Sept 22 (Reuters) - The Supreme Court of Alabama is weighing whether to allow the state to become the first to execute a prisoner with a novel method: asphyxiation using nitrogen gas.
Last month, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the court to allow the state to proceed with gassing Kenneth Smith, who was convicted of murder in 1996, using a face mask connected to a cylinder of nitrogen intended to deprive him of oxygen.
Smith's lawyers have said the untested protocol may violate the U.S. Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments," and have argued a second attempt to execute him by any method is unconstitutional.
In a reply brief filed with the court on Friday, they called the nitrogen gas protocol "so heavily redacted that it is unintelligible," and said Smith had not yet exhausted his appeals.
I'm going to start off this conversation by first saying I'm not an advocate of the death penalty. However, of all the methods used, asphyxiation is not "cruel and unusual." It is quick (as in immediate) and painless. This is why the defendant's lawyers have no idea what they're talking about.
if you crush the person with a giant falling anvil it is quick and painless as well as long as a professional administers the anvil.
This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won't be the ones to do it.
You guys all knew that right? Doctors don't administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won't be administering gas either. Some po'dunk cop will.
Because doctors take an oath that begins "first, do no harm". This has forever been the problem of the very notion of "humane execution", there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.
Know what's just as effective? Bullets. But we can't call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It's not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They're lynchings. Violent theatrics. That's the point.
They shouldn't be legal, it's barbaric. But you already said you weren't for them, so I'm just preaching to the ether.