How about stop murdering people

We actually do know the effect of breathing nitrogen gas. It's a hell of a lot better than injecting someone with a drug cocktail. I don't agree with the death penalty but this is about as humane as the death penalty gets.

“What effect the condemned person will feel from the nitrogen gas itself, no one knows,” Dr. Jeffrey Keller, president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, wrote in an email. “This has never been done before. It is an experimental procedure.”

We do, in fact, know what a person feels from nitrogen suffocation, and we know because nitrogen suffocation happens accidentally with some degree of regularity from workers that don't follow proper safety protocols.

At first you feel out of breath, but you don't feel panic from it; it's like exhaling everything in your lungs, and then breathing in solely from a helium filled balloon (which I'm guessing most people have tried). You feel slightly high and light headed because the oxygen in your bloodstream is rapidly depleted; you are hypoxic. As you take a second and third breath, your vision tunnels, and you pass out. Your body has a mechanism to detect a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood, but since you're expelling the CO2 with every breath out, and breathing nitrogen back in, that panic response doesn't get tripped.

Nitrogen suffocation has been a preferred choice for right-to-die advocates.

We can argue about how the death penalty is applied, and whether it should exist at all (I believe it should, but is almost always inappropriate), but there's no serious argument about whether nitrogen suffocation is a good or bad way to die. The people continuously fighting against this execution are fighting the method because they've lost all their other avenues to prevent the execution; attempting to call this process 'untested'--when it's been tested by a large number of people using it to end their own lives, and tested via industrial accidents--is the only option that they have left to prevent this execution.

IMHO, executions don’t make sense given the amount of innocent people that we keep finding on death row.

It makes even less sense given that we need to have a long expensive, and highly imperfect, appellate process to double check that we’re not killing innocent people.

Also, we don’t really have any good data to support the claim that the death penalty deters people from committing terrible crimes. People that are going to do something -that- bad are usually going to do it.

We know exactly what happens when people experience nitrogen hypoxia. They get confused, then they lose consciousness, then die only if deprived of oxygen for quite some time.

We know because many people have experienced it and survived (because the oxygen was switched back on). I personally know someone who experienced this in a controlled test with the military.

You know what would be more humane?

Not killing people.

Abolish capital punishment. The US is such a freakin' primitive country in so many ways.

Don't critics always and only raise doubts? How about making the article about what experts say instead of critics?

I want to recap the long sequence of events that has led up to this point:

1. In the beginning of this narrative, every death penalty state was doing lethal injections with a three drug protocol.
2. Italy and maybe some other European nations start arresting pharmaceutical executives and charging them with murder, because their drugs are being used for these lethal injections in the United States.
3. Drug companies stop selling their drugs to state penitentiaries. States are not able to perform executions.
4. Death penalty states start amending their protocols to switch to different drugs and sometimes a single dose barbiturate protocol.
5. Those drugs become harder and harder to source. Pharma companies become completely unwilling to dispense the drugs at all. State legislatures start allowing corrections officials to change the protocol without amending state law, in an effort to keep up.
6. States resort to buying drugs from shady compounding pharmacies in secret. Having prison guards write dosage protocols turns out to have been a bad idea. Because, guess what, anesthesiologists are a highly compensated medical specialty, because what they do is highly complicated. So some exit l executions are botched, which delays things even more.
7. It's in this environment that this nitrogen idea migrates from internet boards into the state legislatures.

The big picture here is that if execution remains legal, but you take away all the options, death penalty states will go looking for alternative options.

I'm not sure why people obsess over the method. It distracts from the act itself.

I think we need to go and get sharks with freaking lazer beams attached to their heads

Too many innocent people ending up on Death Row is a fault of how easily we condemn people to death.

That said, the death penalty should still exist.

We absolutely unequivocally know Dahmer did it. To death.

We 100% without question know Trump attempted to overthrow American law, prove it in court. To death.

We absolutely without question know Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin are pieces of shit and committed, in my opinion, crimes against humanity. Prove it in court. To death.

I see no problem with the death penalty or this method only what we consider justifiable for death.

I think life without parole is more evil than the death penalty, life without parole also encourages horrid behavior in prison because what more will they do to you?

Did they get the idea from the Sarco Pod (AKA the Swiss Suicide Booth)? I know inert gas deaths aren't a new concept but it seems like an odd coincidence since the pod was just making news a couple years ago.