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Oklahoma is Poised to Become the First State to Use Nitrogen Gas in Executions

posted by mrpg on Friday March 16 2018, @02:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the fundamental-states-of-matter dept.

DeathMonkey writes:

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

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday March 16 2018, @08:06AM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 16 2018, @08:06AM (#653448) Journal

    Furthermore, it's not unusual if we do it always, so it can't be "cruel and unusual".

    Interesting interpretation. So according to your interpretation, any cruelty would be legal as punishment if it is done often enough.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @05:09PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday March 16 2018, @05:09PM (#653682)

    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.