I mean, the cheapest, most painless and effective method is Helium, as far as we know.
Lights out without feeling anything, within seconds.
I am against the death penalty, I have my reasons, but if they are going to do it anyway, why not Helium?
Why the complicated drug cocktail or other methods that have much higher chances of causing prolonged suffering and even failures?
Again, this is a scientific and moral question, I am ABSOLUTELY against the death penalty.
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I don’t know enough about helium to say, but I am pretty sure the mechanism for death is the same as with nitrous oxide [edit: should have said nitrogen] (no oxygen) and they did try that recently and at least some people were unhappy with the resulting mins of convulsions and whatnot.
That said I think probably the real answer is that I. Gov is slow to act.
II. Risk aversion in doing something new (cause of if it goes bad the blame all goes to you). and
III. Most of the people in favor of the death penalty are fine with existing options and most people who want something more humane are focused on eliminating it entirely.
Does seem like it’s worth exploring though.
Most people in favor of the death penalty are not very interested in providing the most painless, humane process for achieving that outcome. They view the death penalty as the ultimate punishment for the most heinous and taboo of crimes. People get very emotional in regards to these kinds of topics.
Ideas of minimal suffering and speed are probably best reserved for ethical euthanasia.
I’m against the death penalty since I don’t see how we can have an authority that is reliable enough to exclusively use it justly but speaking from a purely practical perspective. There’s a finite suppliy of helium on Earth. It’d leak out of anything you used it with and it eventually drifts off and leaves the planet entirely.
I’m not aware of any reason Helium would be a better execution method than any other inert gas. If you were to go that route (and if I had to choose a way to be killed it would be that) then you could just use pure nitrogen.
They tried Nitrogen last year which would have similar effects. It turns out it only has the lights out few second effects when used with euthanasia where the person is complying with dying. If they hold their breath it essentially becomes suffocation and was a lot messier.
I’ve always thought we should bring back the guillotine. It’s very quick and any pain should only last a few seconds at the most as the person almost immediately loses consciousness. And you don’t have to deal with the complicated nature of methods like electric chairs, gas chambers, drugs etc where any number of things could go wrong. All you need is a heavy blade and gravity.
You’d think if they were truly interested in a humane approach, they’d use something like helium. But let’s be honest, execution isn’t just about ending a life; it’s about making a point. The drawn-out, error-prone lethal injection debacles? That’s the state flexing its ability to botch even the one thing it’s guaranteed to get right.
And let’s not forget the optics. A silent, peaceful exit via helium doesn’t deliver the same "solemn justice" theater that American execution chambers demand. If it doesn’t involve a dramatic IV failure, last-minute appeals, and an uncomfortable amount of suffering, is it even an execution?
The real answer: They don’t care about efficiency. They care about ritual.
The issue has to do with the constitutional phrase “cruel or unusual punishment”.
Cruel meaning that it causes excessive pain or suffering.
But “unusual” is a bit harder to quantify, and some folks take that to mean that it’s unconstitutional to try anything new.
The electric chair and lethal injection still exist because “that’s the way we’ve always done it!” ; in the case of the firing squad, the common usage of firearms prevents people from making the case that it’s “unusual”.
Basically, the long term solution to all this is to either eliminate the death penalty or use firing squad as the primary means of execution.
Not necessarily helium, but we have better drugs already. Think about what you can get at your vet’s office for your pet that are painless and quick. Instead they are using old drugs that are extremely painful and slow. The truth is drug makers don’t want to be associated with the death penalty, so innovation and distribution stops. (John Oliver has a great video on this if you want to learn more.)
I’ve always wondered why they don’t knock the guy out, like with surgery. And then just remove the oxygen from the room. Wouldn’t that be painless, or would you wake up and feel it?
You’d be better off with nitrogen.
The body can’t realize there’s a problem because the atmosphere is already 78% nitrogen.
We had to take classes on nitrogen asphyxiation for work. You’re unconscious in 3 breaths and dead in a minute or less.
A bullet to the brain is the most instant and painless method there is.
But people feel like it’s messy (which it doesn’t have to be) and it conjures up uncomfortable images of like, Nazis murdering people execution-style in the woods.
I think most execution styles in the US are chosen based on vibes. They’re not actually going for the most humane choice.
They should just use the fentanyl they seize.
The problem is whatever the US uses most of the world bans the export of that to the US.
The US might have most of the worlds helium at the moment but I doubt they want to risk being unable to import it.
There are a lot of gases even in low concentrations that can cause swift deaths without even realizing it.
