Alabama, having exhausted its other alternatives, executed Kenneth Eugene Smith tonight by fitting him with a mask and then pumping it full of nitrogen:
Witnesses saw Smith struggle as the gas began flowing into the mask that covered his entire face. He began writhing and thrashing for approximately two to four minutes, followed by around five minutes of heavy breathing.
This has prompted a lot of hand-wringing, but the convulsions are autonomic reactions. Smith was almost certainly unconscious when they happened.
The death penalty doesn't happen to be big hot button of mine, but I understand the opposition and I'm certainly OK with ending it. Still, if it's going to be done, I have a hard time understanding the endless controversies over the precise method it's applied. Nitrogen is fine, and almost certainly painless. Ditto for helium, once a favored method of suicide. That's because human choking reflexes don't respond to what kind of gas you inhale, only to a buildup of carbon dioxide. Obviously you don't get that when you breathe pure helium or nitrogen, so you barely even know anything is wrong. This is why accidental asphyxiation via nitrogen is fairly common.
Hanging is also painless. So is the guillotine. So is a firing squad if it's not botched. By contrast, lethal injection is idiotically complicated and never should have been adopted.
Opposing the death penalty is fine. But trying to pretend that even a brief and theoretical moment of discomfort is the real problem? That makes no sense.
I think the advocates against this method are just against the death penalty in general and are bothered that this method does not require special drugs that can have limited supply. This would allow more people to easily be put to death, which means more innocent people will easily be put to death.
That is not how I would describe it- the anti-DP movement is trying to keep people alive- but it is true that a lot of the recent finagling over method of execution is a result of a bad strategic decision to limit lethal injection drugs, as if the Red States would just give up and cry "uncle" if drugs were made unavailable. Of course they were going to find new methods and of course the courts were going to let them.
"Hanging is also painless. So is the guillotine. So is a firing squad if it's not botched."
Citation required.
Yeah, uh... what?
They might be *quick* (well, see the hanging thing) but they're definitely not painless.
Exit interviews, perhaps?
'Nitrogen is fine, and almost certainly painless"
gonna need to see the research and citations on how death by hypoxia is painless
Google is your friend!
I googled and found out the Veterinarians will not use this method to euthanize animals. Is it so much to ask for you to substantiate this claim in light of this fact?
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/18/alabama-nitrogen-gas-execution
Kevin wasn’t asked to substantiate anything. He was told by the commenter that the commenter was going to “need” some additional information. Kevin quite reasonably suggested such information is available via an Internet search, similar to the one you have apparently conducted.
Kevin asserted this method of execution was painless, but did not provide any evidence this was the case. When asked, he implied it wasn’t on him to do so, despite making the claim. Indeed, this claim is central to the point of his blog post. When I pointed to evidence that it might not be painless, you said it was on his commenters to do this, which again, is weird since he made the initial claim it was painless. I do not think it is weird to ask for evidence to back up a claim someone is making. A long time ago, Kevin would have provided some evidence to back up his blog post’s central claims, but often it seems like he doesn’t need to do this any more for some reason.
Don't act like a lazy whiner when you can find the answer. You just don't want to admit the truth. Plenty more like this.
From Quora - took 30 seconds.
Is it really painless to die from breathing in nitrogen?
Yes absolutely painless.
This experiment is done by dozens of medical students in our university every year.
This experiment is done to show breathing response to hypercapnia (high blood CO2)/mild hypoxia vs pure hypoxia (low O2) alone. This response has major uses in modern medicine (critical for mechanical ventilation tuning for example)
This is done by simple rebreathing without or with a CO2 scrubber (effectively making you breathe higher and higher concentration nitrogen).
Total volume of the system was about the tidal normal lung volume, with the CO2 scrubber on, unconsciousness was reached in less than 10 breaths.
Spirometer did show only minimal frequency/volume increase with decreasing O2 level. Subject didn’t feel any distress before losing consciousness.
