Witnesses watched through a window at an Alabama prison as Kenneth Eugene Smith became the nation's first person to be put to death using nitrogen gas.

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.

  • pwalshj@lemmy.world
    291·
    10 months ago

    That website is poison aids. That’s the fucking official AP site? We’re doomed.

    • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
      221·
      10 months ago

      Holy fuck you’re not kidding. I assumed when you said that it was going to be just shit all over the place. The ads weren’t super intrusive? It was easy to read? But when I got down to the bottom there was shit about a homeopathy treatment for neuropathy that has left scientists speechless.

      How the fuck was that on AP

      • quindraco@lemm.ee
        53·
        10 months ago

        What is wrong with your browser? Did you turn your adblock off or something? This is the bottom of the article.

          • Mr_Blott@lemmy.world
            7·
            10 months ago

            Three dumbest questions I’ve seen today -

            The ads weren’t super intrusive?

            It was easy to read?

            I don’t get how you got to the point where you had to actually ask that question?

            None of these are questions 😂

    • Akasazh@feddit.nl
      21·
      10 months ago

      The most bizarre thing about the entire debate is that most proponents of the death penalty explicitly want it to be a painful experience.

      Everything pushed to make they process more effective and humane meets resistance.

      • quicklime@lemm.ee
        5·
        10 months ago

        They’re self-convinced, against nearly all studies and evidence and expert consensus, that capital punishment is an effective deterrent.

    • KISSmyOS@feddit.de
      7·
      10 months ago

      Anesthesizing someone is difficult and you need the right drugs. No licensed doctor is allowed nor willing to do it, and no company making the drugs agrees to its use for killing people.

    • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
      1141·
      10 months ago

      Dude was unconscious almost immediately. His brain was dead but the body takes longer to go. The violent spasms was the unconscious and uninhabited body using the last of its energy, mechanically.

      This has been so dramatized it’s disgusting. The execution? Humane. The media around it? Must clearly want more suffering.

        • SoylentBlake@lemm.eeEnglish
          57·
          10 months ago

          Life is not black and white. You can deal in absolutes all you want, that just leaves the rest of us here to make the hard decisions, since your abdication.

          Jailing people for life is also inhumane, solitary is torture that can lead to permanent damage. But what alternatives are left with? Society didn’t ask these people to steal, attack, rape or murder. Some people just choose it. So we have to separate them from the rest of us, for the common good.

          Fwiw, I don’t favor capital punishment unless guilt is obvious for all to see - beyond a doubt. But if we have to do it, and situationally It’s appropriate (some will say it never is), we should do it as humanely as possible. Not that they necessarily deserve that, but ultimately it’s a reflection of us.

          This is all first world problems btw. If the facade falls, we’ll all see people put down with absolute disregard. We have survivors alive today from past atrocity, we aren’t even removed in the slightest. Look up the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields, I had a coworker who escaped after watching his brother chopped apart and his mother gunned down.

          Purity in your moralism is a luxury most can’t afford, unfortunately.

  • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
    25·
    10 months ago

    I’m just an armchair medic, but wouldn’t a second tube to evacuate exhaled CO2 prevent this? This feels like monumental stupidity on the side of the prison, not necessarily a flaw with nitrogen as an execution method.

    • robocall@lemmy.worldOP
      101·
      10 months ago

      while I agree that guillotine is a more humane method of execution, we could also consider ending the death penalty completely.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    1046·
    10 months ago

    Oh my. I didn’t realise that it’s actually horrible for the person. Imagine grasping for air for 15 minutes! It must be horrible! That guy had a good reason to be scared of going away like that!

    … And it’s totally not an act made to stop this type of execution. It’s not like hypoxia is undetectable by the body, as the gasping reflex is driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the lungs, not the lack of oxygen. Nor is it like the subject had any beef against the type of execution.

    Come on. This is just fear mongering at this point

      • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
        72·
        10 months ago

        Sure, but as far as methods this is considered the ideal to the point of being how most people advocate for legal assisted suicide.

        If youre going to legally kill someone, this is the way to do so humanely.

      • JizzmasterD@lemmy.ca
        53·
        10 months ago

        I don’t know. The older I get the more I feel that locking someone a confined space with a bunch of other unintegratables, essentially indefinitely, is less humane. I keep thinking society needs to have some skin in the game making these decisions. Seems like there’s more of that with something decisive like capital punishment than locking someone in an out of the way cage and forgetting about them.

        Maybe this was more of an !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world post tho.