H, He, CO, CO2, N to name a few
Were pretty dependent on O2 and a lack of it, or another gas taking its place can gum up the very delicate pumps in mitochondria that convert carbon chains into atp and CO2.
Many gasses in a high enough concentrations can kill us almost instantly.
The most humane execution I’ve seen was when those jihadis shot that blindfolded guy point blank with the antiaircraft gun. Gruesome yes, but there was nothing but mist where his head used to be.
Besides being against the death penalty, helium is not a renewable or easily sourced resource.
The fact is that the world is running out of it, and we squander it on things like balloons.
We can’t make it since it’s an element. It is found in pockets underground that have to just as quickly as they are tapped be captured or else it will just release into the atmosphere and be lost for good.
So without even getting into biology, just capturing and using it for this purpose would be a bad use of the substance.
The death penalty is a tricky subject. On one hand governments should never be in the business of killing it’s citizens and on the other there needs to be dire consequences for dire acts. As to why Helium is not used: helium producers don’t want their product used to fill party balloons associated with death and death row inmates are extremely low on the concern scale for most.
If I was to be executed, I’d want to be pushed out of a plane at 15K feet over the middle of the pacific.
As far as why we don’t use helium for executions, do you want them talking like smurfs as they die?
I don’t know if there’s any reason you couldn’t use any other inert gas. Nitrogen seems to be the standard. It’s commonly available from industrial gas places.
Bullet to the head works for me.
Helium make ne talk funny how you use talk funny to kill a demon? You meet Yeshua and his son Messiah? One of them talk real funny and kills em with his talkin. They both do it you just got to egg Yeshua on to do it funny. WHY SO SERIOUS? Shit I didnt burn any real money father.
Helium is very expensive and in short supply. it has many industrial and manufacturing uses. Just from what I have read when nitrogen was used, it is closer to suffocating someone to death.
Technically the death penalty should be used for those that are a danger to others and beyond hope of any redemption and will kill again even in prison. But the reality of it, is that it is a political issued and your race or social economic class has more to do with if you get the death penalty or not. There are truly dangerous people in jail that have no business being alive, but those with no means to defend themselves getting the Death penalty, that could probably be rehabbed. Most of the time it’s used to plea bargain to avoid the death penalty and sometimes get false confessions to avoid it.
Plain nitrogen works just as well.
But all forms of asphixiation seem to produce convulsions. I think this is part of hte process of dying. If you want to make death "prettier" you need to administer an anti-convulsant or paralytic agent first.
That said, people seeking to commit suicide will often use an adhoc mask and a gas bottle of nitrogen or argon (Any welding supply store) along with a regulator.
I know from playing with a helium cylinder as a teen, you can pass out from two deep breaths. So I would expect it to be totally painless even if the dying body convulsed.
Helium is a finite resource that we are slowly losing, its literally leaving earths atmosphere into space because its so light. Helium is essential to a lot of scientific research and industrial processes. It should not be wasted when there are alternatives.
While Helium might be one of the most abundant elements in the universe, there is a critical shortage of it here on Earth. It’s an essential part of cooling MRI machines, nuclear reactors, and semiconductors, so its demand is high, and supply and production are low. The pandemic and sanctions on Russia, where much is produced, have impacted this.
You’re thinking about nitrogen. It kills you through asphyxiation but doesn’t cause the gasping, I need air response.
Also helium is actually a rare gas needed for industrial purposes and we are quickly running out of it because we are idiots who put it in balloons instead…
I’m beginning to think that techniques where they strap you down where you can’t move are somewhat cruel. It is possible to do hanging where you put a rope around someone’s neck and then let him walk around, sit down, stand up, lie down, whatever he wants until it’s time to pull the rope and strangle him. It will be unpleasant while he’s being strangled, but it isn’t preceded by the agony of being unable to move. You could tie the knot, add glue so it can’t be untied, slip it around his neck, and attach a clamp so he can’t loosen the rope and slip out of it.
With lethal injection, they give you a drug that paralyzes you. Then you look like you are not in pain, but maybe you are in pain. We don’t know for sure.
It’s a waste of helium. Any functionally inert gas will do the same. Nitrogen is cheaper, easier to get, and doesn’t take away from the limited supply needed to operate MRIs. If the oxygen displacement is fast enough, the victim will just collapse and die within seconds.
I was reading about a recent execution with nitrogen (I assume this is the same if using helium). the prisoner was show to be convulsing and flexing muscles which some interpreted as being in pain and also, heavy breathing occurred for up to 15 minutes. the description did not lend itself to a quick and painless death which was my understanding prior to reading about this execution.
