If Kenneth Eugene Smith is brought to the Alabama death chamber to face execution next week for his role in the 1988 murder-for-hire of a pastor’s wife, the state plans to use an untested and untried method to end his life, suffocating him with a stream of nitrogen gas to be delivered through a face mask.
In a federal appeals court Friday, Smith’s lawyers sought to block it, arguing that not only have Smith’s constitutional rights been violated, but that he could be subjected to an agonizing death and that most of the details surrounding the state’s new execution protocol “deserve more scrutiny.”
The use of nitrogen gas will be a capital punishment first, even though it has not only been denounced by some medical professionals but also by veterinarians who oppose its use on animals. In 2020, the American Veterinary Medical Association advised against the use of nitrogen gas as a way to euthanize most mammals, calling it “distressing.” One of the few uses of nitrogen gas in animal euthanasia is with chickens.
The United Nations’ Office of The High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressed alarm, saying in a statement that the untested method “could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under international human rights law.”
We can have a solid, productive argument about the way that they death penalty is applied, and how it’s more likely to be used in racist and classist ways. (My stance is that some people need to be completely removed from the possibility of being returned to society; the overwhelming majority of the people that fall into that extreme risk category are white, and almost always have famous pseudonyms, like Co-Ed Killer, Night Stalker, Zodiac, Green River Killer, Father John Geoghan, and so on.)
You can’t argue in good faith that nitrogen is anything other than a very soft way to die.
I agree with your comment, I just want to point out that I am explicitly against capital punishment, without disagreeing with you. And also that the reason for the demographic spread is that this is the demographic spread of the community you are talking about.
Also, while I am against capital punishment, if it had to be used, it should always be nitrogen gas, it is not untested, it is very well tested to cause no pain what so ever to subjects almost suffocating from it.
I think that you misunderstand. There are very, very few (known) black serial killers. The only one in the US that I’m aware of is questionable; Wayne Williams was convicted of the murders of two adults, but there was very little connecting him directly to the other murders that the Atlanta Police Dept. claimed he committed. My argument would be that, outside of serial killers and serial child rapists, use of the death penalty should be very, very rare, given that the risks to society are very low compared to the possibility that they could ever be released or escape. E.g., someone like Ed Kemper is always going to be a danger to society, until he’s dead.
100 percent with you on Nitrogen being a very soft form of execution. If I was forced to choose how I would be killed and could choose any method possible, I would pick the Nitrogen unquestionably.