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Why Oklahoma Plans to Execute People With Nitrogen
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 13:43:51 -0400
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: March 17, 2018 at 11:05:13 AM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why Oklahoma Plans to Execute People With Nitrogen Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: This item comes from friend Ed DeWath. DLH] Why Oklahoma Plans to Execute People With Nitrogen The state knows shockingly little about how this would work. By ELI HAGER Mar 15 2018 <https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/03/15/why-oklahoma-plans-to-execute-people-with-nitrogen> Oklahoma has always been the nation’s laboratory for capital punishment. It was a state legislator named Bill Wiseman who in 1977 came up with the idea of lethal injection by asking the state medical examiner for a more humane, scientific way to put human beings to death. It looks like Oklahoma might be experimenting again. On Wednesday, the state’s Attorney General and director of corrections announced that a severe nationwide shortage of the drugs needed for lethal injection meant they would be switching to nitrogen inhalation for future executions. Executing prisoners by nitrogen “hypoxia,” which deprives the body of oxygen, has never been tried by any state or nation in the history of the world. But the gas is widely available for purchase from manufacturers (it has a host of uses from welding to inflating tires to carbonating beer), which can’t be said of the lethal injection drugs midazolam and pentobarbital. For humanitarian reasons, medical companies have largely stopped providing those chemicals to state governments. “I was calling all around the world, to the back streets of the Indian subcontinent, to procure drugs,” Joe M. Allbaugh, Oklahoma’s corrections director, said in his announcement of the switch to nitrogen. Allbaugh and state Attorney General Mike Hunter said Oklahoma could begin the nitrogen executions by the end of this year. They said there would first be a period of 90 to 120 days for developing the new method and allowing lawyers for death row prisoners to make their legal challenges in court. Below, a recap of everything Oklahoma knows about its latest proposed execution method (hint: very little). How they got the idea In 2014, a Republican state representative and former highway trooper named Mike Christian watched a BBC documentary called “How to Kill a Human Being,” which included a segment on nitrogen inhalation. Intrigued, he called up a high school friend, Michael Copeland, who had previously served as attorney general of the small island nation of Palau. Copeland asked medical professionals at the University of Oklahoma to help study the idea, but they declined. Instead, he and two other non-scientists compiled a nitrogen report for the state Legislature — which they presented after preparing for just three hours one evening, according to Christine Pappas, a local professor and one of those involved. Their sources included articles from 1963 and 1977, as well as information on techniques of inert gas asphyxiation used by assisted-suicide activists. How it became law After reading the report, Oklahoma lawmakers held a series of hearings on nitrogen gas, during which they watched YouTube videos of teenagers inhaling helium, laughing and passing out. They also considered a financial analysis that said “the costs would be minimal and include the one-time purchase of a gas mask (similar to what one experiences at the dentist), and the price for a canister of nitrogen.” A two-page bill introducing the new method overwhelmingly passed both houses of the Legislature in spring 2015, with the few holdouts expressing concern that prisoners might experience brief euphoria before they lost consciousness and died. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
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- Why Oklahoma Plans to Execute People With Nitrogen Dave Farber (Mar 17)