is that if done right, dying from a proper nitrogen execution would be practically painless.
In this execution, the setup seems to have accidentally on purpose been setup to ensure maximum suffering, even disregarding the victim holding their breathe and seemingly hyperventilating themselves to saturate their co2 levels, something the body will respond to and trigger panic flight or fight responses.
Reuters mentions the execution used a facial mask connected to a tank of nitrogen.
So yeah... No CO2 removal and probably not a perfect seal against outside atmosphere. This is a pretty half-assed implementation.
Half-assed executions are pretty on brand for Alabama. Apparently their last 3 attempts before this made the list.
Who, with sufficient expertise, is willing to participate in creating this? Maybe they're out there, but I think this incompetence is perhaps the best they could find.
Tragic on many levels.
To me it sounds like they read the old 4chan guides on how to kill yourself with a mask hooked up to a compressed air tank for filling balloons. It wouldn't surprise me.
Definitely not Sweden. Euthanasia & death penalty are both illegal here.
78% of the air you breathe is nitrogen dummy.
It's not the nitrogen that kills you, it's the lack of oxygen.
This method of suffocating someone would work just as well with a gas like helium or argon. It's just that nitrogen is cheap and plentiful for reasons even someone as dimwitted as you can probably figure out.