Kenneth Eugene Smith’s execution would be the nation’s first using nitrogen gas.
Lawyers for a spiritual adviser to an Alabama inmate scheduled to be executed with nitrogen gas next month said in a complaint filed Wednesday that restrictions on how close the adviser can get to the inmate in the death chamber are “hostile to religion.”
The Rev. Jeff Hood, who plans to enter the death chamber to minister to Kenneth Eugene Smith, said the Alabama Department of Corrections asked him to sign a form acknowledging the risks and agreeing to stay 3 feet (0.9 meters) away from Smith’s gas mask. Hood, a death penalty opponent, said that shows there is a risk to witnesses attending the execution. He said the restrictions would also interfere with his ability to minister to Smith before he is put to death.
“They’ve asked me to sign a waiver, which to me speaks to the fact that they’re already concerned that things could go wrong,” Hood said in a telephone interview.
Smith’s execution would be the nation’s first using nitrogen gas. The nitrogen is planned be administered through the gas mask placed over Smith’s nose and mouth while he is strapped to a gurney in the death chamber normally used for lethal injections.
Or they’re worried he will accidentally dislodge the mask and interfere with the proper administration of nitrogen. There is no actual danger to breathing nitrogen - the air we breathe is mostly nitrogen - we just need oxygen mixed in. It’s all a stage play for delaying his execution.
I’m not in favor of execution, but this is the most humane method we have available. So until we can stop executing people, it would be good not to fuck with doing it in this way.
The article says the concern is if the masks leaks or becomes dislodged, the area within 2 feet might have the oxygen replaced.
So they said once the gas is on, the priest has to be at least 3 feet away.
But apparently the priest wants to touch him during it?
Like. That wouldn’t work with the electric chair either.
Edit:
And to clarify, the person being executed is the one suing because he wants the priest to touch him while he dies.
Put the preist in SCBA gear (thing firefighters). Might as well turn this primitive practice (capital executions and preists) and go full on distopian clown show.
No no, put him in one of those old timey diving suits with the air tube and stuff.
Just as the Lord intended!
Blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne!
Well…we CAN stop. Before this one.
Theoretically? Sure. Actually though, there’s no chance. Sadly.
No, they’re worried about it being painless. Their god is a god of wrath.
No…
Because it’s his priest objecting to it, after he signed the waiver saying he agreed to be 3 feet away once the gas was turned on.
It’s an attempt to delay the execution
Did he sign the waiver? This says he was asked to sign it.
It’s confusing because in interviews the priest is saying he was asked to sign it, but is leaving out that he already did.
But if you read the whole article, you’d have seen this bit buried below
The form, which Hood signed in order to attend Smith’s execution, gave an overview on the risk of nitrogen gas. It stated that in the “highly unlikely event that the hose supplying breathing gas to the mask were to detach, an area of free-flowing nitrogen gas could result, creating a small area of risk (approximately two feet) from the outflow.”
If he hasn’t signed it, they could proceed without him.
So he signed it, and now the lawsuit is happening to stall the execution.
Seems to me the waiver is a completely separate issue anyway if the lawsuit is about whether he can properly do the ministry without touching the guy, not actually him accepting the risks of being around.
Honest question. How is anything more humane than a bullet to the brain stem?
Hell even something like the cattle bolt or if you wanna get real technical on a pain scale something that immediately destroys the entire brain?
Like personally just put my head in a machine that crushes my head so fast that I couldn’t possibly perceive it.
Tbh I guess I just don’t really comprehend what “humane” means. The way everyone talks about it makes it seem like it just means not leaving a mess.
I’d be worried about any such machine failing and only grievously injuring me.
In the case of inert gas asphyxiation, failure doesn’t hurt. Just try again.
Failure of asphyxiation still has a high risk of brain damage.
Brain damage is painless, and transient because they’re just going to redo the execution anyway.
Uh what, brain damage can cause major issues like seizures and migraines. Having debilitating seizures or migraines for weeks or months till they can reschedule the execution sounds pretty bad.
There’s no need for rescheduling, just crank up the nitrogen and keep going.
