“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
Come on, isn’t this america? Why don’t they just shoot prisoners?! It’s quick, cheap and they love it, don’t they? Coming up with so many twisted ways to kill a person just to do it differently than the Nazis. If even Belarus is still officially shooting their people, why isn"t the greatest country in the world?
/s because I can’t handle thisHoly shit, you’re right. Firing squad would be kinder. And I hate guns, so…
Because guns don’t kill people. The NRA said so.
Mississippi authorizes firing squad if nitrogen hypoxia, lethal injection, and electrocution are held unconstitutional or “otherwise unavailable.”
Oklahoma & Utah have similar rules.
personally i think we should start doing a slightly modified version of the traditional british canon execution.
For those who aren’t familar, you strap a dude to the front of a canon, with a dud charge (i don’t believe there is a projectile) and then set it off and run. Apparently it’s pretty “spectacular” I say we do the same thing but delete the head in the process. Or perhaps add a canon ball because why not.
If we’re executing people theres no need to pretend what we’re doing is “good”
Only if they eat glitter as part of their last meal.
Too expensive and dangerous. A 2-ton tungsten cube dropped on the head is quick, painless, cheap, and puts on a show that can be cleaned up with a power washer.
I imagine that a two ton cube of anything would probably work.
Let me suggest duck beaks.
Ahh, 2 tons of duck beaks actually aren’t heavy enough, actually
A two ton cube of mattress foam probably wouldnt. But there is literally only one way to know for sure
Tungsten is very dense. It is space efficient.
actually, i like this idea. I think someone else mentioned just dropping a massive concrete cube on people for execution. It’s a funny one for sure.
Concrete spall would be too dangerous. Trust the tungsten state sponsored murder cube; it is the death of the future, today!
just makes it more exciting :)
Have you no concern for safety? Somebody could be hurt.
humans love danger! It’s what we’ve been doing since the dawn of time!
We are talking about a legal murder here. We don’t want any chance that somebody could be hurt. If people want to experience danger, they can play Russian roulette, budget skydive, fly on a Boeing, go to school in America, drive while black, try drugs from China, speed in New York on a motorcycle, explore abandoned buildings and eat the paint, become an amateur arborist, deliver pizzas, be a woman, own a tiger or chimpanzee, take a firearms self-defense course run by a balding guy with a ponytail, or compete in Gol/Nanggol.
There is no need for someone to be uselessly harmed at a state execution! We live in a sane society.
Apparently, getting compressed by seawater inside a collapsing carbon fibre tube at a depth of 8kms is ultra quick.
Maybe we should just force condemned prisoners to test-pilot oceangate submarines.
Tungsten is not cheap, also it might fracture
It costs about $1.25m to execute one person currently. 2 tons of tungsten costs $60k spot, $240k with government contract as a one-time purchase. If it were to become damaged, it can be recycled into a new state sanctioned penal murder cube. Given the price of tungsten will increase in value approximately 100% per decade, it is a viable government investment.
Elect me to be king of America. I will balance the budget and establish a stranger economy with a dollar backed by state sanctioned penal murder cubes and other innovative and cost-effective measures. We will all be equal in death and that is a promise you can count your votes on.
You act like running a country is hard. The only hard part of running America is hiding all your bribes.
Hello? It’s called “lobbying” and you don’t have to hide anything.
Under my administration I will have a website that will clearly show contributions to my throne with one of those donations thermometers that will be updated live and never surpass 7/8th full because the goal is always just a bit more money. Under it you will find about 10 clickbait unser-targeted ads, a leaderboard, loser board, and the last 10 donations. There will also be links to my Patreon, Venmo, CashApp, Fansly, and Onlyfans. I am all about transparency and honesty in my rule.
I will use those mandatory contributions to pay for universal healthcare and cutting edge wars of aggression against states with viable economic exploitation possibilities or usable land for battery factories to supply a green infinite rail system that services all major cities without using fossil-fuels to move people and goods.
If it were to become damaged, it can be recycled into a new state sanctioned penal murder cube.
