Who will place the central line? An MD won’t do it. What will they do when they puncture the carotid or subclavian artery? When a lung gets dropped? How will you place it if the prisoner is uncooperative?
Lung gets dropped?
Same person that now administers the IV’s…or find an MD or RN that has lost license…my golly, with the right training and no professional oath you could train a normally competent person to perform these tasks…and you DO have medical personnel in case the “life” is in danger…tell me my cocktail would not work…scrub the central, just use an established IV…if the prisoner is uncooperative…drug him/her…
tsfr
What detoxifies the second toxic gas?
Why use toxic gas? How about a large dose of (long lasting) barbituates to put the prisoner to sleep and then stick on a gas mask that delivers 100% nitrous oxide? Nitrous is not only harmless but is also an anesthetic. Foolproof as long as the gas mask is properly put on.
One of the risks of central line placement in the neck or under the collarbone is an inadvertent needle puncture of the lung, possibly resulting in a collapsed lung (pneumothorax). This may be asymptomatic or rapidly lethal depending on the nature of the puncture, and is normally treated by evacuating the air from around the lung by placing a suction tube in the space between the lung and ribs until the lung heals. Central line placement is pretty uncomfortable for a conscious, cooperative patient, even with good local anesthetic. I shudder to think of trying to place one in a guy who is literally fighting for his life.
I was just thinking about this after reading the news about the controversy. The only thing I could think of that might be acceptable (other maybe than improved drugs) would be some kind of pneumatic device like that bolt stunner but intead of a tethered bolt it would shoot a sturdy metal tube (think pen barrel size) loaded with coils of spring wire. Shoot the tube into the skull in less than a tenth of a second and simultaneously eject the wire spring from the tube with some of the compressed air which then scrambles the brain instantly. Retract the spring (or leave it in if you want), withdraw the tube from the skull and you have an instantly dead person with a pretty corpse for burial.
Is it true that without carbon dioxide buildup you don’t get the horrifying “I CAN’T BREATHE AND I’M DYING AND IT HURTS!!!” feeling that we’re all familiar with from holding our breath (or breathing in and out from a balloon or whatever)? If so, it sounds like carbon monoxide or nitrogen or whatever asphyxiation would be pretty clean. Heck, carbon monoxide is reported (by people who nearly died from it but were saved) to just make you sleepy until you drift off and never wake up. It was good enough for Jack Kevorkian, and regardless of what one thinks of him, I don’t think he would have used a painful method of assisted suicide.
I remember breathing in helium from party balloons when I was a kid. Once I kept breathing in through my mouth and out through my nose, trying to breathe in the whole balloon. It was like, Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, wow, I’m feeling kind of light-headed, inhale, exhale, inha – whoa, where am I? All of a sudden I was waking up on the floor wondering what happened. But sure enough, there was no warning feeling of “I’M CHOKING, I NEED TO BREATHE!!!” like there is when you have carbon dioxide buildup. I never thought about it before, but if I had been breathing from a mask of helium (or nitrous oxide or anything else other than oxygen) and it stayed strapped to my face when I passed out, I would have died. And it was actually pretty pleasant.
So why don’t we consider executions like that? Does that kind of painless asphyxiation still cause convulsions or other problems that spectators would find unpleasant?
Pretty much - yes - it’s the buildup of carbon dioxide that causes the unpleasant sensations of suffocation.
And lack of ability to actually inhale and exhale gas at the right pressure, I suppose, seeing as how not breathing or being submerged is still ridiculously unpleasant even if you exhale completely.
As for death, anything that requires IV administration can turn really messy. Anything that is based on electricity is probably going to be cruel.
Sedating a person with gas or vapors and using a defibrillator-like contraption to automatically keep the heart from beating might be possible but who is going to design this thing? I am guessing having your heart stopped using a defibrillator is not pleasant and does not, in itself, result in loss of consciousness immediately.
