Have they ever considered dropping a huge safe from a height onto the condemned prisoner? Might lighten the mood.
Yeah good luck with that. I’m sure the employees can wear appropriate PPE and the courts ultimately won’t give a shit assuming an employee will file a complaint.
Also trivial. You can buy off-the-shelf nitrogen generators for a few thousand dollars. But seriously, there is absolutely no obstacle at all to just getting a tank of nitrogen. Even if somehow every single gas supplier in the country said they would never sell nitrogen to a prison address or charge account, any employee could just go get a tank of it anonymously.
About $2500 on Amazon for 99.9% pure.
The slightest amount of positive pressure on the nitrogen side would ensure no entry of fresh air an absolute seal would not be necessary.
Any industry that has a potential for exposure to toxic gasses will have lockers with masks intended to be donned by untrained personnel. I once worked a contract at a paper mill where I had to meet with a safety officer to ‘fit test’ one of those masks and I received a 5 minute mini course on how to properly put one on.
This post is muddying the waters in a couple of ways.
First, I’m pretty sure you’re not talking about NO2, which is a nasty atmospheric pollutant that is severely toxic and injurious in very low concentrations and doesn’t appear to have much of an an anesthetic/narcotic effect:
Instead, you are almost certainly talking about nitrous oxide, N2O:
N2O has anesthetic/intoxicant effects even when oxygen is present in life-sustaining concentrations. So yes, it can induce an altered state of consciousness (potentially unpleasant) without progressing all the way to unconsciousness.
Pure nitrogen, N2, isn’t like that. It is a non-toxic asphyxiant at normal atmospheric pressures, meaning the only way it kills you is by keeping ambient oxygen from getting into your lungs. There will be virtually no effect on your state of consciousness, except to quickly end it. Time of useful consciousness, a concept associated with high-altitude aviation, is relevant here:
The table there shows that at an altitude of 50,000 feet, where the partial pressure of O2 is about 10% of its normal sea-level value, a person is rendered unconscious in about five seconds. If you’re breathing pure N2, then the partial pressure of O2 is zero, and TUC will be even shorter; you will go from conscious to unconscious after just a few breaths. No hallucinations, no delirium - there’s simply no more oxygen for the person’s brain to work with.
The danger to others who might be in the room can easily be virtually eliminated by managing the amount of N2 used and the size of the room. A person’s tidal volume is about 0.0177 cubic feet, and a normal respiration rate is about 20 breaths per minute. So a person needs 0.354 cubic feet of air per minute, which adds up to 3.54 cubic feet in ten minutes’ time. So in terms of N2, maybe you quadruple that that to assure plenty of overflow into the mask so that the person never draws in atmospheric air through any leaks in the mask, so figure you need about 15 cubic feet of N2. Just to be certain, you get an industry-standard 80-cubic-foot cylinder of N2, about five times more than your overflow requirement. Suppose the execution chamber is a cube 10 feet on a side, therefore containing 1000 cubic feet of air. Even if you leaked the entire 80 cubic feet of N2 from that bottle into the room, you’d only reduce the concentration of O2 in the room by about 7.5%, the equivalent of ascending from sea level to an altitude of about 3000 feet. Under these conditions, observers in the room would be getting more oxygen than airline passengers. The only safety consideration you’d need is to assure that the air in that room is well-mixed, which you could achieve with a desk fan. All of this assumes no HVAC supply of fresh air into the room at all.
You do raise a good point about thermal safety. compressed gases like N2 are typically delivered in cylinders with pressures of around 1800 psi. Assuming the cylinder is at room temperature, when this high-pressure gas is released to atmospheric pressure via adiabatic expansion, the temperature drops to around -320F, almost enough to start producing liquid nitrogen. This super-cold gas would need to be passed through a heat exchanger to make it warm enough for safe breathing before sending it to the person’s mask.
This. As I mentioned upthread, you can find videos of people unexpectedly passing out after drawing sequential breaths from a helium balloon. The same thing can happen with nitrogen. In 2013, party organizers in Mexico poured a few buckets of liquid N2 into a swimming pool to create a fog effect, and the resulting N2 vapor cloud blanketed the pool and kept breathable air away. People in the pool passed out rather quickly and had to be rescued.