I mean, if you really really want to imagine a scenario where the execution fails and the victim is left in pain for an extended period, you can do that with any method. You could imagine a scenario where the subject is strapped to a nuclear bomb that still ends up surviving with misery and pain. But you have to go to extremely unlikely outcomes with something as utterly dead simple as “flood the lungs with nitrogen”.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a gun and a bullet. With a nitrogen mask, the worst is that it just won’t work.
Just falling asleep, with no sensation of suffocating, no struggling, seems like the best option out of a lot of bad options.
Not killing people would be a better option, really.
Ideally, yes.
But that’s not a method of killing someone, which was the only requirement of these options.
Do you just enjoy trying to derail conversations?
Yea
“What’s the most humane way to crush these orphans?”
Wine press
Humane, in these types of circumstances, are not just for the victim, but for the witnesses and executioners as well.
The internet legend that created the suicide helmet is likely the way I’d want to go given the choice. But it would not be a pleasant thing to witness.
FTR: I’m fully against the death penalty. It is a barbaric practise. But I still feel that those who participate in this horrible exercise shouldn’t be traumatized either.
All the advances in execution methods haven’t been made to make it more humane to the victim - they’ve been made so it seems more humane to everyone else.
AFAIK, statistics-wise, the execution method with the lowest quota of horrible mishaps is the guillotine. A sufficiently fast 4t weight to the head would probably be even quicker for the brain to go, although it’d also require more cleanup.
(Yes, even overdosing on narcotics has more mishaps - and there are little to no narcotics abailable for executions, because the producers don’t want them to be used for that.)
All of the more reliable methods are… grisly, and civilisation doesn’t want grisly. We want to press a button and the victim goes to sleep to never wake up, because that makes it easier on us.
I guess if we want to be respectful to religion, we should stone him and the preacher can get as close as he wants. I bet he wouldn’t have a problem standing at a distance in that scenario.
I can’t tell if this comment is anti religion or pro death penalty.
It’s supposed to be anti both, but I worded it a little ambiguously!
Yea, definitely had me going “wait you still want him to be put to death?” until I got down the comment chain.
Tbf Lemmy has a disproportionate number of tankies, who I’d reason would actually hold an anti-religion/pro-capital-punishment stance.
Tbf Lemmy has a disproportionate number of tankies, who I’d reason would actually hold an anti-religion/pro-capital-punishment stance.
Yeah that’s what I thought it was.
Only the gas? Not the killing? Funny….”religion”
Hood is anti death penalty. He’s using whatever argument that might work. Seems to be an alright dude really, for a Baptist preacher. Was involved in BLM in Texas and wrote a book with the statement “God is queer.”
Never let facts get in the way of an edgelord ranting about an article they clearly didn’t read.
The worst thing about Lemmy is it perfectly nercomanced 2010 reddit’s skin-deep atheism back to life.
You can SMELL the fedora
Happy to inform you it’s actually a trilby, pleb.
Not even that - it’s the “risk” to witnesses. We should be able to watch people die without a care in the world, dammit!
And they praise Jesus when it’s convenient but times like these they love to drive into Old Testament crap.
How this is compatible with the supposedly kind, tolerant and self sacrificing idea of Jesus?
Let he without sin push the murder gas button!
I am against the death penalty, but the requirement to stay away from the mask sounds like a way to keep someone from messing with the mask and bungling the execution more than saying the method is dangerous for observers.
Nitrogen is probably the most humane option available.
Third parties fucking with the mask might also result in the inmate surviving the execution, but with serious brain damage due to oxygen starvation.
Yeah. I’m fundamentally opposed to the death penalty too, but if it’s going to be used anyway despite my strenuous objections then inert gas asphyxiation is probably the “best” way to go. It’s painless and very very hard to screw up.
Nitrogen is certainly my plan when I’m old
Mine as well. I deal with big industrial stuff which involves nitrogen lines often. Making a leak at a site would be pretty easy. Looks like an accident and my family gets a few million.
Your family would rather have you.
Maybe so but I am not going to spend years rotting from bed sores while some underpaid staff punish me for complaining by leaving my diaper on.
My wife is a nurse and quit her old employer the night she had to give a statement to the police about how one of the aids beat a dementia patient out of revenge . Who was a different CNA one that quite literally walked over a patient who had fallen out of bed because “it is my lunch break”.
Nope. Not doing it. I gave up almost everything for my family they don’t have the right to demand that I cling to a life with zero quality.