I have had a momentary shock from a 380V AC main as a child (one foot in the puddle, another foot on the metal step of a soviet trolley that suffered a nasty grounding malfunction that very moment) and I just passed out instantly. I’m assuming it didn’t go through my heart. One second, eyes open, another I feel a convulsion and darkness. I remember waking up lying in the snow on my back with people standing around me about 15-20 seconds afterwards. I don’t know if everybody has such a reaction but it certainly doesn’t seem like that’s what the electric chair does.
Most death penalty supporters don’t the want the execution to be completely painless… if animal shelters can euthanize pets painlessly there’s no reason why they couldn’t do the same with people.
It would be easy to administer a general anaesthetic that would render the person completely unconscious before injecting the poison.
Thing is, when an animal is euthanized, it is done by trained medical staff. When a person is executed, it is unethical for someone trained in medicine to participate, from what I gather.
thats what my suggestion was…look up Versed on google…it makes you feel like EVERYTHING is a-ok…
Well, I believe they generally do administer a potent barbiturate designed to cause unconsciousness before the fatal drug is given.
Even so, it is not easy to administer a general anaesthetic. That’s why there’s a whole specialty of medicine devoted to anaesthesia, and they’ve got quite high malpractice insurance rates.
And one of the basic principles of anaesthesia is that one needs to get the medications into a vein for them to be effective, which was the original problem in the Florida case.
Qadgop…two, ok maybe three questions,
Though Versed is not a barbiturate would it fill the bill for the first part of the execution?
Could a non medically trained person be trained to establish a working IV or central line?
Would my combo of Vered and potassium chloride, if administered into an established IV or Central line (and administered in the proper dosage) work to effectively and somewhat painlessly extirpate the condemned?
thanks for your time and consideration,
tsfr
I’ve also heard that anaesthesiologists are of the doctors that make a whole shitload of money. (When I was in high school, my best friend’s older brother was friends with a kid whose father was one. He lived in one of the ritziest sections of our school district, drove a porsche to school, etc).
Not that reliably, IMHO. It’s an anti-anxiety agent that causes retrograde amnesia, but the person is usually conscious during the experience on it.
Sure, on the easy patients. But firstly most places which teach such skills would have some difficulty with the idea of teaching it to someone specifically so they can use it to kill someone. Starting IVs is a part of the healing arts. And to stay skilled at it, you’ve got to start a LOT of IVs regularly. The occasional execution wouldn’t keep your skill level up to date.
Also, a non-med IV starter would have difficulty with the types of inmates who usually get executed, many (?most) of which don’t have decent veins to begin with, due to years of drug abuse. Some ‘tough sticks’ in hospital settings are referred to a nurse anesthetist or even anesthesiologist to get an IV going, and sometimes they even need a central line put in.
I don’t think I’d want to rely on that combo, for the reason I stated first in this post: Versed is not a sedative so much as an anti-anxiety drug. Also, just because the person has mellowed out doesn’t mean they wouldn’t feel the KCl going in the IV. KCl burns like hell. The person would either need to be unconscious, or have the vein pre-numbed by an infusion of lidocaine, when the K went in.
Yup. Rendering someone unconscious enough that a surgeon can forcibly restructure their anatomy, then wake them up again after, only slightly worse for wear, is really quite a valued skill.
Besides, would you want your surgical anesthesia needs provided by somebody from Bob’s Big Bargain Barn of Gas Passers[sup]TM[/sup]? 
Very curious. I wonder why our body does it that way instead of reacting to a lack of oxygen?
So putting a person in a room full of nitrous oxide or helium or nitrogen or some other gas would in fact work for a painless execution, then?
Utterly fascinating, Qadgop – I had no idea you could numb a vein with an infusion of lidocaine (or anything else). This brings up a question I was wondering about earlier while typing my response about the people I know who have attempted suicide by potassium chloride injection: why does it burn? Not why KCl specifically burns (we all know what it feels like to rub salt into a wound) but why on earth do we have nociceptors inside our veins? What use would it be for our animal ancestors to know when something is hurting the inside of one of their veins?
Seems to me that the earlier suggestion of a nitrogen or nitrous oxide atmosphere is the ticket. It doesn’t take much skill to turn a valve…