Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney Thursday and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method.
The Alabama attorney general’s office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is “the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.” But what exactly Smith, 58, will feel after the warden switches on the gas is unknown, some doctors and critics say.
“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”
Keller, who was not involved in developing the Alabama protocol, said the plan is to “eliminate all of the oxygen from the air” that Smith is breathing by replacing it with nitrogen.
Lethal injection performs as it was designed to: it's agony. You're paralyzed, then given a heart attack.
Done correctly, lethal injection is quite humane. We do it with pets; you administer a strong sedative, and then you use an overdose of a barbiturate to stop the heart (which is not the same as a heart attack). But that's **not **how lethal injections are typically done in the US, esp. since pharmaceutical companies don't want to sell their medications to prisons to be used to execute prisoners; that was because anti-death penalty advocates found ways to put pressure on drug companies. But how do you stop the sale of nitrogen to a prison? I can literally go buy a tank from any welding supply company.
Edit: the sedative is used to prevent feelings of fear or panic when the heart stops.
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We do, in fact, know what a person feels from nitrogen suffocation, and we know because nitrogen suffocation happens accidentally with some degree of regularity from workers that don't follow proper safety protocols.
At first you feel out of breath, but you don't feel panic from it; it's like exhaling everything in your lungs, and then breathing in solely from a helium filled balloon (which I'm guessing most people have tried). You feel slightly high and light headed because the oxygen in your bloodstream is rapidly depleted; you are hypoxic. As you take a second and third breath, your vision tunnels, and you pass out. Your body has a mechanism to detect a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, but since you're expelling the CO2 with every breath out, and breathing nitrogen back in, that panic response doesn't get tripped.
Nitrogen suffocation has been a preferred choice for right-to-die advocates.
We can argue about how the death penalty is applied, and whether it should exist at all (I believe it should, but is almost always inappropriate), but there's no serious argument about whether nitrogen suffocation is a good or bad way to die. The people continuously fighting against this execution are fighting the method because they've lost all their other avenues to prevent the execution; attempting to call this process 'untested'--when it's been tested by a large number of people using it to end their own lives, and tested via industrial accidents--is the only option that they have left to prevent this execution.
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