Witnesses watched through a window at an Alabama prison as Kenneth Eugene Smith became the nation's first person to be put to death using nitrogen gas.
But he didn’t want to die. If you don’t want to die – if you aren’t cooperating with the execution – it is going to be torturous with this method.
The attitude of “this is the way I want to die” is automatically assuming that you want to die. That you’re a willing participant. Execution must be presumed to have an uncooperative victim and the humaneness must be judged in that context.
Lot of people saying he should’ve just let it happen. It would’ve hurt him less. That’s unacceptable to say to a victim of violence in any other context, so I’m not sure why it makes sense to people here.
Like I said, there are many ways of making an unwilling person cooperate but there will always be someone arguing the contrary. Just because this didn’t go as expected doesn’t mean it’s a tortuous method. Some convulsing is expected but that doesn’t mean that the person was conscious.
I’m not for the death penalty but I’m glad that more options are being explored and I hope that this is used as a learning experience.
But he didn’t want to die. If you don’t want to die – if you aren’t cooperating with the execution – it is going to be torturous with this method.
The attitude of “this is the way I want to die” is automatically assuming that you want to die. That you’re a willing participant. Execution must be presumed to have an uncooperative victim and the humaneness must be judged in that context.
Lot of people saying he should’ve just let it happen. It would’ve hurt him less. That’s unacceptable to say to a victim of violence in any other context, so I’m not sure why it makes sense to people here.
Like I said, there are many ways of making an unwilling person cooperate but there will always be someone arguing the contrary. Just because this didn’t go as expected doesn’t mean it’s a tortuous method. Some convulsing is expected but that doesn’t mean that the person was conscious.
I’m not for the death penalty but I’m glad that more options are being explored and I hope that this is used as a learning experience.