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I read an interview with a Swedish expert who, while being negative about death penalties in general, was similarly confused about how long it took and all the reported thrashing, which goes against all experience with industrial accidents where people pass out and die very quickly without they themselves or their nearby colleages realising what's going on.
Something clearly went wrong here.
The usual response is, why not euthanize people in the same way animals are euthanized. Humans have a more advanced nervous system in that they can respond by being aware of the procedure, whereas an animal is not. The condemned ,reasonably, do not wish to die and will do everything possible to delay the process and not comply, with lawyers who will look for any procedural misstep to forestall, adding to the complications. Remove the 'human rights' aspect and putting people to death is trivial.
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Half-baked thought: all of those industrial accidents don't involve victims aware that it's happening. I can imagine that, while it can sneak up on you, being told you're going to die invokes all sort of deeply-rooted vestigial instincts. Industrial workers in confined spaces aren't generally trying to hold their breath or escape. This may apply to some of the times lethal injection goes poorly as well.
Sure, but you can't hold your breath for 25 minutes. For most people it's like 2 minutes and then you would get knocked out. It's not just that it sneaks up on you, it happens very quickly.
Something is fishy here. Maybe they had too low a concentration of nitrogen?
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An interesting thought that genuinely hadn't occurred to me until you pointed it out. While the ability to voluntarily hold one's breath is typically limited to 2 -3 minutes a reasonably healthy Human body is capable of functioning on limited or no oxygen for a significant amount of time (closer 10 to 15 minutes). Hypoxia is pernicious in that it sneaks up on you, without explicit warnings/training most people will not recognize that they are in trouble until they've already burned 90% of their available time assuming they recognize that they are in trouble at all because by that point cognitive ability has already started to decline.
Accordingly, I'm now wondering if they ought to have sedated the guy or gotten him blackout drunk first. Throw a big party on death row, get everyone plastered and then pump in the nitrogen.
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Also, maybe industrial accidents with someone living after minutes do not end in deaths or being noticed more widely?
But being able to survive for 25 minutes without oxygen, holding breath, seems unlikely.
Maybe they fucked up delivery mechanism of nitrogen? Managed to still give access to oxygen?
You'd think they would test it on a sheep or something during commissioning.
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