On the opposite, without the scrubber on. Ventilation is shown to quickly increase on the spirometer and panic sets in in only a couple of breaths. It is impossible to make the subject to lose consciousness in this way because he will defend actively long before losing strength. (This wasn't tested, but interestingly even long before CO2 level become toxic in itself)
This experiment was shown to show strange quirks in human physiology: homeostasis of our most needed input (02) in only controlled indirectly in clinical setting by responding to blood CO2 increase.
By hyperventilating before freediving, you can use this “inefficiency” to delay breathing reflex. It is a very efficient way to die under the sun.
My take on not (widely)using this easy, efficient and painless method for executions is that I believe it is feared it would decrease its deterrent power.
But above all I believe it will make people realise how good a poison it is for themselves but also for others. Imagine pouring a gallon LN2 in someones car…
What's worse is the photos I saw earlier showed them using a medical mask which isn't designed to keep out the external atmosphere.
Worse, you can tell when someone turns on gas, since it's generally colder than the room, because it was compressed.
So he would know he was being suffocated.
It doesn't look like things went according to plan with this execution:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/01/27/alabama-execution-kenneth-smith-death-penalty
You're the one making the claim, Kevin. It's your job to provide proof supporting it.
Divers using rebreathers have to monitor the oxygen level of the gas they are breathing. If the oxygen level gets too low they will pass out. This is an insidious failure mode in that there is no warning, pain or distress prior to passing out.
Many years ago, I read about a couple of workers at NASA who climbed down into a pit that had accidentally filled with Nitrogen. Both men died. The analysis said that they were unconscious after the second breath (just long enough for the lungs to empty of oxygen), and dead a minute or two later.
Personally, I was once working on my running car in a closed garage (early twenties, when I knew a lot less about everything), when I suddenly felt sleepy and needed to just sit down and rest for a minute. Then I looked at the closed garage door and the running car, and I realized that sitting down might not be a good idea. I opened the door and suddenly wasn't sleepy at all.
I will say that my own experience with carbon monoxide poisoning was entirely painless. No different from taking a nap.
Unfortunately, given the way these things go, there's a good chance that your eventual, actual death will be a good deal more unpleasant than the one you barely missed out on. C'est la vie, I suppose!
Unfortunately, they didn't fill a pit with nitrogen and lower this man into it. Given that they botched a lethal injection procedure against this same man prior to this execution, I don't see any reason to believe this execution was performed humanely, even if execution by nitrogen gas can be done humanely in theory.
And I'm having trouble finding accounts written by the press witnesses concerning their opinions about Smith's suffering. That, to my mind, is very telling. Surely if it were obvious the procedure had led to Smith dying peacefully, anyone observing the execution with no agenda would be able to state that publicly? Nobody is losing their job in Alabama for being pro-execution.
Exactly. They used a mask, so he'd know exactly when the has flow started (it would be colder than surrounding air) and medical masks aren't designed to keep outside air out.
So he struggled, because he was tied down, and probably got little bits of oxygen until he exceeded his supply, and stopped being able to struggle. And then it takes another five minutes or so of heavy breathing to actually finish the cell failure from hypoxia.
I don’t know anything about the Alabama case, but some people just deserve to die as punishment for their crimes. I came to this conclusion when the case of Theodore Frank was in the news in Los Angeles. Frank kidnapped a two year old girl who he had seen earlier playing in her front yard. He raped her and tortured her using a pair of locking pliers. Then he strangled her to death. The California Supreme Court overturned Frank’s death penalty because it said the jury shouldn’t have been informed of Frank’s diary in which he detailed 100 other molestations. Rose Bird and two other justices were voted out of office based on that decision. Frank died of a heart attack in prison.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2001/09/08/convicted-killer-theodore-frank/f0d09e30-6914-4f29-bf8d-8d5fbd7bcd45/
The case was a very big deal in mCaliforniia at the time and it changed my mind regarding the death penalty.
