Nitrogen for execution

[blackhawknj]

Fentanyl would work better IMHO.

[Allen]

Fentanyl would work better IMHO.

"Bang"

[JohnMOhio]

Red, I agree that a person can change after 25 to 30 years of imprisonment. However it is a controlled environment and the imprisoned person either follows the rules or not. Swift punishment of 3 to 5 years sounds right but was not a person recently released from prison after 18 years of being found to be wrongly convicted and it was not on a technicality.

As for waiting years for punishment being torture, is that not a part of our law regarding submission of new evidence that the person my not be guilty. As for it being torture to the truly guilty, they made the decision to commit the crime. If they want to end this "torture" stop the appeals and get it over with.

The process of the law may not be swift but it is supposed to be cautionary. Innocent until PROVEN GUILTY beyond a reasonable doubt. Or do we go to the law of the west, give them a fair trial and then hang them.

Consider this. A jury of our peers. Say a CCW person is charged and in his mind he was justified. He had to make a split second decision and according to the prosecutor it was the wrong one. Should the jury be made up of 12 CCW holders?
That would be a true jury of peers.

[Art]

Red, I agree that a person can change after 25 to 30 years of imprisonment. However it is a controlled environment and the imprisoned person either follows the rules or not. Swift punishment of 3 to 5 years sounds right but was not a person recently released from prison after 18 years of being found to be wrongly convicted and it was not on a technicality.

As for waiting years for punishment being torture, is that not a part of our law regarding submission of new evidence that the person my not be guilty. As for it being torture to the truly guilty, they made the decision to commit the crime. If they want to end this "torture" stop the appeals and get it over with.

The process of the law may not be swift but it is supposed to be cautionary. Innocent until PROVEN GUILTY beyond a reasonable doubt. Or do we go to the law of the west, give them a fair trial and then hang them.

Consider this. A jury of our peers. Say a CCW person is charged and in his mind he was justified. He had to make a split second decision and according to the prosecutor it was the wrong one. Should the jury be made up of 12 CCW holders?
That would be a true jury of peers.

I'll start out with John's post above. We have a system of justice broadly based on the idea that if a few guilty people have to go free to assure that no innocent people are punished that's fine with me. There have been people who have been exonerated after years on death row, mostly based on DNA evidence. My grandfather was once a juror in a capital murder case in southeast Texas in the early 1930s. The prosecution had a strong (for the time) circumstantial case aided by the fact that the accused didn't have an alibi but did have a motive. He was sentenced to life in prison. Many years later the real killer, who in this case was in fact the real killer, made a death bed confession in a prison in Mississippi. After a long stretch in prison the convicted "killer" was released. My old grandpappy then said he'd never ever again vote for conviction in a case made solely on circumstantial evidence.

Now to the issue at hand. Suffocation is suffocation. Carbon Dioxide was mentioned as a possible agent of execution. Long ago I was working in a surveillance van with another agent in the dog days of summer. The van had a Co2 dry ice air conditioner. After about an hour in the van, this particular night, I started to feel a bit short of breath, then a lot short of breath, the other guy noticed the same and we got the h*ll out. The air conditioner had developed a leak and the carbon dioxide was displacing the air in the van. Our bodies were just starting to tell us that we were about to be in real trouble. I read an account of the nitrous oxide execution, it took the old boy several minutes to lose conciousness and there was a lot of struggling up to that point. I think it was about 20 minutes before he was pronounced dead.

Another point, apparently this was the fourth attempt to kill this old boy. There comes a point where incompetence by the prison execution staff becomes cruel and unusual punishment. As far as I'm concerned after, lets say two attempts to off a murderer the sentence should be commuted to life without parole.

Lastly, the attempt to sanitize this stuff is wrong headed and counter productive. The fact that we use trappings of medicine to accomplish capital punishment doesn't change what it is. A bullet to the back of the head is quicker and less painful than just about any of the so called humane methods we've come up with. Back when the gas chamber was the way to go a warden in California was so horrified by the obvious suffering of the convict that he resigned and became an anti death penalty advocate. Shooting, the guillotine, and hanging (if done right) are all probably more humane than the current methods we use to make ourselves (as a country) feel better about it,. I remember an account of an execution in the old Soviet Union of a serial killer. The old boy was taken from his cell into a room with a drain in the floor. He was told not to turn around. He probably didn't even hear the bang from the pistol shot to the back of his head.

[Phloating Phlasher]

Why over complicate it?
To make it more humane?
Really:
The execution took about 22 minutes from the time between the opening and closing of the curtains to the viewing room. Smith appeared to remain conscious for several minutes. For at least two minutes, he appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney, sometimes pulling against the restraints. That was followed by several minutes of heavy breathing, until breathing was no longer perceptible."

Any good general anesthetic & then insulin OD.

[Allen]

From what I've heard, those who died at industrial sites using N2 instead of tool air simply worked till they got dizzy then keeled over to sleep. Of course they then suffocated but didn't know anything of it. Inside of those confined space vessels it no doubt took a while to displace the O2. That being the case then perhaps if administered slowly it would take longer but be more gentle or humane.

BTW OSHA now requires open vents where possible (confined space work) and/or forced fresh air. I have been in some vessels where a vacuum was used I suppose to keep from stirring up dust and rust. Same principal, it pulled air in from the outside through open vents. Hose was about 6"-8" and had a strong force, One night one of the contractors working inside needed to pee. Instead of making the 100' climb to get out at the top he decided to pee into the large vacuum hose. It grabbed him and people outside could hear him screaming. The machine was shut down with no lasting injury to the worker. He didn't do that again.

[Phloating Phlasher]

The problem with Co2 is that its what our biology uses to determine if we need to breathe or not. Not Oxygen, oddly enough.
Using Co2 would trigger a "need to breathe" reflex N2 won't, because there's no trigger associated with it, you just quit metabolizing oxygen & your mind & body shut down once you've metabolized whats already in the blood & tissues..
This is why divers suffer from "Shallow water blackout", they out of O2 but haven't exhaled & so no breathing trigger & the just fade away.

[Tom Trevor]

Russian method sound painless until the end. Toss them out a sixth story window into a parking lot. whoosh splat!

[PWC]

Russian method sound painless until the end. Toss them out a sixth story window into a parking lot. whoosh splat!

AHHH! The Putin favored method!

[JimF]

What’s the problem with a bullet behind the ear?