Witnesses watched through a window at an Alabama prison as Kenneth Eugene Smith became the nation's first person to be put to death using nitrogen gas.

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.

    • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
      7·
      5 months ago

      Sure, but as far as methods this is considered the ideal to the point of being how most people advocate for legal assisted suicide.

      If youre going to legally kill someone, this is the way to do so humanely.

      • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
        10·
        5 months ago

        Not this way, they had no method to remove the carbon dioxide from his lungs.

        It would have been trivial if they used existing methodology, but they didn’t bother to emulate it.

          • bane_killgrind@kbin.social
            8·
            5 months ago

            They just filled the air he was breathing with nitrogen instead of cycling it through his airspace… They needed a larger volume of gas to keep the amount of CO2 low enough

            • valaramech@kbin.social
              2·
              5 months ago

              I’ve seen this claim made multiple times but the articles in question make no mention of it - including this one, unless I’m blind. Do you have a source for this claim?

              • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
                3·
                5 months ago

                It’s not a claim that needs sourced. You put out a certain amount of CO2. Breathing that into a larger volume results in lower CO2 density.

                If you have a cup of water that full, pouring that into a swimming pool does not result in a full swimming pool.

                • Tja@programming.dev
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  Every claim needs to be sourced/proved, except axioms. Mathematicians had to prove that 1+1=2, and it was not easy.

                  • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
                    1·
                    5 months ago

                    Yeah, but you don’t have to prove that, because it’s already been done and is commonly accepted as truth. Similarly to how gas laws have already been proven, and as such don’t really need to be sourced unless you’re getting into something more specific than the basics of hows gasses work.

    • JizzmasterD@lemmy.ca
      5·
      5 months ago

      I don’t know. The older I get the more I feel that locking someone a confined space with a bunch of other unintegratables, essentially indefinitely, is less humane. I keep thinking society needs to have some skin in the game making these decisions. Seems like there’s more of that with something decisive like capital punishment than locking someone in an out of the way cage and forgetting about them.

      Maybe this was more of an !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world post tho.