Oklahoma approves Nitrogen Executions

[TimothyC]

Oklahoma became the first U.S. state to approve nitrogen gas for executions under a measure Gov. Mary Fallin signed into law Friday that provides an alternative death penalty method if lethal injections aren't possible, either because of a court ruling or a drug shortage.

Executions are on hold in Oklahoma while the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether the state's current three-drug method of lethal injection is constitutional. Supporters of the new law maintain nitrogen-induced hypoxia is a humane and painless method of execution that requires no medical expertise to perform.

There are no reports of nitrogen gas ever being used to execute humans, and critics say that one concern is that the method is untested. Some states even ban its use to put animals to sleep.

"Oklahoma executes murderers whose crimes are especially heinous," Fallin said in a statement announcing that she had signed the bill into law. "I support that policy, and I believe capital punishment must be performed effectively and without cruelty. The bill I signed today gives the state of Oklahoma another death penalty option that meets that standard."

The bill authored by Republican Rep. Mike Christian and Republican Sen. Anthony Sykes had passed the state House on an 85-10 vote and cleared the Senate on a 41-0 vote.

Supporters of Oklahoma's plan argue that nitrogen-induced hypoxia — or a lack of oxygen in the blood — is a humane execution method.

"The process is fast and painless," said Christian, a former Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper who wrote the bill. "It's foolproof."

Opponents say there's no way to know whether the method is painless and effective.

"It just hasn't been tried, so we don't know," said Rep. Emily Virgin, a Democrat from Norman who opposes the death penalty.

The changes come after a botched execution last year in which Oklahoma was using a new sedative as the first in a three-drug combination. State officials tried to halt the lethal injection after the inmate writhed on the gurney and moaned. He died 43 minutes after the process began.

Adam Leathers, spokesman for the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, released a statement blasting the new law.

"This is not only a grotesque waste of resources but indicative of a corrupt value system," he said. "It is sad to know that our State's collective bloodlust is so unabated that our leadership feels the need to spend resources to put a back up system into place so State sponsored murder can go on uninterrupted."

The problematic execution was blamed on a poorly placed intravenous line and prompted a lawsuit from Oklahoma death row inmates, who argue that the state's new drug combination presents a serious risk of pain and suffering. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments later this month.

Under the new law, lethal injection would remain the state's first choice for executions and nitrogen gas would be its first backup method — ahead of the electric chair, which the state hasn't used since 1966, and a firing squad, which has never been used in Oklahoma.

No comment at this time.

[Ralin]

Opponents say there's no way to know whether the method is painless and effective.

"It just hasn't been tried, so we don't know," said Rep. Emily Virgin, a Democrat from Norman who opposes the death penalty.

Well I guess this would be the way to find out...

Seriously, I'm down with making executions relatively humane and not horrifically painful. But it seems like expecting a hundred percent reliable and painless method is maybe not feasible, and past a certain point trying to find one is more than a little hypocritical. If you're not prepared to see the guy you're executing suffer somewhat and to clean up a mess afterwards then maybe you aren't sufficiently sure he should be dead. Killing someone shouldn't be sanitized.

Ned Stark was right, in other words.

[Grumman]

Seriously, I'm down with making executions relatively humane and not horrifically painful. But it seems like expecting a hundred percent reliable and painless method is maybe not feasible, and past a certain point trying to find one is more than a little hypocritical. If you're not prepared to see the guy you're executing suffer somewhat and to clean up a mess afterwards then maybe you aren't sufficiently sure he should be dead. Killing someone shouldn't be sanitized.

If we were talking about replacing a reliable, painless but messy method of execution, you might have a point. We aren't, and you don't. If we are to kill something, whether it's a cow, an enemy combatant or an axe murderer, we have a moral duty to try to do so without causing more suffering than is necessary. The idea of deliberately torturing a prisoner just to test your own resolve is obscene.

[Mr Bean]

This is a massive first step in the right direction.

