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.
I advocate for it in the case of people that can not reasonably be rehabilitated and pose an unreasonable risk to the existence of other people.
I don’t know why that’s difficult to wrap your head around.
You aren’t going to rehabilitate a serial killer, or a serial rapist.
Can’t know if you don’t try. Some artists have come out and said they had these urges and art is the thing anchoring them enough to keep them from doing heinous things.
…And there’s your key. Moreover, they think that art keeps them from doing it; they have no way of experimentally knowing whether or not they’d do those things in the absence of art. It seems more likely that art is their excuse and that, in the absence of art, they would find anothe,r different reason to avoid committing atrocities.
There’s a distinction between wanting to do a thing, and actually doing the thing.