yeah this is a bit of a response to another thread. no I am not really here to debate the death penalty just the method of execution. going for the most humane for all parties involved I post the following method.
1 create a room/cell with venting and fans to circulate air built into the floor/ceiling. (nothing loud or crazy just a quiet or even silently moving air around)
in this room is a bed, toilet, maybe a game console/some kind of entertainment.
2 randomly every say 6-36 hours (I really don’t care about this part) the room will very slowly and completely automatically fill with Carbon Monoxide over a period of say 45 minutes{or perhaps superfast in say 1 minute, I am not sure which method will cause the least amount of discomfort which is the goal}. (the fail safe for this will be when the outer door opens the room will quickly fill with fresh air before the inner door can be opened and the CO cycle cannot start with either door open and closing both doors will reset the cycle)
3 once the sentence has been passed the convicted person is simply moved into the cell, you could even take the CO cycle up to a longer time frame and leave them in there for a week or shorten it up, even leave a switch that the convict could flip himself. telling them this is the execution chamber would also be optional (in my book) if you tell them this is just the final holding cell they wouldn’t be dreading the impending death in this room anyway)
My goal here is the most painless possible death, using the most removed method possible for those involved. I had some trouble finding out the details of CO poisoning under this type of circumstance, i.e. a room slowly filling/quickly filling. if another gas with the same oderless/tasteless/does not produce an effect when breathed into the lungs would work to cause sleep first then flood the room with CO I would go with that method instead.
does this method have any merit given that places like Texas are going to keep killing criminals for some time to come? and feel free to add your methods as well.
Nitrogen asphyxiation would probably work just as well, or better - as long as the oxygen level is dropped without any rise in CO2, there is no sensation of suffocation - just rapid unconsciousness, then death a few minutes later.
But it’s fairly clear that being humane isn’t the top priority for execution methods - even a bullet in the head is more humane than the electric chair or cyanide gas.
I’ve never understood why the gas chamber didn’t use CO or N2O. I have to conclude that it’s simply the desire to see people suffer physical pain.
The same goes for why morphine isn’t used for lethal injection. The last thing the sick people who support the death penalty want is for the convicted’s last moments to be blissful, or anything but extremely painful.
The most common symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning may resemble other types of poisonings and infections, including symptoms such as headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, fatigue, and a feeling of weakness. Affected families often believe they are victims of food poisoning. Infants may be irritable and feed poorly. Neurological signs include confusion, disorientation, visual disturbance, syncope and seizures.](Carbon monoxide - Wikipedia)
Not sure what the symptoms would be at higher levels though.
yeah there is some confusion as to what the effects are, you link seems to refer to long term non lethal exposures, what I am after is much shorter term completely lethal exposures which seem to cause you to fall asleep and die fairly quickly.
it does sound like the N20 might be a better method though.
I think that the OPs system would be torture as the condemned is sitting there for an extended period of time not knowing if his next second will be his last or not. I think he should be told of the time of his execution so that he can make peace with himself, or if he is religious with God.
When I first read this last night I was tipsy and thought I must be missing something. But now, reading it again, I still have no clue what the point of drawing it out like that could be, if your goal is to be kinder…? Not I just disagree, I don’t even understand the situation well enough to disagree.
If your goal is to come up with as close to a painless method of execution as possible, you can’t beat a gunshot (.38 cal or higher) to the base of the back of the head, right where the spine comes into the skull. Angle it up slightly so that the bullet exits the forehead area.
It’ll turn them off just like flicking a light switch.
A simple sealed chamber that slowly loses air pressure. As you say, there would be unconsciousness early on, making it fairly merciful, and eventually the body’s systems would fail catastrophically as the pressure becomes critically low.
Sounds absolutely terrorizing and horrible, honestly. All that waiting and not knowing…
I’m with Ned Stark. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Which I suppose means that the jury should draw lots. And I’m not actually anti-death penalty, I just feel that if we’re going to use it, we should woman up about it and just friggin’ do it, honest and brutal and quick.
Give them a pill or injection that renders them unconscious.
Wood chipper. Blunt axes. Lawnmowers. Thrown from helicopter. Torn apart by hungry pigs. It doesn’t matter because the victim is unconscious, and so can’t be said to suffer.
Once they’re unconscious, which can be achieved any number of humane ways, and can’t in itself be viewed as inhumane since we sleep every night (and perform dental work and surgery under anesthesia), anything you do to render them dead is humane because they don’t experience it. And were I on death row and my execution came up, and I was given a pill and told “take this so you won’t be awake to be executed,” I don’t think I’d hesitate.
So, you’re pushed into the execution-chamber, and you have to wait there, and wait there, without even knowing at what point in the next several hours the switch will be thrown? No, that is not more humane than methods currently used; it is, on the contrary, a refinement of cruelty.
I always thought that giving them a cabinet with an unlimited supply of pharmacutical grade heroin and unlimited cases each of syringes and alcohol swabs would work. Let them wind up their dosage until they drift off and stop remembering to breath.
I always wondered why they picked the cocktail of chemicals they picked. Why not simply trank the dearly almost departed and then push an OD of heroin or morphine, or slap on a few fentynl patches and out go the lights permanently. I can pretty much say with assurance that there is somewhere on the web that I could go look up the lethal dose of pretty much anything by weight. I can give a damned injection and I never took the hippocratic oath. Heck, all you really need to do is slap on 3 or 4 simultaneous fentanyl patches and not worry about anything else… those things are scary!
I think the “let them OD” school of thought gets ruled out by the fact that ODing can be really messy, while lethal injection, carried out properly, is about as certain and clean a method as is possible. And really, if you follow my method and render them unconscious first, then do with them what you will, it would probably end up being just like lethal injection but with a gap between the rendering unconscious and the administration of lethal chemicals. One of the current issues with lethal injection is that, because medical personnel tend to refuse to participate in executions, you get prison staff learning to make injections, which leads to screw ups. John Wayne Gacy’s execution was buggered up by a clogged tube caused by solidified chemicals; others have undergone very painful executions because the first chemical, which is supposed to knock them out, didn’t do so by the time the second (extremely painful) chemical hit them.
If you have an anesthesiologist knock them out and then leave the room, you have a doctor doing a proper job, and doing it compassionately because it’s a better way to face execution. After that, prison staff can’t really botch it in a way that leads to prisoner suffering and triggering concerns about the humanity of it.