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Oklahoma plans to start carrying out executions with nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used in the U.S. but that some states have already approved amid difficulties with lethal injections.
At a news conference Wednesday, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh said that over the next few months the state would develop a protocol for using nitrogen.
[...] In recent years, Oklahoma and other states have struggled to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections, the most common execution method but one that has increasingly faced scrutiny.
In 2015, a state court put a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma after a series of botched executions, including one in which an inmate convulsed for 43 minutes before dying and another in which the wrong drug was administered.
Oklahoma is poised to become the first state to use nitrogen gas in executions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:22AM (5 children)
Nitrogen narcosis happens to divers. It requires high pressure to drive excess nitrogen into the nerve cell membranes. Unless they'll be doing executions 100 feet under water, that doesn't apply.
Nitrogen narcosis isn't even miserable. It's like taking heroin. Some prisoners would jump at the chance.
Even if nitrogen did cause misery, so what? The supreme court even said it was OK to jab prisoners with needles.
Furthermore, it's not unusual if we do it always, so it can't be "cruel and unusual". It's not cruel either, at least in relation to the crime. (Is a 180 days in prison cruel? It is for jaywalking. The crime matters.)
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 16 2018, @02:33AM
Here on land, helium is the most humane option. You can go to your local grocery store and go out in a blaze of glory inflicting barotrauma upon yourself. And die with a chipmunk voice. Reciting Hilter speeches is a lot funnier at 8x the speed.
Carbon monoxide works, sure, but that requires a setup. You have a garage, or a flexible tube to pipe it from your tailpipe into your carriage. And that's very messy and suspicious.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday March 16 2018, @08:06AM (1 child)
Interesting interpretation. So according to your interpretation, any cruelty would be legal as punishment if it is done often enough.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @05:09PM
Basically. I mean, we sentence people to live out the rest of their lives in a cage on a regular basis - that's pretty damned cruel.
It's when you start imposing cruel punishments against particular individuals (unusually) that you start getting real problems. Person A gets a modest fine, Person B who pissed of the wrong people gets locked in a box listening to Nickleback for 30 years for the same crime - then you have a problem. Which in fact we do already have in many cases: A rich white guy gets caught with a sack of weed he probably gets off with a warning, not even dragged into the legal system. While a poor black man with the same bag of weed may spend many years in prison under "mandatory minimum" sentencing. Not a problem with the legal system per-se, but if you can't trust law enforcement to do their job evenhandedly, then you really should take that into consideration in your legal system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @08:43AM
Try applying the same argument to ISIS or the Nazis to see why you are wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:51PM
I don't think you understand "cruel and unusual" punishment. Cruel is more or less what it sounds like, are we inflicting unnecessary and unreasonable suffering on the convicted. The exact line has changed over the decades so that we don't inflict as much as we used to, but it's still a bit of a problem.
Unusual is about the predictability of consequences when deciding whether or not to convict a crime. If I go out and decide to jaywalk, being handed a life sentence would be unusual. In fact, being handed any sentence at all for only jaywalking would be highly unusual and as such unconstitutional. It may also be cruel, but the fact that it's not expected would bar it without anything else.
In terms of the debate, we don't really know in most cases what it feels like for the majority of death row inmates that do pass out and don't wake up again. There's sometimes spasms that suggest that there's pain, but we don't really know. Which is part of why lawyers keep filing suits, it's also a basis for stopping an execution.