Move follows Alabama’s recent killing of death row inmate Kenneth Smith using previously untested method
Three of the largest manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas in the US have barred their products from being used in executions, following Alabama’s recent killing of the death row inmate Kenneth Smith using a previously untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia.
The three companies have confirmed to the Guardian that they have put in place mechanisms that will prevent their nitrogen cylinders falling into the hands of departments of correction in death penalty states. The move by the trio marks the first signs of corporate action to stop medical nitrogen, which is designed to preserve life, being used for the exact opposite – killing people.
The green shoots of a corporate blockade for nitrogen echoes the almost total boycott that is now in place for medical drugs used in lethal injections. That boycott has made it so difficult for death penalty states to procure drugs such as pentobarbital and midazolam that a growing number are turning to nitrogen as an alternative killing technique.
Now, nitrogen producers are engaging in their own efforts to prevent the abuse of their products. The march has been led by Airgas, which is owned by the French multinational Air Liquide.
I could not agree more. People should stop murdering people so there is no need for the death penalty.
Keep in mind this guy thought it was fine to kill someone for $1000. Not any hatred or psychological issue or ideology. Just a bit of cash.
Or we could just not retaliate with execution. We could follow the evidence that execution doesn’t reduce crime rate or severity and to not make murderers of the state
Its this flawed argument on repeat. You just start assuming that killing a murderer (“life for a life”) is somehow automatically wrong and then use it to show death penalty is wrong.
Why is “life for a life” somehow unfair demand for the premeditated murderers? What is this based on? Or just repeating it because you heard it so often.
Youre Right I’m just parroting the idea that killing is bad. Definitely not from a belief that punitive justice is ineffective at reducing crime, that we as a society must be better than our worst people, and a deep terror informed by history at the idea of a government having the power to decide to kill its own citizens.
Like seriously this is fucking gas chambers in Alabama and some people aren’t just horrified by where that might go?
You mix two very different issues. Whether our corrupt governments should have the power to execute people, which they shouldn’t but its not what this article is about. Also, since they had this power since like the beginning of written history, I kind of am too used to it to be horrified.
And if we are executing people, what the method should be. Electric chair is something that actually horrifies me. So if we at least get a 100x more humane method, it is a win in my book. Certainly not gonna loose sleep because it has association with Nazis. So does VolksWagen and Fanta.
Yeah but nobody is mad that the Nazis were drinking fruit based beverages, our problem is that they were doing mass murder. And the method of gas was important to that because it was easier to stomach and scale.
The Nazis were also using trains to transport them because it was more efficient. Lets ban trains. They used guns to keep them in line. Ban governments from having guns. They used fences to keep them in camps. Lets ban fences.
There is no logic to this argument. Its just an appeal to emotion.
“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”
-Holly Near
And we have the capacity to be better than that.
There was no compelling need to execute him. If such a compelling need did exist, it would have presented itself in the past 36 years where he was in custody but not executed. But it didn’t, so the state just waited until some arbitrary time to tick a box that didn’t need to be ticked.
My fundamental issue is with the “better than that”. I really don’t see why letting a cold blooded murderer off lightly would be the better way.
What do you mean by “off lightly?” They’re still getting punished while serving a life sentence. The punishment stops when the lights go out.
Do you actually believe that life imprisonment and death are the same level of punishment? And if yes, why would it matter which one we use?
If it is not the same, then how are they not getting of lightly for ending someone elses life?
Having a comparator does not automatically make something light.
Water torture is not “light” simply because we’re not gouging eyeballs and cutting off testicles. Burning someone with acid is not “light” simply because we’re not actively lighting them on fire.
You have yet to provide any justification for your claim that imprisonment is “light” other than that it’s not death. You can’t justify barbarism simply by saying that something else that isn’t barbarism is lighter by comparison, and therefore barbarism must be justified. Were that true, you could try to justify any proposed barbaric act by saying that the second worst thing is “light” by comparison.
What is the necessity of killing someone after 36 years of not killing them? There’s clearly not a safety concern, or a concern of escape, or anything else pressing. It’s so far removed from the original crime that it’s not really a punishment for that crime anymore: the last 36 years of imprisonment were the punishment. It’s just an act of barbarism for the sake of ticking a box.
I guess both barbarism and light are subjective, but I think I understand your argument.
That being said, there are so many things more barbaric than executing criminals going on in our societies that focusing on this is like fixing a burst water pipe on the sinking Titanic.
“Other things are bad so we should fix nothing” is bad reasoning. If we all agree that something is bad and can be fixed by proper legislation, then it should be done. The price of tea in China has no bearing on whether this specific problem should or shouldn’t be fixed.
If you have other things you want to focus on, feel free to advocate for those in the proper channels.
An empty swimming pool is bad. A burning house is bad. Filling your pool with limited water supply before putting out the fire is also bad.
There is so much focus to go around for politics.
Well prison for decades doesn’t seem very light to me. I have never been granted but from those that have I have heard most wouldn’t recommend it.
You think living the rest of your life in a cage is “getting off lightly?” Are you a child?
If you murder a murderer, that makes you a murderer. Just because the state is the one doing it doesn’t make it okay.
Same (faulty) logic used to tell the oppressed not rise up against their oppressors. If you’re going to conflate all killing with murder, be prepared to get into weeds like self defense and right to die. If you’re willing to admit killing humans is more nuanced than that, then and only then we can have a real discussion.