Lmao
I can’t agree with this, everyone knows you’re supposed to reuse before recycle. The murder cube will look way more badass with some chips and cracks in it
We’re going to adopt your proposal but all that’s in the budget is a 45 lb plate from a local gym that closed down. Next execution is scheduled for next week, we hope to see you there!
tungsten isn’t cheap. look up the prices
and that’s a pretty small rod
That is a finished machined tungsten rod from a distributor, not a 15 cubic inch cube from a manufacturer. Metal rod is more costly to machine than billet.
Even extrapolating from that invalid example, volume of it would be 2.36 cu in. Volume of 2 tons of tungsten is roughly 3375 cu in. So the price of a 3375 cu in cube at the price of a 1/2x12 tungsten rod would be $594,028.60. Even at a half million per cube, or about $2 million in government spending contracts, the cost savings over just 2 executions is apparent given the $1.25-1.5m cost of one execution.
The cube is reusable and therefore environmentally friendly. We could end up dropping the same cube on generations of victims of state sponsored penal murders in multiple states instead of having to go through vet clinics or welding gas suppliers for unsustainable forms of capital punishment.
When the actual cost of a state sponsored murder cube is closer to $240k($30k per ton plus government contract pricing), it doesn’t make financial sense to continue our inhumane state sponsored murder techniques as we do. In 2023 the prison system has murdered 24 people, which cost roughly $30 million dollars of wasted tax-payer dollars. With the Capital Punishment Cube, we could have saved the tax-payers over $25 million by using only 4 cubes plus transport(<$5 per 1000 miles) and powerwashing($200/hr).
Sentencing the probably rightfully convicted to capitol punishment by state sponsored murder cubes is cheaper, more reliable, more humane, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly. We owe it to the future generations to enact the changes that will make for a better world; state sponsored penal murder cubes are the change we need to make in order provide that better world for the children.
Capital Punishment Cubes are the future of a humane and green justice system.
From a purely academic/scientific perspective, is there a reason why they do not administer some form of benzodiazepine to gently sedate the prisoner before conducting the execution protocol? I’m not a medical professional, but I do have prescription benzo and it works miraculously in calming me down and lets me drift off to an incredibly deep sleep.
They’re worried about the prisoner becoming addicted.
pharmaceuticals manufacturers won’t sell you this stuff, this already happened with lethal injection
taiwan (?) gets this well, as far as you can get death penalty well. prisoner is sedated with injectable benzos and then shot, no pain, no consciousness at all, very hard to fuck it up and no pretence of subtlety
Medical professionals, particularly doctors who have sworn an oath against causing harm, refuse to take part in the executions. This is partly why lethal injections are so hit and miss. Even if you can get the drugs, the dosages are tricky. IV placement is a skill. All of it being done by untrained individuals leads to a high rate of failure- and that was before the pharmaceutical companies started refusing to supply prisons.
I would imagine that if benzos became part of the nitrogen hypoxia protocols prisons would then have a hard time sourcing them, which is terrible for those other inmates who might need them for other reasons (anxiety, alcohol withdrawal, seizures)
Look I can’t help but feel deceived.
Every single time the death penalty was brought up, nitrogen asphyxiation was touted as a humane alternative. There were always claims that it would be painless, and that the process itself was extremely well understood. It was usually further implied that the reason states don’t do this was because death penalty advocates wanted the prisoner to suffer as long as possible.
Yet the second nitrogen asphyxiation became a viable option, the very same people touting it lined up against it. Suddenly it was completely unproven. Suddenly it was wholly inhumane and inflicted suffering.
It’s so incredibly obvious that the push for nitrogen asphyxiation was at least in part a bad faith argument by people who are philosophically opposed to the death penalty.
Being philosophically opposed to the death penalty is a valid opinion, but the dishonesty makes me much less inclined for me to take these people seriously.
I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. Nobody likes being deceived or lied to.
How does the delivery method here differ from the euthanasia setup in Switzerland?
Where’s all the people that said we “do actually know what it does to people and it’s painless” now?
I wonder how long Elizabeth Sennett struggled to live after Kenneth stabbed her to death. May she and her family rest in peace knowing justice has been served.
Look. Execution is inhumane. You can’t make it gentle, peaceful, or nice. All you can do is make it quick, which it sounds like they failed to do here. But if the good people of Alabama aren’t comfortable with someone struggling for half an hour and then dying, they shouldn’t execute people at all.
