Alabama wants to be the first state to execute an inmate by making him breathe pure nitrogen. Now I am no scientist at all and the periodic table looks like hieroglyphics to me. But I still know that Bamas little plan presents a huge problem. And it should be shut down and stat. 

Now before I go ahead and lay things out, let me get this out. I may be liberal, but I’m not an across the board hater of capital punishment. Yeah, I sincerely just believe that some folks should be voted off the island early. So my condemnation of Alabama’s nitrogen execution plan is not coming from a blanket anti execution stance. Where it comes from is a blanket anti human guinea pig stance. 

No one knows how forcing someone to inhale only nitrogen will work. Yet Alabama authorities are trying to greenlight the execution method. The State Attorney General made this abundantly clear in a filing on Friday when they asked the Alabama Supreme Court to set the execution date for an inmate named Kenneth Eugene Smith. They had listed on Smith’s forms that the anticipated death would be by nitrogen hypoxia. 

Now no death row inmate has ever been executed using that gas before and officials think that forcing an inmate to breathe only nitrogen would kill him because he’d be deprived of oxygen. Gosh, depriving a fully conscious human being of oxygen doesn’t sound particularly humane to me. And yeah, nitrogen makes up almost 80% of the air that humans inhale, and apparently it’s harmless when inhaled with oxygen. But what would happen to an inmate if oxygen is removed from the equation entirely? 

Well, that’s merely a theoretical exercise. And it’s 2023. Yet we’re out here theorizing how a human being would physically respond as though they are test dummies. That’s incredibly gross. To make matters worse, the American Veterinary Medical Association says not to use nitrogen hypoxia to euthanize mammals other than pigs. It’s not even cleared to put down a rat. Yet Alabama is somehow confident that force feeding inmates nitrogen alone will be an effective painfree execution method.

Now I know the State is ranked near 50 in education but there has to be an intelligent mind somewhere there in the Heart of Dixie. Now of course, you know how nitrogen even got approved as an execution method there in Alabama does say a lot. It was 2018 when then Republican lawmaker Trip Pittman sponsored the bill to make this happen, theorizing that the execution would probably be somewhat similar to how airplane passengers pass out when a plane loses pressure. Sure. Cause we all know that it’s a real chill experience when an airplane passenger, you know, loses access to oxygen and just passes out. 

Pittman had no idea how nitrogen would impact the human body when he got Alabama to go ahead and sign on for this, joining Oklahoma and Mississippi as the few states that allow nitrogen execution, he also didn’t likely care. The fact is that it is inhumane though, it’s inhumane to use human beings as a test case for whether or not a gas is an effective way to end human life. This is neither knots viler nor Nuremberg, and regardless of one’s criminality, this is not okay. If we as a society are going to vote someone off the island early, they should go with dignity, not as an experiment