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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Nitrogen Asphyxiation in the workplace is insanely dangerous specifically because humans (and most animals) don't have a way to detect nitrogen displacement...
The body detects hypoxia by build up of CO2, or more accurately carbonic acid, not loss of O2 - it doesn't expect for nitrogen to be the thing to displace all the oxygen, so you literally don't notice it. There's countless stories of people fainting and dying due to not realising the situation they were in.
So how in fuck's name did Alabama manage to botch it so badly that the first guy had an agonising death via seizure?? It takes a special kind of neglect to make that happen.
They put him in a mask instead of a sealed room. The mask filled with CO2, and may have not had a perfect seal due to thrashing as he struggled to breathe.
There are ways the masks could have worked but really to do this kind of thing humanly you need a sealed chamber with enough volume for CO2 to diffuse into or some kind of scrubber at the bottom pulling air out and displaced with pure N2 at the top.
It's difficult to tell if they are using the setup they are because of incompetence trying to seek out the cheapest solution, or malice and using the cheapest solution that will cause the maximum agony and suffering. It's pretty bad when bringing back hanging would be a more humane way of executing people than this travesty.
I don't understand how they even fucked it up. You have a very shallow mask with positive pressure from the nitrogen gas and a valve that opens when there is any extra pressure. Person breathes out CO2 and some nitrogen gas is expelled, person breathes in, almost only Nitrogen gas is inhaled. Am I missing something? I am not an engineer, but this seems like a way you could do it.
Congratulations, you're now the mayor of Alabama.
Well that makes sense - without any exhaust, the volume of nitrogen available wouldn't properly displace the air from his lungs before he put the mask in...
So he could've essentially just died from regular asphyxiation, which is quite painful, with a side of nitrogen.
Yes, that's what happened. He was tortured to death for over 20 minutes.
Why don't they apply anesthesia first? If I can get conked out so bad that I can't remember getting my wisdom teeth removed wouldn't that totally knock you out before being gassed?
You need a medic to administer the anesthesia and no medic is going to participate on that.
That's because if you mess it up you could kill somebody
Pharmaceutical companies will not supply those kinds of drugs for executions, because they understandably don't want their products associated with killing people.
Done properly, the nitrogen is basically an anesthesiac. It knocks you out real good.
If they can't properly enact what should've been a painless execution, how do you expect them to properly anesthetise someone?
Isn't the danger of improperly applying anesthesia that you could kill someone?
Of an overdose sure, but if they botch it the other way, there's a good possibility the prisoner never properly goes under or they wake up during the execution, either way experiencing the full pain of death.
That I'd figure is the worse of the results, and likely the one that'd happen given these guys seem to have a knack for torturous executions.
Isn't that still better than no anesthesia at all? Assuming that the execution method wasn't changed to be worse.
Technically speaking yes, but that assumes they're treated the same. It's almost certain that if the executioners are under the illusion their anesthesia has worked, they're not going to do things in such a way as to minimise pain.
Prisons seem determined to turn executions into torture sessions - and while the need for capital punishment can be debated all day, we can all agree that the death is supposed to be the punishment, not the procedure.
Because that would make a lot of sense, but the world doesn't work that way
The cruelty is the point
I think it just didn't end up working as well as scientists thought it would. Maybe there's more to painless nitrogen execution besides just filling a container with nitrogen. It's not like they can just test a nitrogen death chamber before rolling it out. We'll see if the next execution goes the same way or not.
Alabama did not listen to scientists. Medical science understands the roles of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen quite well, and predicted that filling a mask with nitrogen would be a horrible application of the technology. The mask did not ventilate his own breathe, so the high concentrations of nitrogen did not displace the oxygen and carbon dioxide fast enough to avoid the gasping asphyxiation reflex.
There were specific recommendations made by scientists. Either use a mask with a one-way valve that exhausts exhalation, or fill a chamber of sufficient volume that will render the concentrations of his own exhalation insignificant. Alabama did neither, and it was a disaster.
I think the problem was that they didn't actually use a chamber and instead tried to use a mask, IIRC
I think there's a few contextual factors...
If someone doesn't know they're being asphyxiated with nitrogen they might just pass out.
If someone wants to euthanise themselves by nitrogen asphyxiation they might just drift off peacefully.
... but if someone doesn't want to die and knows they're being asphyxiated it's probably not going to be so peaceful.