My dad is dying of dementia right now, not saying you have to ride that out. I’m saying you owe yourself and your family the time between retirement and sharp decline.
I am sorry you are enduring that and frankly I don’t want to argue about my last wishes with someone who is enduring the misery you must be. No offense but I enjoy looking at myself in the mirror.
Be well, your point is taken and I will consider it.
Again, I would understand if someone wanted to end it before serious decline set in. Just not just in case before retirement to get my family some money. Because again, if there’s real quality time to be had with someone who’s still definitely your father/husband as opposed to a shell with a bit of them left inside. Then they’d rather have that than the money. I wouldn’t judge anyone for sparing themselves that latter stage though, I have no idea what I will do if that choice comes to me.
Mine is heroin, it’s easier to access.
You don’t want to do opiate overdose. I once found a dude overdosing. He was already at the agonal breathing stage. It sounded like a loud short snore about 1 every 2 min. I followed the sound to the bathroom. There was brown liquid leaking out from under the door. I tried to open the door but it wouldn’t budge. So I turned the knob and put my shoulder into the door forcing it open.
There on the floor was my best friend in the world since we were six years old. His pants were around his ankles and that brown liquid was the vomit he was choking on. Unknown to me he had been there a couple of hours.
I called 911 and they came and got him. He spent a week in the hospital, but when he came out he was different. For one thing he had lost his short term memory. He’d tell you something. Then 2 mins later tell you again like you never heard it before. But also something on a fundamental level was different.
A few years later 2 days after Christmas it was his mom’s birthday. She made him stay in the basement because she was afraid he’d embarrass her in front of her guests. After the party they went down to check on him and he was dead of an overdose.
TLDR: Don’t use heroin as an end of life plan. The margin of error is too large and if you fuck it up you’ll be tarded for the rest of your life.
That’s arguably the most humane way to do it though.
Granted, I think the death penalty is wrong in 99.9% of cases but if it needs to be done then it should be humane.And for the 0.01% of cases I’m taking about, it should be reserved only for people who demonstrate that their continued existence would harm other people.
I lived in fear for 20 years that my grandpa would get out of prison and kill me and my family for putting him in there in the first place, and he absolutely would have too.
A death sentence would have saved my entire family decades of mental anguish.
Every 5 years we had to contest his parole hearing just to sit on edge for the next 5 years while we waited for the next one.Removed by mod
So use an old fashioned gas chamber instead of a mask? This never seemed to be an issue when inmates were executed that way…
Because the state had much more leeway to trample on people’s rights at that time. My gut tells me you didn’t read the article. I didn’t either, but I just listened to a podcast about this case yesterday.
Isn’t any kind of killing hostile to religion?
Have you read any holy books? They’re filled with god-ordained killings.
Definitely haven’t been any holy wars, witch hunts, or inquisitions.
Killing in the name of God is kind of a thing
Someone should write a song about that.
Yeah, like… One in particular. Buddhism, not Eastern Wind Buddhism (I am only tangentially familiar with that version of the religion, so I cannot speak to strongly on it’s teachings) is the only religion I know of that actually shows any real reverence for life.
Side note, even most Buddhist nations still permit abortion and practice capital punishment, though both are heavily socially stigmatized unless the abortion is medically necessary.
Why would any religion that has reincarnation be against abortion? At worst, it’s a spawn kill - respawn in 30 seconds elsewhere and carry on.
To be fair, it’s impossible to know how long the respawn timer is. Also, spawn killing is not cool.
(this is purely a joke and has no connection to my views on abortion)
The only thing attributed directly to the Buddha about abortion is him saying that he didn’t want it to be used to conceal adultery. So technically he wasn’t even against it, he was against it being used as a tool to do something else.
Sure there is nothing directly that advocates capital punishment in Buddhist tradition but they do have the Angulimala story which, in most versions, the Buddha tells him to accept his fate to be executed for murder. Also you know in practice the Tibetan theocracy was willing to do it for the crime of heresy.
Ok, let’s use the electric chair and let the priest touch him.
We should stop allowing priests to touch people. I think they have already touched more than enough…
Would they prefer he be crucified?
I think they’d prefer he not be killed…
Fair enough
Line on the left, one cross each.
The good book only approves lethal injections
Guillotinés are effective
