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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:58AM (3 children)
It's not true about the nitrogen. As has been stated by somebody else, that only applies to individuals who have been pressurized and are brought back to normal pressure too quickly. In this context all that's likely to occur is for the individual to pass out quickly and die shortly thereafter. It's probably the most humane way of murdering somebody and very hard to get wrong.
You're right about CO2. CO2 is used to decide how often to breathe, amongst other things, and as such, you're absolutely right about it being cruel to deprive a person of oxygen in that fashion.
CO would also work quite well, but has the downside of being harder to neutralize. With N2, you can just exhaust the air in the chamber to the outside of the building and bring in fresh air and the chamber goes back to habitable in a matter of minutes, depending upon the amount of ventilation. And if you don't get quite enough ventilation, it's unlikely to sicken anybody.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday March 16 2018, @12:51PM
It's a little bit more subtle than that. Your breathing reflex is triggered by a response to acidity in receptors in your lungs. You're constantly producing small quantities of alkaline solution that is exposed to the gas in your lungs. When it absorbs enough carbon dioxide to neutralise the alkali then you breathe. The amount of alkali that you produce changes over time based on a much slower feedback cycle linked to oxygen levels in your blood, which is why it's so dangerous going up a mountain quickly: your lungs aren't absorbing as much oxygen as you're used to per lungful but (because of the lower air pressure) you're also absorbing a lot less carbon dioxide and so your breathe reflex isn't triggered. If you overexert yourself you can pass out from oxygen deprivation without ever breathing deeply.
Any gas that produces an acid solution when dissolved in water would trigger your breathe reflex and, if breathing doesn't make it go away, would then trigger your suffocation response. Carbon dioxide is just the most common gas in this category (and the one produced by your body).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 16 2018, @01:36PM (1 child)
How about making that the method of execution?
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 16 2018, @06:22PM
It requires big bags of money for the pun.
Even Bond villains gave up on that much logistics.