I'm all for killing the Theodore Franks as long as we can guarantee that we never execute an innocent person and the scales of justice aren't unbalanced by wealth, racism, and other biases. Until then, Theodore gets to die of a heart attack after life in prison with no possibility of release.
It’s a problem, isn’t it? For my part I think there should be a higher standard of proof for the death penalty. Beyond any doubt. And it would have to apply to only the most heinous of crimes.
i don't know how you get to a standard higher than beyond a reasonable doubt. beyond an unreasonable doubt? but that isn't the only problem with the death penalty. its use is arbitrary. eleven of the 12 jurors in the smith case voted for life in prison for smith, but the judge overruled them and imposed death.
there was a murder in the town in which i once lived. the victim was a canadian police officer, if i remember correctly, and two men and one women were charged. one of the men and the woman made a deal to testify and got prison terms as a result. the third went to trial, was found guilty and sentenced to death. by the time he was executed, the other two had served their time and were free. the case is memorable for two reasons: first, the man and woman who testified were the ones believed to be chiefly responsible for the murder rather than the defendant who was executed. second, the state used the electric chair at the time and the executed inmate caught fire, one of a series of botched executions that led to the adoption of lethal injection.
If you scroll down you will see me talk about a guy I knew who was murdered. There is footage of him being shot and footage of the person who killed him standing over him and shooting again. The perpetrator did not deny he did it and had no remorse. His defense was that they deserved it. To me, that is beyond any doubt. There are lots of cases, as you note, that don’t rise to that standard, yet a reasonable person hearing the evidence would conclude that the defendant did it.
another example: the guy who committed the marjorie stoneman douglas high school shootings. there was no question of his guilt, no question about the magnitude of the crime, yet his life is spared because his attorneys convinced one juror that he should be spared. it's not hard to imagine that with a different legal team, different jury, even a different prosecutor that he ends up on the business end of a needle. totally arbitrary that his life is spared.
I was in college in California when they brought back the death penalty. Even though I was getting crushed by my stupid approach to college, I marched around, and I was at San Quentin the night they executed Robert Alton Harris. I had to look up his name twice to make this post.
Why was I out there then? Almost nobody at college cared. My dad opposed the death penalty like a lot of liberals back then. Now he's in assisted living.
I can still remember my dad telling when the story of Robert Stroud that changed his mind about the death penalty. Robert Stroud was a twice murderer whose sentence to be hanged was commuted to life in prison in solitary confinement. He became known as the Bird Man of Alcatraz, making real contributions in ornithology and later behaved heroically to protect innocent people during a prison riot.
Society must protect itself, and we have prisons, but I'm disappointed so many think they know who deserves to die. There's an aspect of human sacrifice to the death penalty. We kill Theodore Frank, and he becomes a totem or idol of the Monster. I think the death penalty is the navel of the dream of fascism. People understand this, so they don't want it to be a spectacle.
There are all sorts of people I think deserve to die, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for the state to kill them. We are capable of keeping people in prison, and when the justice system makes mistakes (which will happen, no matter how careful we are), the ability to rectify those mistakes is important on both the individual level and at the social level of maintaining institutional legitimacy.
Yeah, when people do bad shit, we should emulate them.
See, I find lifetime imprisonment a far harsher punishment than letting someone escape into nothingness.
It also has several other incredibly important benefits:
1) No arguments about the morality of state-sanctioned murder.
2) No possibility of ending the life of someone who didn't do what they're accused of doing. Death is final, imprisonment doesn't have to be.
3) Cheaper (I don't care about this one).
In my view, these 4 things completely negate any possible argument for the death penalty. It is completely indefensible as a position, full stop. If somebody did a crime deemed to be so heinous they deserve the worst punishment imaginable, I fail to see how death is worse than locking them in a cage forever.
People often argue as if they are attacking or defending a mathematical proof: chip away the smallest part and the whole edifice will come tumbling down. And so if you’re wrong in any particular, you’re wrong in your argument, and if you’re wrong in your argument then you’re probably wrong in life. Hence the ferocity.