Look as someone who's worked around these heavier than air gases I can tell you from personal experience that what makes them so dangerous to work with is the fact that the first time you know your breathing it in is when you suddenly feel tired and want to pass out. I've seen both in person and the handy Navy training movies we all got to see what happens when someone sucks down a lung of halon, argon or nitrogen. I'll give it to you in a three step process.


1. You step into a space to check on a possible fire or a possible broken fire sensor, be it a server room or sticking your head into a crawl space to look for the sensor itself.

2. You feel tired, yawn... then faceplant into the floor

3. Hopefully your fellow personnel drag your limp body out of the cloud before you suffocate to death.

Having seen what Nitrogen and assorted gasses do thanks to firefighting setups I can tell you. It is the best method, poison gas has been and remains a stupid method when heavier than air gasses don't trigger the choking reflex and induce unconsciousness in a handful of minutes and brain death then death within ten minutes thanks to oxygen deprivation. And your body has no idea what's going on right up until the moment you pass out and then that's it. Your going to watch the prisoner ask, hey did they turn the gas on... yawn... and then oh so quietly.... slip away and die without a fuss or mess.

[Tribble]

Hmm, I thought they were thinking if using liquid nitrogen when a read the title. I suppose using it as a gas works better. I imagine that submersing people in liquid nitrogen would have killed them pretty quick?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Minimizing the torturing means a firing squad. I haven't seen someone demonstrate another method that still leaves a body intact -- and many people would prefer to suffer pain so their family has something to bury. If we cannot stomach the firing squad, we shouldn't be executing people.

Of course I badly want to see the scope of crimes for which the death penalty is used clarified. Multiple killings, serial killings, murder following rape, murder following torture, crimes of political activity against society resulting in deaths (i.e. terrorism and insurrection), and people who murder another inmate or a guard while already in prison. Again and again and again with the death penalty we hear the same thing, a black man on death row is exonerated due to lack of evidence in some kind of gangland killing where, honestly, I don't think he should have gotten more than twenty years imprisonment for the murder to begin with because it was an eminently reformable crime in a crime and poverty ridden neighbourhood committed for basically understandable reasons.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Minimizing the torturing means a firing squad. I haven't seen someone demonstrate another method that still leaves a body intact -- and many people would prefer to suffer pain so their family has something to bury. If we cannot stomach the firing squad, we shouldn't be executing people.

Nitrogen asphyxia completely removes all suffering. This is nitrogen gas at room temp. Not liquid nitrogen.

Hmm, I thought they were thinking if using liquid nitrogen when a read the title. I suppose using it as a gas works better. I imagine that submersing people in liquid nitrogen would have killed them pretty quick?

Nitrogen's vaporization point and latent heat of vaporization is so low, that your body heat causes it to evaporate while carrying away very little heat (in fact, contact with the air does this). This leaves an insulating layer of gas around the body that protects from the freezing effect for some time. Seriously, dunk your hand in liquid N2 sometime, it wont hurt so long as your hand is not in there for too long.

There are other variables with full-body immersion. If the subject holds their breath (if they breath the stuff in, the expanding gases are likely to cause horrible injuries to the lung and thoracic cavity), the gas is cold. Eventually (and I dont know off the top of my head how long), they will start to get full-body frostbite. The body insulates pretty well, so if they had a respirator they might live in agony for a good long while. Beyond that, they will either pass and breath, or take in a deep liquid N2 breath...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

AD: I've heard contradictory opinions on that when it comes to nitrogen asphyxiation, but I'd need to find them and verify they were more than heresay. If I don't answer again, assume I couldn't.

[Alyrium Denryle]

AD: I've heard contradictory opinions on that when it comes to nitrogen asphyxiation, but I'd need to find them and verify they were more than heresay. If I don't answer again, assume I couldn't.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 05/?page=1

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewconten ... _greenacre

The only reason it is not used more often these days in animal euthanasia is because it can take a while to kill a subject after unconsciousness. There is enough oxygen in circulation that the body can continue to live for a few minutes, because N2 does not replace oxygen on hemoglobin the way CO does. Muscular spasms in an unconscious animal can disturb the operator as well.