There is a difference between reacting to a situation vs creating a new situation.
Very few people would argue against having to use violence to stop someone else from using it, in the moment where other options don’t present themselves. However a murdered container in prison is no longer a threat. The state has the luxury of just keeping them there until time and nature does her thing.
Basically the rules for a crisis are not the rules for a non-crisis. Additionally, if it is required to use violence to stop violence at least the hope is something bad won’t happen. Not the case for someone in jail. The bad thing already happened.
More broadly Ukraine has the right to defend herself. She does not have the right to burn down parts of Russia 40 years from now when the war is long over.
Sure. I can say that self defense (only in cases where there is an immediate threat of death) is fine due to it being a life or death situation. I can also agree to right to die being okay since there is consent, so long as the person is considered to be in a mentally healthy state.
Not sure about the rising up thing, though, but that is very nuanced. I believe in democracy, but most of the time, corruption makes it so that true democracy becomes impossible. Overthrowing a government is also a difficult topic, since often times, it is a movement that gets coopted by the powerful or by those who seek power instead of those who seek the government to serve all of its people.
If you bake bread, you are a bread baker. If you play football, you are a football player. If you murder someone, you are a murderer.
If you don’t commit the crime of murder, you are not a murderer. Murder is a legal term. Administering a death penalty is not murder, since it is not a crime.
No matter how much batman says otherwise, there is nothing inherently not ok about death penalty for murderers. Of course, you can dislike it all you want. But don’t go slandering people that disagree with you.
Arguably, the opposite is true: If I decide I really want to kill you, what should be the minimal punishment? Is it ok to just pay a fine? Is it ok to be in prison for a month? How about a year? What if I decide the slap on the wrist punishment is worth it? Why should the punishment be less than paying with my own life in kind? Why is your life worth less than mine when I am the murderer in this hypothetical?
The same way that the Holocaust was legal…
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Life in prison.
Murder is not exclusively a legal term; it is also used in ethical/moral discussions, like how I used it. A government can decide legallity, but it cannot decide if something is moral or not, although most governments attempt to do so. What is moral or not is also not universal, and can vary across different cultures and time periods.
You mean like what you just did with this comment?
Keep in mind, in the US, there is a ~4% false conviction rate for the death penalty. That means that ~4% of people who get the death penalty are innocent.
Source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111
I do remember about the 4%. That is why I don’t support death penalty.
I am just honest about the reason why I don’t support it, instead of pretending I am somehow morally superior for refusing to kill.
As for life in prison, that is up to everyone’s values, whether that is equivalent. In my view, it is not.
I am also honest about why I don’t support it. I think killing people for any reason is wrong except for the case of a direct threat of violence (self defense). The 4% statistic is just another one of my reasons, but not my main reason.
I mean, you are free to subjectively think that and conform your own actions to that. Refuse to participate in anything death penalty related.
But unless you have any rational basis for it, I don’t see why anyone else should care about what you think.
What need is that, exactly?
You don’t know that. You think that, and there’s evidence to support it, but you don’t know it.
As I wrote in a different thread, yes, I agree we should not have death penalty due to the high possibility (inevitability?) of executing innocent people.
I just don’t see any moral issue with executing actual murderers with N2, just the practical issue of not being able to precisely determine who the murderers are.
Why do you even care which way they kill people then? Trying to take the moral high ground, when you’re just as blood thirsty as the condemned.
That’s a ridiculous argument. If I believe a bank robber should be stopped from robbing a bank using force, can’t I also demand the force is not excessive?
Thinking death is an appropriate punishment and torture isn’t is not contradictory.
You think bank robbery is a crime worthy of execution?
I literally said the opposite. Just because I don’t believe people should be allowed to rob banks, I don’t believe they should be killed or maimed for it.
Just because I believe the death penalty is just does not mean I believe people should be tortured.
Name one reason that the death penalty is a good thing that isn’t an appeal to emotion or outrage.
3 things:
These are actually excellent examples as to why the death penalty is terrible and we shouldn’t listen to the advocates for continuing this brutal practice.
#1 completely invalidates the practice by acknowledging that innocent people get killed by it. Amazing that you would make an “in the real world” argument as if that’s not where we live.
#2 has plenty of real-world data to suggest that life in prison is cheaper and more practical than the death penalty in ~100% of cases, further invalidating the practice as useful or economical.
#3 is just a devil’s advocate argument about a society that currently practices execution, and I have zero interest in a “if we must kill people” argument, because I absolutely have no tolerance for the state having the power to decide that its own citizens must die. Humoring that is complicity in murder afiac.
In all you didn’t answer my question because there is no valid purpose for execution than to satisfy bloodlust and to give the state ultimate authority over its people.
I did answer your question, you just assume like so many people that because I disagree with you on some points, I must be a contrarian who disagrees with everything.
I do not support the death penalty. I came here to defend N2 because after giving it a lot of thought, N2 would be my preferred method of euthanasia if I needed it.
As for point 2 and 3, I am just saying it would be a bit better to ban it. But there are literally hundreds of more important things to care and lobby about like Gaza, school shootings, healthcare, mental health, police violence ,… All much more important than a handful of convicted murderers being executed.
Just reforming the legal system to maybe not have 4% of the largest incarcerated population in the world be innocent would do a lot more good.
Still not enough. I have had the same stance for a long time. The death penalty should only be used, if ever, for crimes so bad that to not use it is to say thr crime was as bad as regular murder. Warlords who commit genocide level.