739
Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates
(www.independent.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
739 points (93.6% liked)
News
23287 readers
1272 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Anyone still want to use the cool nitrogen based suicide pods from Austria?
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.
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.