United Nations moves to stop Alabama from carrying out America’s first nitrogen gas execution

“U.N. experts argue there has been no evidence to suggest that nitrogen gas would not “result in a painful and humiliating death.””

Oh FFS.  Nitrogen asphyxiation has been dangerous in industry specifically *because* it’s painless. If you find yourself in a volume filled with carbon dioxide – a small room, a tank of some kind, whatever – you are *instantly* going to know it. Your lungs will object, you’ll cough, you’ll hold your breath… and you’ll try to get the hell out of there. If you find yourself in a volume filled with *poison* gas, you’ll try to evacuate even faster. But nitrogen? You feel nothing. Your lungs are used to nitrogen… about 80% of every breath you take is nitrogen. You’ll continue to breathe it in, and continue to expel oxygen with each breath, rapidly getting rid of the oxygen in your blood as you continue to respire normally, until you rather quickly slip into a peaceful unconsciousness, and soon *die.*

All evidence points to nitrogen being a peaceful and painless way to go. And consequently one of the less humiliating, unless you find not thrashing about and screaming in pain and terror humiliating. I imagine the actual goal is to simply stop executions, rather than having any legitimate objection to nitrogen. Because if this is carried out and shown to be what history has shown it should be – effective and painless – other governments might adopt it. Given that unlike lethal injection it quires little skill – just strapping on a mask, rather than finding veins and jamming needles into them – and uses cheap and easily available nitrogen gas rather than difficult to obtain chemicals, nitrogen executions should be relatively inexpensive. One argument might be that this will incentivize bad governments to execute more; but bad governments have little trouble with just shooting people they don’t like. The counterpoint is that taxpayers shouldn’t be overly burdened if clearly easier alternatives are available.