As others have said, helium is an expensive gas that is in limited supply
If you have the death penalty I think the guillotine (kept in good condition) has several advantages over any injection or other methods.
One cut and it’s all over. It’s not going to leave the soon to be dead person in agony for minutes, it’s not going to fail to work due to lack of supply, and it’s certainly not going to delay the process due to lack of availability.
And for medically assisted suicide. I heard some horror story account of how the drugs paralyze you, but you remain conscious, and then you feel like you’re drowning until you die, but it looks peaceful because you’re paralyzed.
Nitrogen would be a lot cheaper and easier. It’s unconsciousness in a minute or less, no pain, no spasms, just pass out and die (after a couple of minutes). Mind you, it’s also the reason why it’s dangerous. A leak could accidentally suffocate someone else.
I mean, the US is a signatory to an international treaty banning gassing people (including nitrogen hypoxia), and purveyors of nitrogen have refused to provide it for executions, so those could be reasons.
Helium? ignoring the fact that its a non renewable resource with much better applications then killing I’d rather not sound like a fucking chipmunk in my last moments.
And no the cheapest method would be firing squad, ignoring the cost of the rifle’s at least. Most firing squads use 308 which is about a dollar a bullet.
The man who was executed, a lot of people are commenting on his death by firing squad. Personally I really don’t care how he died just glad he is finished.
You might say that it is cold and calius, I say how much mercy did he give the parents of his ex, his chases and killed them both with a baseball bat, really??
As long as they keep finding innocent people on death row, I too am also against the death penalty. But I have decided that yourvsuggestion of using helium is a good one and I will allow it.
Statistically, most people on death row die of natural causes first and since the death penalty is only given for the most heinous of crimes, most people don’t really care, if the condemned suffers a little before "lights out".
2 reasons.
The people watching don’t want it to look horrific they want it to look painless even if it isn’t. So while helium is painless to the receiver the person will convulse and spew etc which is hard to watch and the viewers feel guilty.
Second is because they need a contract with a company to secure the products and very minimal companies on the planet are willing to sell their products for the death penalty. This is basically why morphine is out
Generally speaking, most people in favor of the death penalty don’t care about humane methods- you’ll often notice they are of the opposite mindset. If they don’t want it painful and slow, they at least want it cheap.
I can answer why they used the drug cocktail. It was to forward an illusion of mercy and civility. Other methods of execution are outwardly and noticeably violent. Hanging, you use a rope and the condemned’s own body weight to break their neck and suffocate them… when done right. Firing squad, I mean you are riddling someone with bullets. Electrocution, when done right is quick, but horribly painful. Gas chamber, it wad the preferred method of mass genocide in Nazi concentration camps. Lethal injection? Well, it’s just like putting them to sleep! Right?
The protocol was a barbiturate to induce unconsciousness, a paralytic, and pentobarbital to stop the heart. Why do they use a paralytic, one might ask? What happens to a human body, conscious or not, when it’s deprived of oxygen? Why, it tends to convulse and jolt. In other words, the paralytic is there to maintain the illusion of gently and mercifully ending a life.
One of the other reasons we abandoned the gas chamber is how much the condemned would convulse. Some suggested vacuum asphyxiation, which would take longer than you think, and gas replacement asphyxiation, usually nitrogen gas. Yeah, at first it would seem relatively painless, it would take time for the condemned to realize they were suffocating, but we’d rapidly return to the obvious convulsions.
If you really want a rapid and painless means of execution, without a sci-fi phaser rifle, I can only think of two. A high power shotgun placed directly against the back of the condemned’s head and shot. The other? Place them in a room where the ceiling is a ten ton slab of concrete and drop it on them. The only truly humane way to execute someone is death via old age, IE, a life sentence.
The problem is not the method, but the people using the method. As an anesthesiologist, I can put people to sleep painlessly. After they’re asleep, any poison can kill painlessly. And it is literally simple enough to teach a monkey to do. Yet, news reports are full of idiots who screwed it up. If they can screw up 1) put to sleep then 2) give poison, they can screw up anything. The solution is getting reliable people to do the job.
There’s some sort of helium shortage I guess? https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/helium-shortage-doctors-are-worried-running-element-threaten-mris-rcna52978
Not sure how well it works. I had a client try to kill himself like this and it ended up failing (despite his copious research and planning) and his son found him and called an ambulance for him.
I assume in a more controlled setting with someone administering it, it would be less likely to fail. But high pitch voice seems in poor taste for an action of such gravity.
Several gases work equally well here. The "suffocation" feeling only comes from CO2. Nitrogen, helium, etc. don’t create that sensation. Within a few seconds the blood deoxygenates, you pass out, and then just don’t wake up.