Rats and Mink are special snowflakes because--unlike humans--they can detect O2 concentration directly.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

At the rate you guys are going with this, might as well do it the same way the Nazis did it with gas chambers anyway.

[Mr Bean]

At the rate you guys are going with this, might as well do it the same way the Nazis did it with gas chambers anyway.

Once again poison gas is stupid and your a moron for making that comparison.

Whenever we need to kill large groups of minorities we use remote piloted drones not gas like a proper modern nation.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

At the rate you guys are going with this, might as well do it the same way the Nazis did it with gas chambers anyway.

Once again poison gas is stupid and your a moron for making that comparison.

Whenever we need to kill large groups of minorities we use remote piloted drones not gas like a proper modern nation.

I didn't say you were killing minorities.

I am just saying the methodology is identical. And any gas in sufficient quantity is dangerous. Be it oxygen, nitrogen, or anything.

[Mr Bean]

At the rate you guys are going with this, might as well do it the same way the Nazis did it with gas chambers anyway.

Once again poison gas is stupid and your a moron for making that comparison.

Whenever we need to kill large groups of minorities we use remote piloted drones not gas like a proper modern nation.

I didn't say you were killing minorities.

I am just saying the methodology is identical. And any gas in sufficient quantity is dangerous. Be it oxygen, nitrogen, or anything.

You make a direct line comparison to Nazis with gas chambers, comparing Nazi uses of Zyklon B which caused seizures, stroke, bleeding from the eyes and anus, uncontrollable vomiting, psychosis and then death.

To Nitrogen gas which involves unconsciousness then death as compared to firing squad, hangings, and lethal injection which was to date the most idiotic method of execution aside from the old gas chamber method using Hydrogen cyanide.

[Napoleon the Clown]

At the rate you guys are going with this, might as well do it the same way the Nazis did it with gas chambers anyway.

Once again poison gas is stupid and your a moron for making that comparison.

Whenever we need to kill large groups of minorities we use remote piloted drones not gas like a proper modern nation.

I didn't say you were killing minorities.

I am just saying the methodology is identical. And any gas in sufficient quantity is dangerous. Be it oxygen, nitrogen, or anything.

Except poison gas has an entire point of causing as much suffering as possible, whereas nitrogen asphyxiation makes you just go to sleep without your brain knowing at any point you're suffocating.

I mean, there's probably videos up on YouTube showing what happens to cute little animals when they inhale poison gas. Even before they lose consciousness they go into convulsions. Poison gas is torturing to death, nitrogen is like firing squad except even cleaner and less chance for suffering.

If you want to say "Well they both kill the person with a gas!" then be intellectually consistent and say that any sort of execution method is horrible and inhumane. Once the effects of the method are so different from each other, saying they're basically the same means you should condemn all executions as being no better than gas chambers. Is firing squad the same as gunning down a bunch of civilians in the streets? Hanging just as bad as garroting?

[Alyrium Denryle]

At the rate you guys are going with this, might as well do it the same way the Nazis did it with gas chambers anyway.

Once again poison gas is stupid and your a moron for making that comparison.

Whenever we need to kill large groups of minorities we use remote piloted drones not gas like a proper modern nation.

I didn't say you were killing minorities.

I am just saying the methodology is identical. And any gas in sufficient quantity is dangerous. Be it oxygen, nitrogen, or anything.

No. The methodology is not identical, you half-witted twat.

Nitrogen deprives the subject of oxygen, but because human physiology detects suffocation through CO2 concentration in the blood, and CO2 is still vented even with oxygen partial pressure of near zero, humans dont feel it. They go hypoxic, which at worst they wont notice, and at best brings on a state of giddy euphoria.

