On Jan. 25, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) plans to execute Kenneth Smith by forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen gas, an untested execution method with profound legal and ethical conseq...
The author’s argument actually seems pretry flimsy to me. If the issue is that it’s cruel to make a prisoner an active participant in their own execution, you could easily resolve that by putting them to sleep before applying the nitrogen. Breathing is only voluntary as long as you’re awake; once you’re asleep, you’re no more in control of breathing the nitrogen as you are in control of your heart pumping a lethal injection throughout your body.
Absolutely, the argument is crap, but they do a really good job of framing it to sound awful. Like, you die of suffocation. The nitrogen is harmless and breathing it makes you more comfortable. They make it sound like people are going to harm themselves by holding their breath to keep the deadly stuff out of their lungs, but it’s harmless and they don’t live any longer by not breathing it, so all they are doing by holding their breath is to make the experience more miserable.
But the article careful tiptoes around anything that doesn’t serve the narrative. So they did a good job at propaganda, but an awful job at journalism.
The author’s argument actually seems pretry flimsy to me. If the issue is that it’s cruel to make a prisoner an active participant in their own execution, you could easily resolve that by putting them to sleep before applying the nitrogen. Breathing is only voluntary as long as you’re awake; once you’re asleep, you’re no more in control of breathing the nitrogen as you are in control of your heart pumping a lethal injection throughout your body.
Absolutely, the argument is crap, but they do a really good job of framing it to sound awful. Like, you die of suffocation. The nitrogen is harmless and breathing it makes you more comfortable. They make it sound like people are going to harm themselves by holding their breath to keep the deadly stuff out of their lungs, but it’s harmless and they don’t live any longer by not breathing it, so all they are doing by holding their breath is to make the experience more miserable.
But the article careful tiptoes around anything that doesn’t serve the narrative. So they did a good job at propaganda, but an awful job at journalism.