That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed’s spiritual advisor. If I was Smith’s spiritual advisor, I’d also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful. The reality is that it’s a lot more cruel that Smith went back into the execution chamber despite them botching the job the first time than that they half-assed the nitrogen asphyxiation. It was an untested method, but every method of execution has a first person to be executed with it.
If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you’ve already ceded the moral high ground. We have already solved execution, and we’ve had it solved for decades, even centuries arguably. Hanging, firing squad, electrocution, beheading, lethal injection–every method has its proponents and detractors, but every method is to the same end. If you’re too squeamish for what happened in Alabama, an alternative method of killing people isn’t going to fix that for you. The solution is staring you right in the face, and it’s life without parole.
Weird, everything I saw on Lemmy until yesterday was about how humane and painless this method is, without any suffering. Seems that the tone has changed
I personally experienced breathing nitrogen until loss of consciousness under controlled and supervised conditions for training purposes with the RCAF. I was in a room with seven other people who were all doing the same thing as well as instructors who were in here with us for safety.
The point of the exercise was to sit in a room with a mask on, recognize the symptoms of hypoxia when we experienced them and throw a lever that would resume normal air breathing once we had enough. We were given tablets with simple games to play to simulate having our minds occupied on accomplishing some tasks. We knew they were going to switch or air supplies with pure nitrogen at some point to cause hypoxia but we didn’t know when it was going to happen. The room was also a hypobaric chamber but it didn’t stimulate a high enough altitude to induce hypoxia by itself, it was only there to simulate the environmental signs of decompression ( fogging of the air, percieved drop in pressure, cooling sensation, etc)
We sat there for a few minutes accomplishing the tasks on the tablets (basically paying candy crush) with nothing special going on. Then I noticed that we all started breathing deeper and harder. When I looked around people were also red in the face but strangely did not feel any discomfort from it and some people were even still playing on their tablets without noticing. Some of them threw their personal lever immediately because the point of the exercise was to recognize the signs of hypoxia. But others including my competitive ass wanted to see how far I could take it and if I could outlast others so we kept going.
My breathing naturally got deeper and harder but strangely I wasn’t feeling like I was suffocating. I started feeling pins and needles in my extremities. Concentrating on the tasks in the tablet became increasingly difficult and slower. A few moments later I got tunnel vision and my hearing started to sound muffled. These two effects progressively got worse until I could almost not see or hear anything anymore at which point I finally threw the lever just before passing out due to a phenomenon called oxygen paradox where when oxygen supply is resumed the hypoxia symptoms briefly get worse before going away. I didn’t even notice passing out. I woke up a few moments later and from my perspective it seemed that time had skipped forward a minute. Had I not thrown the lever and there were no instructors to do it for me I would have died a few moments later.
All of this took less than 5 minutes and I never experienced anything worse than mild discomfort throughout. I don’t know how they managed to make it last 25 minutes other than maybe the brain stem running on fumes and keeping the heart beating but there is no consciousness at that point. If I ever had to pick a way to be executed this would be it, provided that it is done correctly.
Gruesome.
I’m not convinced the death penalty is worthwhile except to feed someone’s wrath.
What if, (and hear me out,) we did for corrections the sort of thing that countries with low recidivism do? Like, not use for-profit prisons with incentive to turn out re-offenders, and not use prisons that turn out hardened criminals that aren’t equipped to function in the world without resorting to crime, and actually take the ‘corrections’ or ‘rehabilitation’ parts of their nomenclature seriously?
If all we do with our prisons is punish and humiliate (and squeeze slave labor out of) convicts, we’re just creating future crime and all that’s left at that point is killing convicts at industrial pace unless you can figure out that crime is more driven by poverty than anything else, and the USA just doesn’t want to figure that out because it just doesn’t want to solve poverty or crime, it wants to make money creating and punishing both.
The simplest explanation for what went wrong here is that Kenny’s religious advisor is lying and we need to ask a neutral observer what actually happened.
When is America going to learn that you can’t punish murder with murder? You are literally saying “rules for thee but not for me.”
Another reason not to visit the place
So they fucked it up and then there’s a real gem in the article. The jury voted to give him life without parole. A judge overruled that jury to give him the death penalty anyways.
There are no more laws. Only the whims of judges.
