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Alabama completes first execution by nitrogen asphyxiation
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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I'll agree that dying against your will is torture. And for animals that have time to know something is wrong and can't escape it, they're going to be distressed. I'm curious about the discrepancy between why this reportedly took so long when work safety experts warn that a couple of breaths of an oxygen deficient atmosphere can induce unconsciousness.
But I'm only answering the question of why we would think this is painless and then assertion that we can't know. It sure sounds like we do know. But I'll stay open minded and keep reading.
The article said that the guy held his breath for as long as possible. It really would be torture to be strapped down and know that the next breath you take will kill you. Even if the actual experience is completely painless, trying to hold your breath as long as you can in order to stay alive for just a few more seconds sounds like a nightmare.
That's horrifying. Holding your breath until you think holding it any longer will kill you because not doing so definitely will. At least with the injection there was absolutely nothing you could do to delay or stop the process once it started.
Well, apparently there was.
Why the fuck wouldn't they sedate the guy first - give him a fucking fentanyl OD and immediately put the mask on him.
I'm not sure. Maybe there's a law or something that says a person needs to be conscious and aware when they get executed?
I mean, the citation is, to start with, not a medical organization. They're reporting on workplace incidents, essentially, and making big assumptions. Also no mentioned of the violent seizures.
Also, not to be captain obvious, but reports of the experience, definitionally, come from people who survived, which is another layer of it being a vastly different experience than dying that may not even be terribly analogous. Surviving it might mean a biologically different process happened to you than not surviving it.
There's a huge difference between an industrial accident and an execution. One of them is being done on purpose. An industrial accident may be someone running into a room flooded by the N2 fire suppression system, expecting nothing was wrong, taking a few deep breaths, and suddenly blacking out. Sudden, unexpected, unprepared, confused. The prisoner knows its coming, it's being administered on a schedule, and might not be too keen on the whole thing. The guy in this case, for example, was strapped down to a gurney and had the mask tied to his head, allegedly. Not being surprised means it is a lot less likely to work in that sudden, shocking way even all-else being equal, which it isn't.
Again, the medical experts I've seen interviewed all shrug at the question. They do not know. And even if knowing its coming isn't an issue, the best evidence of using it for deliberate execution we have was the great distress it apparently caused animals.