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Nitrogen Hypoxia – The Death Penalty’s Future?
It’s never been done before and might never be used, but Alabama has announced its near-completion of a nitrogen gas chamber if it should prove impossible to obtain drugs for lethal injections. Far from dusting off its electric chair, (the notorious ‘Yellow Mama’) like Tennessee and South Carolina or offering firing squads as South Carolina…
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Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, capital punishment, Charlie Brooks, Colorado, death penalty, Dennis Lawson, Don Cabana, Donald Harding, Eaton Metal Products, Edward Earl Johnson, electric chair, gas chamber, Gee Jon, James Wells, Jimmy Lee Gray, Leanderess Riley, lethal injection, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New York, nitrogen, nitrogen hypoxia, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Parchman, San Quentin, Sizzling Sally, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, William Kemmler, Wyoming, Yellow Mama
It’s never been done before and might never be used, but Alabama has announced its near-completion of a nitrogen gas chamber if it should prove impossible to obtain drugs for lethal injections. Far from dusting off its electric chair, (the notorious ‘Yellow Mama’) like Tennessee and South Carolina or offering firing squads as South Carolina also proposes, Alabama is preparing an old method with a modern twist; Nitrogen hypoxia. Arizona has recently returned its old gas chamber to active service.
Nitrogen is an inert gas, as lethal in large amounts as any other. Alabama’s legislators hope it will provide quicker, less painful death without the suffering inflicted by cyanide gas, for decades the standard method for gas chamber execution. Just as William Kemmler debuted the electric chair at Auburn Prison in August, 1890 somebody might debut the latest in America’s long, mostly-discredited line of methods intended to kill less unpleasantly.
The gas chamber is nothing new as a concept. The world’s first was used in Nevada in 1924 to execute murderer Gee Jon. Even before its first use the method attracted controversy. The hastily-converted prison barber shop was by no means airtight. While Jon himself died fairly quickly witnesses had to be hurriedly removed after the smell of cyanide gas caused a near-panic. While never as popular as the electric chair, the chamber was widely used in States like California, Arizona, Wyoming, Missouri and Mississippi.
At a signal from the prison Warden an executioner works a lever mixing sodium cyanide with dilute sulphuric acid to create a lethal cloud of cyanide gas inside an airtight steel chamber. The prisoner, strapped into a metal chair inside the chamber, then suffers terribly before falling unconscious and dying. While they might be unconscious within a minute or two they might last considerably longer and suffer considerably more. After being certified dead and left to sit in the chamber for some time, the gas is pumped out into the open air.
When the body is removed by guards wearing gas masks and rubber gloves the entire chamber has to be decontaminated from top to bottom. The prisoner’s clothes are removed and burned. Every inch of the chamber and the prisoner’s body has to be thoroughly washed down with ammonia to neutralise any remaining cyanide. After one execution at San Quentin the prisoner’s mother kissed her dead son and spent the next week in hospital with cyanide poisoning. In executing her son the State of California almost killed her as well.
Most gas chambers were specially built by Eaton Metal Products of Denver, Colorado. It’s something that company would nowadays rather forget. Some, like those in California and Missouri, had two chairs for what California prison officials once called a ‘double event.’ Others like Maryland, Mississippi, Arizona and Colorado, were built with a single chair. No chamber would require much conversion to deliver nitrogen instead of cyanide.
From its inception the gas chamber was by far the most expensive, complicated, difficult and dangerous method ever adopted in the US. The chamber and associated equipment are highly specialized in manufacture and operation. Preparation, use and decontamination involve considerable risk for the execution team and official witnesses. All gas chambers leak to some small degree. Pre-execution testing for leaks often involves little more than a lighted candle and a small smoke bomb.
