Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen.

The Alabama attorney general’s office on Friday asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58. The court filing indicated Alabama plans to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that is authorized in three states but has never been used.

Nitrogen hypoxia is caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorized it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.

  • PoliticalAgitator
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    1 year ago

    Not only are there plenty of people who have no problem with it, there’s plenty of people who will be upset the killing wasn’t more barbaric.

    And it’s pure blood-lust. They know the criminal can never reoffend. They know the death won’t bring back the victims or bring peace to their family. They know it won’t stop other people committing the same crime. They weren’t impacted by the crime in the slightest and don’t seem to have any real compassion for those who were.

    But they want to see the criminals fry anyway.

    Threads like this make it extremely clear the the reason the western world isn’t executing women in soccer stadiums is because the people who make those decisions said “no”, not because it wouldn’t draw a crowd.

    • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yup, if this takes off, we can absolutely expect people to start complaining that death row criminals are getting off easy.

      People will pull out the usual excuses for cruelty in our criminal justice system “well, their victim didn’t get a peaceful death!” and shit like that. As though making the perpetrator (and it’s always a possibility that they were falsely convicted) suffer an agonizing death will retroactively lessen the victims stuffering.

      Its sick, but it’s absolutely going to happen.