It has been fairly standard practice in the last few decades to use lethal injections to execute death row inmates. This has always been a troublesome and expensive approach, and recently difficult to carry out since the drugs used are getting hard to come by.

What has always confounded me is that there are far simpler, cheaper and more certain approaches that don;t even carry the risk of undue pain to the condemned: use inert gases like nitrogen, helium, argon, freon and the like to asphyxiate them. Unlike carbon dioxide, these gases don’t prompt the “oh crap I’m choking response.” Nitrogen, after all, makes up about 80% of every breath you take *now.* If you replace that 20% of oxygen with another 20% of nitrogen, your lungs won’t complain. They will simply continue to expel carbon dioxide from your blood; since you don;t get the choking response, you continue to breathe normally. As a result, you will also pass some perfectly fine oxygen from your blood back out through your lungs, causing you to pass out a *lot* faster than if you were in a high CO2 environment that makes you hold your breath. There have been a number of industial accidents where someone has wandered into a high nitrogen or argon or helium environment, and then quickly gone to sleep, and then quickly died.

And so, huzzah:

Oklahoma Officials Plan to Use Nitrogen for Executions

Nitrogen is cheap and omnipresent. It’s not like those whacko bizarre lethal injection drugs manufactured by only a few companies; a prison could call up Air Liquide or any of a number of other suppliers and have them bring in cylinders of compressed nitrogen or even large dewars of liquid nitrogen.

Of course, they could always think outside the box and consider alternative approaches like gigantic trebuchets, or as weight simulators on future Falcon 9 flights. Strap ol’ Dead Man Walkin’ into another Roadster and point some Go Pros at him. The footage should prove enlightening and entertaining, and perhaps even useful when played on a loop in gen pop.