Prior to this execution, I thought the same as you -- that he'd just go to sleep. Now, I'm not so sure. Was he, knowing what was going on, trying to resist falling asleep? The closest to an autonomic response the hospice nurses would retell, is the death rattle and the gasping for air, but none of it involved shaking or writhing.
I'm sure both that Rev. Hood's medical training makes him an expert on nitrogen hypoxia and that he is not at all biased in his claim.
This wasn't autonomous. This was a guy, strapped to a board, knowing he was about to die.
Every wriggle would get him a little more oxygen, as the mask they used isn't designed to block out outside air.
Which is why KD's reference to autonomic movement must be wrong.
Yet, there is this niggling thought that there might be something we've missed about what his struggling action entailed physiologically.
It was almost assuredly an autonomic response.
"Autonomic responses to hypoxia induced by a five-breath nitrogen exposure and intense isometric exercise resulting from handgrip to exhaustion were measured."
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/120/21/3241/84496/Autonomic-Response-to-Hypoxia-and-Isometric
“ By contrast, lethal injection is idiotically complicated and never should have been adopted.”
I’ve lived a long time; I’ve had a lot of pet dogs. They have been well loved and well taken care of, but unfortunately a dog’s lifespan doesn’t match mine. So I have had the sad duty of holding and comforting quite a few of them as the veterinarian assisted them across the final threshold.
For pets, they call it “put to sleep.” In my experience it’s been simple for the vet and easy for the dog. Why is lethal injection for humans “idiotically complicated” and frequently botched?
Why is lethal injection for humans “idiotically complicated” and frequently botched?
I've never understood this, either. We know how to render people unconscious for purposes of surgery. Why can't we do that first, and only then administer the toxin?
For death penalty fans, cruelty is the point
I would say the reverse. For anti-death penalty crusaders, cruelty is the point. It would be a lot harder to fight against someone being put to death in a blissful heroin daze than these stupid rube goldberg systems the states enact.
For the record my argument for the death penalty is that we already are doing it with a life sentence but in a cruel and inhumane way. I would absolutely prefer to go out with a hangman's noose compared to being kept in a cage for decades until my body finally deteriorates to the point where it can no longer function. That may be the usual punishment but it is certainly cruel.
But, if you are alive there's a theoretical chance we can exonerate you. You are skipping over the number of innocent people who have been put to death.
A guy I knew liked and had worked with was murdered 20 years ago. He was an investigator with the California Department of Agriculture assisting a federal team. They were trying to talk to a sausage processor whose business was shut down due to several violations relating to not safely processing sausage. They were not armed. The guy went into his office, got a gun and came out and gunned them down. He killed 3 people. One investigator managed to escape and ran for his life while the gunman chased him while shooting. When the gunman returned to his building he saw the people he shot writhing on the floor and stood over them and shot them to death. It was all caught on the security camera. Under what theory do you think he could have been exonerated?
insanity, diminished mental capacity. and yes it could be brought up on appeal in a number of different ways.
We don't determine "cruel and unusual" based on the feelings of the condemned.
Because the people trained to do that humanely take an oath not to kill people with that knowledge, and they can make way more money working anywhere else.
That's what we used to do, before death penalty opponents got the brilliant idea of convincing European governments and corporations to interfere with the supply of execution drugs, somehow thinking Red States would just give up on something they really believe in.
Look, the death penalty is wrong, but still, that was a dumb strategy that made things worse.
Your explanation does not provide a reason as to why standard, general anesthesia drugs cannot be employed.
They drugs that make a general anesthetic execution work are not available anymore.
You can pump them up with phenobarbital but a lot of these folks will take a very long time to die if you do it that way.
I know, right? Why can't they just use the same barbiturate overdose that we use for our pets? It seems so obvious...
Because the jailer executioners can't seem to find a vein. Because the condemned doesn't cooperate, and is not weak and debilitated. Because nobody is holding his hand and reassuring him with words of love.
