(April 18, 2015 at 11:26 am)zebo-the-fat Wrote: In general I am against the death penalty simply because of the problems of killing the wrong person. There have been several cases of people being on death row for years before new evidence shows that they were innocent.
If you are going to kill people, nitrogen is ideal, it is cheap and painless, I remember watching a documentary about test pilots, demonstrating the effects of oxygen starvation, the guys were put into a chamber and wore breathing masks, the ratio of nitrogen to oxygen was adjusted while they did various tests (maths problems, writing etc.) As the oxygen was reduced and replaced by nitrogen they became confused, made mistakes and eventually passed out, when the oxygen was restored they recovered and said that they were totally unaware that anything had happened. The feeling of suffocation is not due to a lack of oxygen, it is due to a build up of carbon dioxide, because they were breathing normally (not holding their breath) the CO2 didn't build up in their blood so they felt fine.
(April 19, 2015 at 9:34 am)AFTT47 Wrote: I'm 100% against the death penalty but I've often wondered why this method was not used by states who insist on murdering the murders. I'm familiar with the physiological effect because of my background as a scuba instructor. Zebo is correct in that it is the build-up of CO2 which causes a feeling of air starvation, not a lack of oxygen. All you have to do is replace the oxygen one breaths with an inert gas such as nitrogen. They won't notice a thing until the oxygen percentage drops below about 16%. At that point, they'll simply get light-headed and lose consciousness. No discomfort at all.
Thanks for the correction, guys.
