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Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Anyone still want to use the cool nitrogen based suicide pods from Austria?
Correct me if Im wrong but those pods are in Sweden, and also take steps to ensure what a person exhales is quickly removed from the system to prevent rebreathing. If this had been done with one of those pods, he would have lost consciousness in minutes, the fact that he lived to struggle for long suggests this setup was not using pure nitrogen, and not accounting for exhaling. Strangling him would have been quicker, meaning he was getting oxygen somehow.
Edit: I recommend watching the Smarter Every Day episode on Hypoxia. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw the TL;DR is that if done right, dying from a proper nitrogen execution would be practically painless.
In this execution, the setup seems to have accidentally on purpose been setup to ensure maximum suffering, even disregarding the victim holding their breathe and seemingly hyperventilating themselves to saturate their co2 levels, something the body will respond to and trigger panic flight or fight responses.
78% of the air you breathe is nitrogen dummy.
It's not the nitrogen that kills you, it's the lack of oxygen.
This method of suffocating someone would work just as well with a gas like helium or argon. It's just that nitrogen is cheap and plentiful for reasons even someone as dimwitted as you can probably figure out.