I think that the debate is interesting only in that it exposes the hypocrisy of the proponent of the death penalty. The irrational need to punish someone by death stems from a brutal and blood thirsty impulse to take revenge. But oh, we must also not feel guilty ourselves, so this has to be carried out in a "human way". I call all this BS plain and simple. Oh, we can feel much more civilized and superior to those who cut off the hand of someone who stole bread (Saudi Arabia). These executions are gross displays of barbarity.
Your foundational premise is incorrect. I do not support the death penalty because of a desire for revenge. The purpose of criminal sentencing should primarily be rehabilitation and only very secondarily punishment*. I support the death penalty because permanently putting someone in a cage in order to remove them from society is much less humane than just killing them.
* there is also significant evidence that a higher chance of being caught is much more effective than harsher punishment in discouraging criminal behavior.
So no doubt you would favor allowing condemned, criminals the option of life in prison or execution?
respectfully, I urge you to reconsider your position. No life sentence is beyond the capacity of the government to commute, in meritorious cases. Moreover, there is no law of physics that requires a life in prison to be remorselessly, unpleasant, or cruel.
I appreciate the feedback. I too have some emotional need of retribution and anger, when someone has done something truly awful. I get that. But it touches me more deeply if, at some point, the person sincerely regrets what he/she/they did. Really regret. Because accepting one's responsibility in a terrible action is very very painful, it is a genuine pain, that the person deserve. It is the burden of that person to live through that.
Getting there may take years, maybe it never happens. But I prefer keeping someone in prison until they come about and realize the hurt that they have caused.
"I support the death penalty because permanently putting someone in a cage in order to remove them from society is much less humane than just killing them."
The best resolution to that problem is prison reform, not killing people.
Ahh, yes, 'heighten the contradictions.'
Aka, have no real morals.
I never understood why they don't just put people under anesthetic like before surgery and then kill them at their leisure.
That's basically lethal injection. And again, untrained and ham-handed jailer executioners are likely to botch the process, because they don't do it every day.
I think several states now do essentially that -- rather than futzing around with three different drugs, they simply administer a massive dose of pentobarbitol or propofol (the anesthetic that killed Michael Jackson). As Salamander notes, however, the cruel and unusual part generally comes into play because prison personnel aren't trained phlebotomists and don't know how to find a vein, and even if they could, many inmates' veins are collapsed or hard to find due to years of atrophy in prison or drug use. So the guy lies there strapped down while a bunch of poorly-trained, nervous prison guards use him as a pin cushion for 20 minutes before finally killing him.
And real medical personnel won't have anything to do with it, of course, and who can blame them?
“First, do no harm.”
Yet we do it to unwanted pets every day, all day long. Millions of them every year.
Supposedly the least-botchable and most painless method of execution is in fact the firing squad. So I guess if I had to choose...
Execution method aside, what was in fact outrageous about Smith's execution is that he never should have been on death row in the first place. The jury that convicted him recommended life without parole, but at the time, a judge was allowed to reverse that decision and sentence him to death. That was later ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS, but not applied retroactively in Alabama (because Alabama). *Then* he actually survived the first attempt to execute him by lethal injection because finding a vein took so long the execution warrant expired. And then it takes him something like 20 minutes to die via this new method, probably because the mask was not fitted correctly and he was getting too much oxygen along wtih the nitrogen.
At least he's out of his misery now, but JFC.
+1
Living in Illinois, I'm against the death penalty. Mistakes are too irreversible. But if we're going to do it the guillotine seems optimal to me. It's fast, reliable; probably not painless, but not painful for long. It's also visually compelling, which would seem to add to the deterrence factor of the death penalty to the extent that there is any. Also makes it pretty clear to the rest of us what we are doing.
Certainly since Reagan, the conservative movement and the Republican party have supposedly stood for distrust of government and governmental solutions to problems. If you are terrified by someone saying "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help," why would you trust the government with the power to execute even dangerous prisoners?
