this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Attorneys for Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, filed an amended lawsuit challenging the proposed new execution method as a potential violation of the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. They asked a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction to block the execution from going forward next year.

“There is sparse research on how long a human must be exposed to 100% pure nitrogen to cause death, what happens if a human is exposed to less than 100% pure nitrogen for a prolonged period of time, or on the pain or sensations that a human exposed to nitrogen might experience,” his attorneys wrote in the amended lawsuit filed Monday.

They noted in the filing that the American Veterinary Medical Association wrote in 2020 euthanasia guidelines that nitrogen hypoxia is an acceptable method of euthanasia for pigs but not other mammals because it could create an “anoxic environment that is distressing for some species.”

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Arguing his way into a more painful death

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Every crack in the death penalty is another step towards abolishing the death penalty.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Agreed, my read of the quotes is that it's saying something like "you can't claim ANY execution method is humane because we don't research how people feel while we are killing them, so just stop."

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For real. There is plenty of research on what death by hypoxia does to the human body. Nitrogen being an inert gas, the sentenced wouldn't feel anything different than breathing (notwithstanding their own anxiety). Lethal injection- muscle paralysis followed by heart failure - is the much more cruel execution method.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I think if the legal injection went exactly as planned, it would be painless. But that gets botched all the time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Fun fact, this same inmate was spared last November because they couldn't find a vein. He's a prime candidate for lethal injection going wrong. It's part of the reason they wanted to use nitrogen toxicity.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Not toxicity, but asphyxiation. Nitrogen's harmless, but you need oxygen and will sleep fast if you don't get it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

States no longer have access to the drugs used in lethal injection because the suppliers didnt want to be associated with all that. IIRC one state tried their own cocktail of drugs recently and it went horribly wrong.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

It goes exactly as planned. It's agony, and the prescribed under dosage of the anesthesia ensures it.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Exactly this. There is a lot of experimental and direct human knowledge of nitrogen asphyxiation.

The "anoxic environment distressing to some animals" is specific to rodentia or other creatures that have been exposed to anoxic environments in their evolutionary process.

Must animals use a buildup of waste products to sense a need for fresh air. But in an anoxic environment (like when breathing only nitrogen, or when breathing subterranean gases that have similarly supplanted oxygen), you still breathe out the waste products, so everything seems fine.

But since rodents live underground on a regular basis and have realistic probabilities of encountering low- or no-oxygen environments, they evolved the ability specifically to detect oxygen - that is, they evolved the ability to realoze there's no oxygen and freak out.

But for us, it's blissful sleep, possibly preceded by a case of the sillies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

He’s trying to argue his way out of execution while appeals are being filed.