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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion oped

EDITORIAL: Inhumane methods of capital punishment should be abolished

This past week an inmate on death row requested his last meal before his death by electrocution. 

That’s correct — the electric chair is still a viable option for enforcing the death penalty in Tennessee and five other states, including Alabama, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia. 

The death penalty in itself is a questionable policy, but its methods are long overdue for reexamination. 

If the death penalty is to exist in the current climate, it needs to be mandatory that the execution method is the most cost-effective and humane option available. 

Methods of execution in the United States include death by firing squad, hanging, electrocution, lethal injection and most recently, nitrogen hypoxia. 

Many states already have nixed the firing squad, electric chair, and hanging — and more are moving to do away with lethal injection as well. Just recently Oklahoma added legislation that allows people receiving the death penalty to elect to die by nitrogen inhalation. 

In 2014 Clayton Lockett was executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma.

Lethal injection is the process of injecting three separate drugs sequentially to induce cardiac arrest, and thus, death. The first is an anesthetic to put the inmate to sleep, the second is a paralytic to render the inmate immobile and the third is potassium chloride to induce cardiac arrest. However, if the doses are off, if the order is messed up, or if the needle is not inserted into the vein correctly, these drugs can cause immense pain and suffering before a prolonged death. 

Such was the case with Lockett, who received an untested concoction of drugs and died after over an hour on the gurney after the injection site was botched and the anesthetic was not in full effect. 

In cases like Charles Warner, executed a year later in the same state, the wrong drugs were even administered causing torturous effects. In his last moments he reportedly stated that he “felt like his body is on fire.”

If states are going to insist on enforcing the death penalty, they need to be conscious to not violate the eighth amendment in the process. 

After many horror stories involving lethal injection, it is not surprising that states refusing to abolish the death penalty are scrambling to find a more humane method. But is nitrogen gas really it?

Nitrogen is an inert gas and is nontoxic. But inhalation of pure nitrogen is lethal because nitrogen displaces oxygen in the lungs within a matter of minutes. According to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, unconsciousness can occur within one or two breaths. 

At first glance this seems benevolent — quick unconsciousness followed by quick death, as the body starts to die after only five minutes of oxygen deprivation. Nitrogen also will not cause the same panicked feeling that suffocation does because the person continues to exhale carbon dioxide in the process. 

The World Society for the Protection of Animals conducted a study in which they observed the euthanasia effects of nitrogen hypoxia. They deemed nitrogen hypoxia unsuitable for the euthanasia of dogs — and Oklahoma is considering that for humans. The findings in some instances were disturbing — recounting that loss of consciousness was not instant, causing dogs to convulse and yelp after falling unconscious. This casts doubt on the argument that nitrogen hypoxia is painless.

However, in an earlier study done in the 1960s, researchers reported human patients falling unconscious within 20 seconds of rapidly breathing pure nitrogen with no after-effects. 

It seems ludicrous to think that states can adopt and enact these new methods with so little research available to corroborate its compliance with the eighth amendment, but here we stand. 

States ought to be held accountable for violating the eighth amendment provision for outlawing “cruel and unusual” punishment — even against our world’s cruelest inmates. 

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