this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Alabama is seeking to put a second inmate to death using nitrogen gas, a move that comes a month after the state carried out the first execution using the controversial new method.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office asked the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to set an execution date for Alan Eugene Miller. The state said Miller’s execution would be carried out using nitrogen. Miller, now 59, was convicted of killing three people during a pair of 1999 workplace shootings in suburban Birmingham.

“The State of Alabama is prepared to carry out the execution of Miller’s sentence by means of nitrogen hypoxia,” the attorney general’s office wrote, adding that Miller has been on death row since 2000 and that it is time to carry out his sentence.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

This man will never drop an embryo again.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Looks like Alabama is run by non-intelligent life forms. Because one key feature of intelligence is to be able to learn from past mistakes.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (4 children)

I feel like Alabama has been making some high profile bad decisions lately

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

It all starts with conservatism and attacks on education

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I mean, we could, maybe not be killing people, but that failing, if they do it right the victim just euphorically slumbers away into death. It's not that hard you just give them nitrogen to breathe. How the f*** can they screw this up?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I always thought suicide bags with nitrogen or helium were the way to go. I didn't read why the last guy had such a miserable death, but I did read it wasn't pretty.

I feel like they could put someone under some anesthesia and finish the job with the gas. Or even better, don't kill people, like you said.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Generalized convulsions are a pretty well-established effect of nitrogen toxicity.

"In the few experiments in which nitrogen was breathed for 17–20 sec unconsciousness supervened and was accompanied on most occasions by a generalized convulsion."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation

Known in the scuba diving world as "getting narced" (nitrogen narcosis)

https://www.scuba.com/blog/dealing-nitrogen-narcosis-2/

"In severe cases, divers have been known to experience convulsions, possibly causing loss of consciousness in extreme cases."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Not-so-sweet home Alabama

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Meanwhile I'm still waiting for America to drop capital punishment

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Nah. You need it after a Civil War. Not using it the last time to hang the Confederate officers really fucked us over in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Disappointing to see from Alabama.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Congratulations, you're now the mayor of Alabama.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Yes, that's what happened. He was tortured to death for over 20 minutes.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Done properly, the nitrogen is basically an anesthesiac. It knocks you out real good.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

Pharmaceutical companies will not supply those kinds of drugs for executions, because they understandably don't want their products associated with killing people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If they can't properly enact what should've been a painless execution, how do you expect them to properly anesthetise someone?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isn't the danger of improperly applying anesthesia that you could kill someone?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isn't that still better than no anesthesia at all? Assuming that the execution method wasn't changed to be worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You need a medic to administer the anesthesia and no medic is going to participate on that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

That's because if you mess it up you could kill somebody

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Because that would make a lot of sense, but the world doesn't work that way

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

The cruelty is the point

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

I think the problem was that they didn't actually use a chamber and instead tried to use a mask, IIRC

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Those of you who read the news and watch it on TV know this already, but the execution last month by nitrogen gas was carried out AT THE REQUEST of the guy who was being executed. He wanted to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, it was something he felt strongly about.

And according to the AG who witnessed the process, it went really smoothly and was much less horrific than many other methods of execution.

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