I thought that in the US anesthesists didn’t always have to be doctors, from some information mentioned in other threads about nurses. Are the nurses anesthesiology assistants?
Anesthesiologists are M.D.s, and they are one of the highest paid specialists in the U.S.
Nurse anesthetists also administer anesthesia, but they too are licensed medical professionals who are mandated to act in the patient’s best interest. So they would not be able to administer lethal doses to an unwilling patient. To do so would certainly undermine patient confidence in the profession, and cause licensure difficulties.
Pjen wrote: “The unspoken rule is that the person must be aware of what is happening and suffer enough to satisfy death penalty proponents, but not so much that it offends death penalty opponents.”
I think you’ve given the correct answer. There are many quick, easy and painless ways to execute a human being.
If we have to.
Jake
I don’t think anyone here, including OP, has said that legal execution of the death penalty, in practice now, is not painless.
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Metaphor alert. But, here,
poetic allusion and appropriateness: excellent.
Final grade on post: satisfactory. Excellent for brand-new SD poster. (Welcome!)
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In less ‘refined’ shall we say countries like Saudi Arabia where they still execute by decapitation via the sword the condemned are always heavily sedated beforehand. Don’t think it has much to do with sympathy for the victims, more just a practicality of the procedure. Better than some other Islamic states where they still do slow-drop, strangulation hanging in front of throngs of zealots!
I think CO (carbon monoxide) isn’t used because it isn’t fast enough because it’s not really toxic. It merely displaces the O[sub]2[/sub] in your bloodstream and your cells suffocate. But because there’s no build-up of CO[sub]2[/sub] (carbon dioxide) it doesn’t trigger a pain response.
If we’re only talking about physical pain I still maintain that you can never beat the guillotine. It’s horribly graphic & messy for the living, but I will always believe it’s absolutely painless…
Suffocation = asphyxiation = oxygen is not available for the lungs to give to the blood.
Suffocation is not what happens when you breathe small concentrations (a few thousand PPM) of CO; what happens is you are poisoned, just as surely as if you had inhaled hydrogen cyanide.
CO is very toxic.
You take perhaps 15 seconds to die (loss of consciousness) after your head is cut off/throat is slashed. Dunno what your experience of pain would be.
Any of the oxygen deprivation methods would seem humane to me, based on the fact that oxygen deprivation is something many people have experienced, and they all report painless and unexpected loss of consciousness.
People/mammals go into convulsions when exposed to loss of pressure or oxygen-free evironments, and people watching find this distressing, which is why this painless* method of euthanasia is not used as often now as it used to be for cats and dogs. As far as I know, this method had it’s origins in WWII medical research about high-altitude flying and altitude sickness.
*(Except C02. I hope the earlier poster was mistaken)
I’ve often wondered why something like N2 is not used. It would seem to be the perfect combination of humane/looks horrible that would molify the humane and entertain the public. My guess is that it would just be more expensive.
By the way, my understanding is that execution by firing squad is not used now because they found that they couldn’t depend on a random selection of voters to actually shoot to kill. Or is that just myth?
CO just binds to hemoglobin stronger than oxygen. It is suffocation in a sense, just that oxygen can’t get into the blood even if it gets to the lungs.
I suppose one argument that could be used in support of medical professionals participating in executions notwithstanding the “patient’s best interest” consideration (or maybe because of that interest), is to say that having a licensed medical professional’s involvement makes the ‘patient’ less likely to suffer.
In other words, if someone is going to be executed regardless, then having it done by an anesthetist or nurse anesthetist ensures that the patient ‘suffers’ no more than does any patient who receives a general anesthetic, i.e. not at all. I think that is in the best interest of the patient (especially considering that the alternative, having it done without the involvement of medical professionals, makes suffering more likely).
For a very liberal definition of suffocate, fine. Ask any medical professional though, and they’ll tell you that CO is toxic.
My thoughts exactly. I can’t imagine being any part of this. Seems to me someone made a terrible mistake here.
I’d like to hear what could be wrong about this. It just causes the person to pass out and never wake up. Does it really cause convulsions in some people? I’ve never seen that with N2O – admittedly that’s a bit different from nitrogen gas, but I’d think it would be more likely to have a variety of different responses, since it’s less inert.
Well, I don’t want to hijack this thread, but this has been a ghoulish fascination of mine for a long time. From everything I’ve read and my idea of anatomy:
No, when guillotined you don’t quite turn off like a switch, you essentially black out, albeit very quickly. Some descriptions of experiments with guillotine victims have stated that when the heads landed flat on the severed neck part the heads showed signs of ‘awareness’ the longest. The key to consciousness is having blood moving through your brain, and this maintained a tiny amount of blood pressure in the brain for the most amount of time (though still only seconds). I don’t doubt that even your vision actually fades like blacking out, being that your eyes are connected directly to your brain (not via the spine).
But I don’t believe there is any way you could have any pain sensations. You’ve severed the main nerve ‘bus’ completely & essentially instantaneously at its root. Brain matter itself has no pain receptors and can’t feel any (this is why they often do brain surgery with the patients awake).
The psychological trauma just before, during, and right after all this is another matter. Though in my opinion, a rather moot one…
There was a rather disturbing thread on just this some years ago. You can go search. I’d rather not.
So is full drop hanging. Both result in the dislocation and separation of the spine and spinal nerves.
If my suggestion (that the infliction of immediate terror to the victim is an intended part of the process) then why not use considerable tranquilliser administration plus admin of anaesthetics prior to the procedure.
It might even be worth arguing in the USA that the denial of such sedation makes the process cruel in that the pain and terror could be avoided, but the state is using a method intended to cause distress. Similar to the adage that people are sent to prison AS punishment, not FOR punishment.
I repeat my personal opinion that people who engage in these matters are more morally reprehensible than the people chosen for judicial killing. The additional insistence on using a method that is more distressing and painful than necessary compounds the felony.
There’s much more to the head than just the brain. Example, anyone who has ever cut their scalp on anything knows that it hurts. For open-skull brain surgery, surgeons administer local anaesthetic to the area where they will be slicing through the scalp and skull.
A guillotine victim receives no such anaesthetic when his neck is severed - and that is a rather large cut. Pain receptors above the site of the cut are still connected to the brain and are still capable of communicating their pain signals - and AFAIK a slice through the neck produces as much pain as a comparably-sized cut anywhere else on the body.
CO2 is NOT carbon monoxide. Shagnasty, were they really using a CO2 chamber??? That sounds pretty damn horrifying actually.
Carbon Monoxide, on the other hand, just makes you go to sleep. I’ve never heard of any thrashing associated with it, which may well be why some suicides use it (go into the garage, close the door, run the car). Certainly my own probably exposure just made me tired.
It looks like it is CO2, not CO. See Euthanasia Guidelines for example, but other cites all mentioned it as well.
We definitely used a carbon dioxide chamber. It a common method of euthanasia in the research sciences as mentioned above.