All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
Alabama’s attorney general has requested permission from the state’s Supreme Court to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith using nitrogen-induced hypoxia, a method that involves depriving the individual of oxygen using nitrogen gas. While nitrogen hypoxia is permitted in three states, it remains untested and has not been employed previously for executions.
Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence argues that using humans as guinea pigs to determine the efficacy of nitrogen as a method of execution is inhumane.
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?