Of course, Republican "fear" of government has always carefully avoided the military, the police, and for a time, the justice system more generally. Now, with Donald Trump facing multiple prosecutions, institutions like the FBI (traditionally conservative and run by Republican appointees even during Democratic administrations) are now suspect as part of the so-called "deep state."
And yet, the state can and should be trusted with the ultimate sanction of execution?
Kevin may be correct that this execution method, if handled properly, would be painless. But how can he assert that Alabama has the capacity, or even the interest, to handle an execution properly? DoJ sued Alabama in 2020 over unconstitutional conduct in prisons, after "over 20 months" of negotiations with state officials and following a "multi-year investigation," suggesting things were so bad the DoJ was investigating conditions during the Trump administration and that it's been seven years and counting of these bad conditions.
Alabama is also famously the state where Sheriff Todd Entrekin took $750,000 of state money that was to purchase food for prisoners in his county and spent $740,000 of it on a beach house for himself, while feeding prisoners spoiled and rotten food... and it was legal. The state has also been accused of denying prisoners parole in violation of its own stated principles for determining parole in order to profit from their labor. Alabama's prisons are overcrowded, its guidelines suggest up to 80% of prisoners should be paroled, but under the present administration approvals dropped to 8% (from numbers in the 45-55% range before). The chair of the three-person parole board voted against paroling a prisoner who is now a quadriplegic and mostly catatonic (the other two members voted yes in this instance). Note that state prisons have been overcrowded and inhumane for over 50 years.
If one were to wish states to begin using nitrogen execution, is Alabama the state one would want to be first to go, given its record? The state botched two lethal injections, a well-established procedure, before opting to switch to nitrogen. What are the odds that Alabama carried out this procedure humanely, even if it is possible for the state to humanely execute someone?
Because the conservative movement is bound by the principle that there are in-group(s) that the law protects but doesn't bind (these supporters), opposed to out-groups that the law binds but doesn't protect (the people being put to death). Pretty simple in thought, even if it's not that simple in reality.
There is no amount of governmental waste, fraud, and abuse that conservatives will not support as long as the effect of said waste is to make poor folks and POC suffer. Take a program like Medicaid in red states. It could be fairly easy to administer if you just used a basic income cutoff or something and then gave people health insurance. But no, conservatives insist you build a huge, inefficient bureaucracy to monitor whether recipients are working at approved jobs each month, have to reapply after moving, or whether they've breached their income qualification by $6. It actually *costs more* to do this, but well worth it if a poor single mother has a few nights of added stress waiting for her insurance to re-up so she can see the doctor about that worrying breast lump.
It's what Republican Jesus would want.
As you say, most of the arguments over death penalty methods are really more about opposition to the death penalty in general.
There are some problems with finding "humane" ways to put people to death. For one thing, doctors won't assist in doing this humanely because it violates their oath/ethics. So the people with the most expertise can't be involved.
That leads to things like typical lethal injection methods which appear painless (the patient is paralyzed) but can in some cases be quite horrifying. And most death methods, even the ones Kevin sites, can still be painful and awful in cases where things don't go according to plan.
There's no foolproof way to put a person to death that's 100% humane and painless. If that's a problem for you, then you probably shouldn't support the death penalty. (I don't, for a lot of reasons.)
It seems to me that a simple, fast, and painless way to kill someone would be to place them in a hole in the ground, put a heavy lid on it, and then set off some explosives inside the hole.
Cheap, fast, and can be done with unskilled labor.
In fact, if I wanted to die, that's how I'd want to go.
I've been put out by intravenous anesthesia, and then wakened up by a second injection. It was "out like a light", then the light was turned back on, with no intervening time in between. Scared me like nothing else has, before or since.
I've seen videos of Russian tanks in Ukraine exploding, with the internal pressure separating a many-ton turret from the steel bearings and sending it flying a hundred feet into the air. You know that the guys inside that steel box were converted into a burnt mist before the nerve impulses from their skin reached their brains.
