Sure David. Killing people is dirt cheap. Heck, if you’ve got two hands and enough motivation, you can do it for free.

Avoiding killing innocent people is what makes capital punishment expensive. Roughly 10% of the people that have been executed in the US over the past 50 years were later exonerated. Are you really suggesting that we should make it easier for the government to kill innocent people in order to maintain a policy that, as far as I can tell, has a whole lot of “cons” and no “pros”?

Bob for Seriously?

A human breathes less than 30 cubic feet of air per hour. If it takes 10 minutes to kill a human, that would be less than 5 cubic feet of nitrogen. Nitrogen costs about $30 per 125 cubic foot bottle refill. So it would take less than $30 worth of nitrogen for 25 executions. Definitely less than $2 per execution if you reuse the mask.

Getting to the point of execution may involve several million dollars.

This is done to avoid accidentally executing an innocent person while still trying to punish someone who committed cold-blooded murder and might do it again if given the opportunity.

AND:
“we don’t trust the government enough to not decide who is or is not worthy of living.”

Which is grammatically equal to: We do trust the government enough to decide who is or is not worthy of living.

That probably was not the intention though. Most likely it was meant to say, “We do not trust the government enough to decide.” Obviously we DO whether we should or not. We made the attempt to avoid it being capricious by having a legislature write the laws, a judiciary judge whether the laws have been broken and the punishment is proper, and the executive actually execute those laws or pardon the convicted killer. Each one is a check on the poor performance of the others.

This particular incident was interesting in that the judge had the power to override the jury. That power has now been taken away so now we not only have the three branches of government but we have an impartial jury of his peers deciding his fate, limiting the ability to execute a killer if even one member of the jury is unwilling to say that he deserves death.

.

Assuming you are genuinely curious, the short version is A) there is no evidence that the death penalty mitigates crime rates, B) the rate at which innocent people are executed and later have their convictions overturned is way too high, C) execution is significantly more expensive than life in prison, and D) we don’t trust the government enough to not decide who is or is not worthy of living.

My point exactly.

Most things are safe if you are careful enough.
Nitrogen is safe unless you go out of your way to make it hazardous.

Just wondering what Mrs. Sennett’s last words were

(Fentanyl IS correct.)

Fentanyl is deadly to handle. The corpse would even create a risk for the medical examiner and the mortician. It WOULD work, though.

Nitrogen alone is not poisonous, just lacks the oxygen required for human life.

He was probably “writhing and thrashing” because he tried to hold his breath. The body is designed to “alarm” when there is a high level of CO2 in the blood, not a low level of O2 or a high level of any inert gas, like nitrogen.

Nitrogen hypoxia may be the most humane – and definite – method of execution. It is fail safe and painless if carried out properly.