Alabama is set to perform the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday.
Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis.
Miller was to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.
If they must kill people I don’t understand why they don’t knock people out first. I’ve been under anesthesia for surgery; If they had killed me while under, things would’ve just stayed dark, but I never would have known.
So the lethal injection was supposed to be that, three injections: an anesthetic, a paralytic, then a chemical to kill. Firstly, anesthesia is hard to dose with a doctor much less when it’s understood that serving as an executioner is a violation of professional ethics among doctors. But also even then the person is awake when receiving the anesthesia, they know what’s happening as they’re strapped down against their will and have the IV that will kill them placed. It’s fundamentally cruel to do that.
Doctors wont do it which makes dosing tricky. More importantly drug companies won’t sell them the drugs because they don’t want their product to be associated with people being killed.
How does it make dosing tricky? Just give everybody a mega dose… what’s the worst that can happen, they die before you kill them?
“Tricky” means “ethical issues of someone who took an oath to heal and save lives doing the opposite.”
They were asking why is getting the dosing right important if the person is going to die anyway.
Anesthesiologists won’t do it. That’s why they had so much trouble executing the guy in the first place: its not a doctor doing it, just a prison guard.
They take their Hippocratic Oat seriously thankfully.
Well some of them do
More than that, it could cost your license and make you a professional pariah. But beyond that, would you be comfortable seeing your doctor has performed executions?
Are the torture doctors (including psychologists) of the last Gulf invasion still practicing?
Why would you even need a doctor? All you’d need is access to something like fentanyl and general knowledge of how to calculate a lethal dose, then just pick a dose higher than that and have a second one prepared. Other than that, they’d just need training to insert an IV or needle into a vein.
It’s a separate question from whether they should be executing anyone, but it just seems ridiculous that reliably killing someone is a hard problem. I personally think it’s based on a desire to walk a line where they are cruel to those they kill but don’t seem that way unless you look closely. Like with the first nitrogen execution, it sounded fool proof, but then they didn’t do anything to vent the CO2 and it became cruel.
Yeah the “just given them X” is how they got into a mess botching executions.
Killing people realibly and quickly has been perfectly fixed for centuries but they want to make a barbaric act look civilized, clean, even clinical.
A guillotine would be cheaper, perfectly reliable, quick, painless, fittingly antiquated looking for an antiquated practice. But it makes a mess and conjures images of angry Frenchmen getting rid of the ruling elite.
I hope all Americans come one day to realize how horrible, ineffective and unnecessary state mandated executions are.
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First… uhhhhhh… do harm I guess
That’s what lethal injection is for. But they can’t get legitimate doctors to perform an execution, so they have to just wing it with hacks, which is why they often get fucked up.
At least a firing squad is full of people who know how to shoot.
That’s what they used to do. Now they can’t obtain the drugs as no pharmaceutical company or pharmacy wants to be associated with murder…
Only it often didn’t work properly because no medically trained person will participate. Nor should they because they must “do no harm”. So most of the time, the guards have no idea how to tell if someone is reacting to pain and don’t understand the actual effects of the drugs.
I’m sorry, that’s too humane.