They just tried it. (Well Nitrogen, not Helium, but same deal biologically – inert harmless gas that we can breathe without noticing we’re breathing it.)
It was a huge news story. It went … badly.
In all honesty we should go back to the Guillotine. It’s swift, certain, and unforgettable to those who witness it. Yes, we’ve all heard the circumstantial evidence that a severed head may retain consciousness for a few seconds, based on many recent executions that is a VAST improvement.
Also, executions should be public again. It’s only a deterrent to one guy unless others witness it. It is well that it is disturbing, lest people become too enamored with it.
Well, instead of an electric chair, may I suggest an electric bench? Just kidding. Firing squad I think is the quickest. However, the problem with the death penalty is you don’t know if someone is really innocent. You can’t bring them back to life. So to me life in prison without parole. Then if you find out they are innocent, you can release them.
Helium has become a rarer commodity, in shrinking supply because it escapes our atmosphere so easily, and is growing in value because it is a vital requirement in semiconductor production, MRI machines, etc. (yet people waste it on things like party balloons without a second thought). Efficiency aside, I can’t imagine why one would choose to squander it on executions.
That’s an utter waste of helium. There is a finite amount of helium on earth, there was a helium shortage recently, and stores couldn’t blow up balloons
Liquid helium has an important role when it comes to MRI Imaging, we take pictures of inside your body using a superconductive electromagnet, but it gets crazy hot, due to heliums natural properties, it’s the best gas to use to cool off the magnet, If the magnet gets too hot it will full on melt
The helium has 2 functions, the cryogens cool off the magnet as it’s in use maintaining its temperature
Or the magnet has a quench function, if someone were pinned to the magnet by a metal wheel chair or gurney; we quench the magnet to get rid of its magnetism. All the helium floods in to cool the magnet as fast as possible, making it possible to demagnetize, and remove the stuck item, and save the persons life
If you guys start wasting all the helium we got on this planet, no more good MRIs, there would still be some with terrible pictures, but the good clean pictures, that can catch the slightest tears in your tissue, they’ll be gone, or reserved for elites at that point with what little helium remains
I’m sure it’s because there is only a finite supply of helium on earth. Helium is a critical gas for many scientific and medical instruments. A better option for the death penalty would be fentanyl. The feds have stockpiles of confiscated fentanyl and it only takes a tiny amount to kill a person.
Well, helium in particular isn’t a great choice because it’s a finite resource and we’re running out, so using it to murder people is wasteful at best. As for general use of inert gas to murder people, they tried that recently with nitrogen and it went horribly. Turns out it’s not so clean and painless when the person is refusing to breathe it in.
Nitrogen is better, gets you high and happy as you asphyxiate.
Helium is getting incredibly rare, I’m honestly surprised to still see balloons for sale given how we are burning through the strategic helium reserve.
But ultimately it’s because it’s not pleasant for the people watching. So much of modern-day capital punishment in the USA is about making it as pleasant as possible for the witnesses, not a humane end for the convicted.
why not just stick them in their a arm like you would a blood donor and then instead of having the blood get collected in bags it would just pump out of the person until death … they would just pass out from their blood pressure dropping and not wake up because they died
Nitrogen would be cheaper and is used in some places. Helium is t exactly rare but it is a limited resource. Nitrogen though. 7 10ths of every lungful for most of us is nitrogen.
You don’t need to use helium, when nitrogen is abundantly available. As long as you are exhaling CO2 normally, your body has no way to know that you are suffocating, if no O2 is coming in. You very quickly lose consciousness and die.
I read somewhere that the reason this isn’t used for executions is that some people experience a bit of euphoria just before they die. The authorities didn’t like that the prisoner seemed to be enjoying being executed. I don’t know if that is really true, but it is believable.
Why not; Helium is of limited supply in he world. Nitrogen is plentiful and does the same thing.
One of the fastest most painless methods is the guillotine.
Because,It’s not nearly painful enough. If you look into death penalty practices you’ll see that they are as cruel as they can legally be. It’s definitely not about justice or fairness. Simple logic tells you that. If killing is bad then killing is bad. Unless you have the intellect of a 7 year old, which is surprisingly common. Thanks mobile technology.
I can’t figure out why we’re not using all this free fentanyl that’s being poured into the country. From what I understand a few micrograms is sufficient, with death being quick and painless, if not pleasant. Never tried the stuff but there’s gotta be a reason it’s still being bought! For the record, not an advocate for the law, but this seems like a natural fit.