Once the chamber itself has been certified airtight and Vaseline smeared heavily around the edges of the viewing windows the chamber can be tested with the cyanide-and-acid mix. In his book ‘Death at Midnight’ former Mississippi warden Don Cabana described a near-lethal accident when testing it before the execution of Edward Earl Johnson in May, 1987:
“Roger Vanlandingham was the officer responsible for pouring the cyanide crystals into the receptacle under the chair. I was standing in the doorway as he took the cap off the jar and crouched down to start the cyanide on its way. Strangely, the crystals disappeared from view and it took a few seconds before anyone realized that something was amiss. The crystals were going down the small shaft directly into the sulfuric acid, producing a small, willowy-looking, deadly cloud. After repeatedly running through the checklist, none of us had noticed the lever in the down position. Consequently, the dish that holds the cyanide was already sitting in the acid, and the seven of us who were in the room at the time could have been killed.”
The suffering endured by the condemned was also often hideous even when gassings went as planned which, unfortunately, was by no means guaranteed. Leanderess Riley in California, Dennis Lawson in North Carolina, Jimmy Lee Gray in Mississippi and Donald Harding in Arizona were horrendous for the condemned and no better for those having to witness their deaths. Nitrogen hypoxia would be the first trial of a brand-new method in the US since Texas delivered the first lethal injection to Charlie Brooks in 1982.
So how, theoretically, would nitrogen gas execution work? Would it be any more humane (or less inhumane) than electricity, hanging, the firing squad or the cyanide gas chamber? The short answer is we don’t know until it’s actually tried. Theoretically a human body doesn’t detect abnormal physical symptoms with nitrogen as it does with cyanide. So, theoretically, the prisoner wouldn’t experience the same pain and feeling of suffocation. If anything they would experience either a brief high followed by quick unconsciousness or a progressive euphoria before passing out and then dying. Theoretically, anyway.
There are two ways nitrogen could be administered. They could be strapped into a chair with a face mask similar to those used for delivering other gases. A pilot’s oxygen mask connected to a gas bottle and regulator could be a basic, effective delivery system. Directly delivering so large a volume of concentrated gas might cause unconsciousness in under fifteen seconds. Certainly far quicker and far less cruel than cyanide, at least according to Alabama. That said, a century ago many thought cyanide would be better than electricity. Nowadays that seems debatable at best.
The other would be simply replacing the air inside a chamber with increasing levels of nitrogen. As nitrogen levels increased the prisoner would hopefully be unconscious after around one minute and dead in around seven. Not much faster than cyanide but theoretically far less painful. It would still, however, require multiple executions using nitrogen gas before the execution procedure could be refined into a fully workable, standardized process. Experimental execution to refine and perfect a method is also nothing new, albeit a morally flawed and rather twisted idea to put it mildly.
Given the problems with William Kemmler and Gee Jon that bodes ill for whoever might become an unwilling part of penal history. New York needed years of experimental electrocutions and hideous botches to ‘refine’ the method and even then botches still occurred. Kemmler’s went so terribly George Westinghouse claimed they would have done better using an axe. Despite this and many other disasters the chair was adopted by over twenty-five states at one time.
When executing Gee Jon in 1924 Nevada’s improvised gas chamber leaked. Not being a custom-made airtight chamber, the converted barber shop at the Nevada State Prison nearly killed the witnesses as well. They had to be hurriedly removed after the aroma of cyanide gas was smelt outside their new appliance. Despite this the chamber soon found a home in the West and Mid-West. Most Eastern and Southern states preferred the electric chair, although Arkansas’s electrocution of James Wells in 1923 was probably the most botched execution in American history.
Many of the early lethal injections and many subsequent ones have also gone wrong in various ways. Unable to obtain the original cocktail of potassium chloride, sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide, states have tested many drugs and combinations thereof often with disastrous effect. Botched executions in Oklahoma, Ohio, Texas, Arizona and other states bear grim witness to lethal injection’s unreliability in dispensing quick and painless death. Ironically it was a botched gas chamber execution that caused Arizona to adopt lethal injection, recently dusting off its cyanide gas chamber due to the shortage of lethal injection drugs.
Alabama isn’t the first state to look at nitrogen hypoxia. A few years ago Oklahoma added it to their repertoire but discarded it when new supplies of lethal injection drugs were found. The first state west of the Mississippi to adopt the electric chair grotesquely named ‘Sizzling Sally,’ Oklahoma was also first to adopt lethal injection although Texas was first to actually use it.
