It was just getting dark in Italy, but night had just fallen in the prison in Atmore, Alabama. After tying him tightly to the bed, they applied a mask to his face to make sure it adhered perfectly. Then they opened the valve and the nitrogen entered his nostrils as he held his breath like a free diver, trying to delay the effects of the gas. When the nitrogen finally entered him, he began to writhe convulsively. “He struggled with the restraints,” the prison officer summed up aseptically and concluded with a sentence that was perhaps intended to sound reassuring: “Everything went as expected.”
Rather, this is where the problem lies: certain things shouldn't be predictable, let alone visible. Even those who advocate the death penalty will, I hope, feel a wave of revulsion at an act that smacks of pure sadism and which is not the work of a tyrannical and bloody regime, but the effect of a confirmed democratic judgment Supreme Court of the United States.
Convict Kenneth Smith survived a fatal injection two years ago because he couldn't find a vein to insert the needle into. So they subjected him to this devilry invented by a horror film director and rejected with disdain even by vets. It's called nitrogen hypoxia: it causes oxygen to disappear from the air and with oxygen all remnants of humanity disappear.
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