Unconsciousness happens so quickly that any vomiting/convulsions, if they happen at all, would only happen after they could no longer be perceived by the person. Whether N2 execution constitutes torture would not depend on any physical aspects of the procedure.
The shittiest-sealing mask imaginable will get the job done here. All that’s necessary is to have an N2 flow rate into the mask that’s substantially greater than the person’s maximum inhalation rate. Once you’ve achieved that, then any leaks in the mask will only ever flow N2 outward; they’ll never flow atmospheric air inward.
See my analysis earlier in this post; you can have a very high overflow rate for the duration of the execution while still having only a very slight effect on ambient O2 concentration in the room.
N2 is used for many purposes. It’s available from all kinds of non-medical sources in all kinds of purity grades. Unlike prescription medications, you don’t need any kind of license or permit to buy it, and suppliers generally don’t ask their customers what they plan to use it for.
No doctor required. As noted above, with adequate overflow, the mask does not need to fit very well at all.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Decades ago I dabbled in N2O and found it an enjoyable, though short-lived high. Always did it while sitting, so falling down wasn’t a concern.
You are correct.
I retract my inaccurate post.
The NIOSH standard for a positive-pressure mask is a minimum flow rate of 4 cfm for moderate work rates, so about 10x normal respiration. It’s not the average intake you need to worry about; it’s the peak flow as someone is taking a deep breath.
Given that a prisoner is likely to be under stress and breathing rapidly, you probably want a flow rate even greater than 4 cfm (NIOSH allows flow rates up to 15 cfm).
None of this changes your basic argument - the excess nitrogen is not going to be an issue under these conditions.
BTW, is it obvious from the body that the death was caused by nitrogen? Because all this talk about how easy nitrogen and a suitable mask is to buy and how fast it will kill someone…sounds like a handy murder option.
(I mean, finding nitrogen in the lungs shouldn’t be suspicious, right? I mean, we all walk around breathing about 80% nitrogen our whole lives anyway.)
Do you need an answer fast?
It’s going to happen later today barring some other intervention.
From the article below:
The mask the state will place over Smith’s face is a “NIOSH-approved Type-C full facepiece supplied air respirator,” which is a type of mask sometimes used by industrial workers to get life-saving oxygen, the Associated Press reported, citing a court filing related to the execution.
“After the nitrogen gas is introduced, it will be administered for (1) fifteen minutes or (2) five minutes following a flatline indication on the EKG, whichever is longer,” reads a portion of Alabama’s protocol for execution by nitrogen hypoxia.
The mask will be something like this, I think
[image]
I appreciate the info. Especially @Machine_Elf’s post.
My question is: nitrogen is considered humane because nitrogen asphyxiation doesn’t increase the CO2 level in the blood stream and CO2 is what makes you feel like you’re suffocating.
Is that still the case when a mask is used? Doesn’t the wearer re-breathe their own exhalations resulting in increased CO2?
Only to a small extent. The method is known to work so it’s really more about how competent Alabama officials are. They don’t have a great track record in that regard.
That said, it’s likely to work, but I’d rather not trust my death to those bozos if given a choice.
Not even a small extent. You’d breathe more CO2 without a mask than you will with a positive pressure mask at an appropriate flow rate.
Fair, it’s not concentration but the actual amount of CO2 present that does necessarily increase. Either way, if properly done, it shouldn’t trigger any suffocation reaction
Similarly, you’d think you might feel uncomfortable wearing a respirator due to carbon dioxide buildup, but you don’t. Yes, breathing overall often feels more labor intensive since you have to overcome the resistance of the filters, but I’ve never felt like I was suffocating from not pushing out CO2 with my own breathing.
Is there a difference in rebreathing escape gasses like oxygen and carbon dioxide depending on the mask? I’m thinking you want a poor seal so that the nitrogen can push out of the mask everything that is not N2 before the next breath.
And don’t people in that euthanasia advocacy group (the name escapes me. Hemlock Society?) kill themselves with nothing more than a N2 canister, a hose and a large plastic bag? That’s a lot leakier than your worst mask.
I cannot think of a single method of execution that death-penalty opponents would ever concede is sufficiently humane. If nitrogen is “cruel,” then literally everything is. If Alabama went back to lethal injection, these DP-opponents would insist that is cruel, too.