Setting explosives is not unskilled labor.
Setting explosives safely, so as to limit the damage to only the objective, is a skilled occupation. On the other hand,
(a) it doesn’t require an advanced college degree,
(b) the practioner doesn’t have to violate his oath.
Actually, I'm surprised Alabama hasn't considered the good old firing squad. Second Amendment solution! You'd think their current government and most of their law enforcement would love it!
Speaking from New Mexico, where Governor "Big Bill" Richardson managed to get the death penalty outlawed decades ago, and that's fine with me.
Only marginally on topic: I would prefer that the death penalty be ended, but I was astonished by some newspaper reports that there was concern that nitrogen could leak from the mask and thereby endanger witnesses in the death chamber. The air we breathe is already 80% nitrogen.
I think killing someone is always cruel. A person who KNOWS they are being executed is going to resist and struggle -- and suffer-- much more than someone who accidentally finds themselves in a nitrogen filled chamber or has set out to kill themselves. I don't know how much that adds to the suffering of being killed, or the suffering of waiting for the execution to occur.
“Still, if it's going to be done, I have a hard time understanding the endless controversies over the precise method it's applied.”
There is that whole amendment against cruel and unusual punishment, so it would seem that the founding fathers wanted us to be concerned over precise methods of punishments doled out by the govt. I mean, incarceration in which you’re tortured vs incarceration in which you’re raped vs incarceration in which you’re neither tortured nor raped is also of concern to lots of people… but why? The Kevin Drums of the world have already decided that the “precise method(s)” in which incarceration is applied is of little to no concern.
Jeez Kevin. It really isn’t hard to take what you write and lampoon it. Try harder to not be so oblivious to how your arguments, applied elsewhere, can be shown as completely ridiculous. I’m not entirely against the death penalty, but there are obvious reasons why the govt might/should want it to not be agonizing, not the least of which that “cruel and unusual” has to mean something in the constitution. (Of course I’m one of those silly people who thinks “well regulated militia” also is supposed to mean something…)
Wouldn't it be just as much trouble to loft them to the edge of space in a balloon and toss them overboard so they burn up on re-entry?
They won't burn up on reentry. That only happens when something has been in *orbit*, which requires speeds of, for most satellites, greater than 10,000MPH. Geosynchronous orbits are a bit slower, a mere 7,000MPH.
But if someone just goes straight up in a balloon and falls back down, their terminal velocity will be 100 - 200MPH, and there's a chance, albeit a small one, that they will actually survive impact (if there are conveniently located bushes or something). BUT, in a balloon at the edge of space they will die from asphyxiation. Which is not much different than the nitrogen gas method that is the topic of this thread.
Uhh, geo orbits are faster, because they're further out. The faster you go, the higher perigee orbit you end up in.
Wrong. But thanks for trying!
He was thrashing because they tied him down and he knew he was suffocating.
There was no secret they were slowly suffocating him.
We euthanize unwanted pets all the time, constantly. Yet somehow people who've committed heinous crimes deserve better?
News flash, pets and humans are two different things.
It never ceases to amaze me that the same people who think the government can’t do anything right are the most supportive of the death penalty.
I’m against the death penalty because I’m unwilling to accept the inevitable mistakes. And those mistakes mean not only that we’re killing an innocent person but the real murderer is walking free.
The question I ask is “How many innocent people are you willing to kill?”
If your answer is “none”, then you have no choice but to oppose the death penalty.
Recall that Donald Trump’s first big foray into politics was taking out full page ads in the NYT calling for execution of the “Central Park 5” in a horrendous gang rape case.
Those five guys spent up to 13 years in prison until exonerated by DNA evidence. They were straight out innocent.
Yes, mistakes will be made. (Especially black defendants with a white victim).
Seems to me about 80 years ago another group figured out that a kind of gas was an efficient way to kill people. Nothing new here.