What assisted dying and the death penalty have in common
by Kevin Yuill, spiked:
The cruel execution of Kenneth Smith has exposed the liberal hypocrisy over euthanasia.
On 25 January, the US state of Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith. Thirty-six years on from being convicted of the ‘murder for hire’ killing of Elizabeth Sennett, the 58-year-old finally ‘answered for his horrendous crimes’, as Alabama governor Kay Ivey put it.
The execution was rightly condemned by liberals of all stripes. Activists, campaigners, members of the US Supreme Court and even the United Nations re-stated their opposition to the death penalty.
They were especially outraged by the method of Smith’s killing. Instead of being administered a lethal injection, Smith was subject to ‘nitrogen hypoxia’. This meant he was strapped to a gurney and made to breathe nitrogen through a mask apparatus, depriving him of oxygen.
[…] Yet while these activists and politicos are right to condemn capital punishment, there’s more than a whiff of selective outrage on display here. After all, those now condemning this act of state-approved killing routinely turn a blind eye to another form of state-approved killing – namely, euthanasia and assisted suicide.
In fact, the methods of killing in cases of assisted suicide bare an uncanny resemblance to those used for state-ordered executions. In Canada alone, there were 13,000 assisted deaths by lethal injection last year. In the 2000s, Dignitas in Switzerland even experimented with helium hypoxia, a very similar method to that used to kill Smith. Dignitas’s efforts resulted in the botched killings of one man and three women, because of ill-fitting masks.
Even the length of time it takes to die is comparable between assisted suicide and the death penalty. But while critics have described the 22 minutes it took Smith to die in Alabama as ‘agonising’, they say nothing about the 40-plus minutes it takes individuals to die through assisted suicide in Oregon.
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