Whether nitrogen hypoxia will become the next standard method has yet to be decided. Oklahoma has already discarded the idea. South Carolina and Tennessee have restored their electric chairs. Virginia, once the nation’s oldest bastion of capital punishment, recently abolished capital punishment altogether. At the time of writing Alabama has no formal protocol for a nitrogen gas execution, but its chamber is evidently nearing completion.
The ghosts of William Kemmler and Gee Jon, meanwhile, might be hoping the next debutant dies more easily than they did.
13 responses to “Nitrogen Hypoxia – The Death Penalty’s Future?”
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The best, and already proven, painless execution is by oxygen hypoxia wherein a person is placed in an unused former military altitude chamber and the pressure reduced (simulating an increase in altitude to 35-40,000 feet). The person simply breathes in normal air which has been reduced in pressure. No chemicals are added, no shocks, no blood. This method has, unfortunately, killed hundreds of aviators and passengers around the world and is known by pilots for its deadly and insidious effects. Staying at the simulated altitude for only four or five minutes eases the person into unconsciousness. Death will occur when the body can no longer distribute oxygenated blood throughout the body.
The military trains pilots in altitude chambers to warn them of the dangers and of the effects on individuals bodies. Using altitude chambers from former military training bases would save the cost of building new ones and the costs of operation would simply be the electricity used in running the air pumps.-
It would be an option, were it not for the fact that the Nazis conducted experiments using this very method. The Luftwaffe were known to have done so.
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The whole argument for any kind of death penalty ignores the fact the a country can spend billions on warfare and kill hundreds of thousands of combatants, but even more civilians. Civilians lives are ruined by a state that allows all the felonies to dance rampant on their lives Murder, larceny, rape and fraud take center state in a time of war. It’s a state’s time to do all the crimes it condemns for it’s own citizens. Countries never execute themselves, do they? They all have intellectual disabilities when it comes to collateral deaths or even illegal war. Some states even use the opportunity to develop their own weapons industries and use the opportunity to demonstrate their effectiveness. Murderers are usually guilty of doing their crimes without a license, when states do it it’s all gruesomely premeditated, except for the accidents. .But the accidents would still be called manslaughter if not for the state sponsorship..
If the death penalty is supposed to be cheaper somehow than letting a murderer live out a life in prison, How does that work? The appeals process can cost more than a lifetime in prison. He might actually do something useful with his her life in the meantime? Of course, making utility a reason to live, puts me at 70, with not a lot of usefulness left in me and awful maintenance bills, at risk I suppose? I find being useful requires spending even more money just getting to where I might be needed and no one ever seems to really need it. Volunteerism needs a supporting income and the managers of the situation usually see to it they are paid rather well..
I probably shouldn’t write the rest of this comment but I’m still such a barbarian I think about it. I watched the first and last episode of Squid game and the attitude that death is somehow the just comeuppance for rampant ambition (or entrapment) is kind of catchy. I don’t have the stomach, or don’t want to find it, to really enjoy that movie. But there are a lot of blood suckers who evidently did. They should have all quit en masse after the first episode and gone to the police.
Can’t anyone create a simple pill that allows a condemned murderer to take his own life whenever he gets sick of prison? People snuff themselves all the time. This may not be a much better “moral” solution, but the morality of executions always escapes me. Why not put a pistol in the condemned prisoner’s cell and never let them out until they do the “right thing” or the honorable thing? They might not do it right? What is the double talking morality of the “legitimate” death penalty anymore than that? And it always seems to be “fundamentalist” attitudes that think the deity demands the death penalty.
I’ve heard an overdose of heroin might send the overdosed out with a smile and perhaps vomit down them front? Is that the wrong attitude? Physician assisted suicide seems to work and there are no complaints there, or so I’ve heard.
The big issue is, what the law does to the condemned can effect what it does to everyone else. Hypoxia will probably make the prisoner gasp for oxygen even if their lungs fill with nitrogen. It’s the oxygen that’s needed.