Zyklon B used by the nazis reacts with air to form hydrogen cyanide. At sufficient dose, onset can be rather rapid and unconsciousness nearly immediate, but getting that much hydrogen cyanide into the air is difficult, and lower doses (still often lethal, but takes longer) are extremely painful as Mr. Bean pointed out. It is lighter than air, so it wont displace the air in a chamber. The fucking Nazis pegged it low specifically to cause maximum pain and suffering, with the wailing of their victims lasting for half an hour of more audible to other prisoners in the camp despite attempts at sound-proofing.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Germans didn't give a fuck about the pain and suffering of the Jews being murdered, seriously the point was to kill millions of people people quickly without requiring German troops to shoot them, and the workers doing the job were mostly other enslaved Jews for added insulation from purpose.

They used a fairly low concentration to facilitate speed. The more poison they used in the gas chambers the longer they'd have had to ventilate the rooms before sending in slaves to remove the bodies for burning. Since body removal and burning was the real holdup in the entire process they wanted to be able to do that as quickly as possible. The added time for the victims to die was much less then the time saved for ventilation.

[Channel72]

The fucking Nazis pegged it low specifically to cause maximum pain and suffering, with the wailing of their victims lasting for half an hour of more audible to other prisoners in the camp despite attempts at sound-proofing.

Do you have a source for this? I'm not necessarily challenging your claim (nor am I trying to um... defend Nazis here...) - I'm just curious. I would have thought the Nazis would want to minimize the suffering - not out of any humanitarian concerns for their victims, obviously - but simply in order to make the process more efficient, and also to reduce the screaming since that might cause mass panicking, which just slows everything down. The whole gas chamber process was often based on the ruse of showering after all, for crowd control purposes. If it took almost 30 minutes for the next "batch" of victims to be "processed", wouldn't the administration be looking for ways to speed this up? Surely causing maximum pain and suffering to the gas chamber victims wouldn't be a high priority if your overall agenda is to exterminate the Jews as quickly and efficiently and with as little fuss as possible.

[Channel72]

Ah, nevermind - somehow I missed Sea Skimmer's post.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

No. The methodology is not identical, you half-witted twat.

Nitrogen deprives the subject of oxygen, but because human physiology detects suffocation through CO2 concentration in the blood, and CO2 is still vented even with oxygen partial pressure of near zero, humans dont feel it. They go hypoxic, which at worst they wont notice, and at best brings on a state of giddy euphoria.

So you are trading physical torture for a psychological one. How is that any better?

[Dominus Atheos]

Is there some problem with morphine? Besides just it being "too" pleasant?

[Mr Bean]

Is there some problem with morphine? Besides just it being "too" pleasant?

Some addicts require twenty or thirty times the standard lethal dose to kill and it's possible to screw up and induce intense chest pains and then heart attack.

As far as injection based methods go it is a reliable method of killing a good 95% of the population. But for that 5% either you find out the hard way that they are simply immune to anything other than a bucket of morphine or you mess up and induce a heart attack, a not necessarily fatal heart attack at that.

[bilateralrope]

No. The methodology is not identical, you half-witted twat.

Nitrogen deprives the subject of oxygen, but because human physiology detects suffocation through CO2 concentration in the blood, and CO2 is still vented even with oxygen partial pressure of near zero, humans dont feel it. They go hypoxic, which at worst they wont notice, and at best brings on a state of giddy euphoria.

So you are trading physical torture for a psychological one. How is that any better?

What psychological torture is being added to the process by switching to nitrogen gas executions ?

[Ralin]

Is there some problem with morphine? Besides just it being "too" pleasant?

As I understand it morphine is actually a pretty bad way to go as well one you get into the dosages you'd need to make it consistently lethal. I forget the details of how and why.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Is there some problem with morphine? Besides just it being "too" pleasant?

Some addicts require twenty or thirty times the standard lethal dose to kill and it's possible to screw up and induce intense chest pains and then heart attack.

As far as injection based methods go it is a reliable method of killing a good 95% of the population. But for that 5% either you find out the hard way that they are simply immune to anything other than a bucket of morphine or you mess up and induce a heart attack, a not necessarily fatal heart attack at that.

Not only that, but medical personnel are legally required to either dispense or administer the morphine. The state of Oklahoma will find it difficult to obtain the necessary staff due to professional ethics.

[cosmicalstorm]

I was also disappointed when I realized they were not going to flash freeze anyone.