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Ironically, it would be unconstitutional to force a prisoner to take their own life. The same Constitution that romises (and regularly fails) to ensure equal justice under the law.
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That’s something I’ve never seen suggested by anyone anywhere, well done. In theory a high altitude chamber would be quite a novel, convenient way for states to conduct executions by oxygen hypoxia without having to worry about the numerous engineering challenges posed by developing a new method from scratch. The problem I see, for one is that it’s highly unlikely the original manufacturer of the equipment would be willing to allow their product to be used to purposely kill people; it’s quite a conflict of interest for a company that works to save lives.
Assuming that the manufacturer doesn’t object, the next problem would be the cost of the thing. I remember a few years back when California built a new death chamber and it cost something like $600,000 and people were pissed. I don’t blame them, more than half a million dollars for a lethal injection room? Give me a break. As for something like a hypobaric chamber, I can’t even imagine how much something like that would cost. With executions becoming fewer and fewer and far between, it would be very hard to justify the cost to the public and states’ legislators. In the recent press over Arizona refurbishing their gas chamber, speculation of what it would cost to replace it with a new (cyanide) gas chamber has generally been estimated to be well over a million dollars.
In my opinion, it doesn’t need to be this complicated to achieve the same result. I don’t mean to make light of suicide but people everyday successfully kill themselves with helium, nitrogen or other inert gasses using extremely simple means, typically via mask. I cannot believe how to this day, states like Alabama and Oklahoma are so befuddled by what should be a very easy problem to solve. A bottle of gas, regulator, hose, mask, well ventilated room and a restraint chair, that’s all. It’s not like they’re breathing carbon monoxide, cyanide or something that could injure or kill the people around them, it’s nitrogen. 80% of earth’s atmosphere is nitrogen. So long as it isn’t allowed to accumulate and displace the oxygen in the room, it won’t harm anyone. All that would be required to to prevent this possibility is a simple ventilation system.
An old gas chamber could also be repurposed (as noted) to use nitrogen instead of cyanide in those states that have one. In fact, Eaton Metal Products gas chambers actually have a compressed air intake to pressurize the ammonia gas neutralizer used to purge the chamber of cyanide after the execution was completed. The only significant challenge I could foresee is how to deal with the plumbing network that fed into and drained the acid pots. Perhaps the whole thing could be simplified by using a mask and running the ventilation system at the same time.
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I just priced .308 ammunition at Cabelas and for as little as .54 cents a piece or $3.24 for six shooters to perform the execution. They could sell lotto tickets for the firing squad members and make their money back. I forgot one of the rounds is supposed to be a blank. That way all six members can assume they might have been the one person with the blank.
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[…] Pero los científicos que trabajan en mejores métodos para realizar un mal necesario pueden haber descubierto un nuevo método. Hay una alta probabilidad de que Alabama utilice este nuevo método para ejecutar a los condenados a muerte. Se llama "hipoxia de nitrógeno". […]
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[…] But the scientists working on better methods to execute a necessary evil may have discovered a new method. There is a high likelihood that Alabama will use this new method of executing death row prisoners. It’s called “nitrogen hypoxia.” […]
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Since we have millions of Fentynal pills and Rainbow Candyies coming from China and our Southern border….why not make use of them……..it seems like a favorable and cheap way to go out without pain………if you want to check out.
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Why are we concerned to have it humane? These are murders and didn’t give much thought to another’s pain and suffering. I can tell you if one of my loved ones were to be murdered, hell, even raped. I would not blink at watching them suffer til they were dead. An eye for an eye.
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Sure, why not dismember them with chainsaws or bring back the breaking wheel? The Eighth Ammendment means more to the credibility of the judicial system, the people tasked with actually carrying out executions and the dignity of society as a whole than it does the dying criminal and certainly not to app the limited imagination everybody’s drunken uncle who’s solution to everything is to either nuke it or shoot it.
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…not to *appease*
Sorry, no edit function.
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Brutality for its own sake has already been tried and it failed. Even the very worst and cruelest methods were not a deterrent and society evolved beyond inflicting unnecessary cruelty in the name of justice.
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