MOBILE, Alabama — What part of the words “cruel and unusual” do lawmakers in Louisiana and Alabama not understand?

Imposing outlandish cruelty while inviting a costly constitutional challenge shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of public service. Yet by insisting on allowing the use of nitrogen gas, a gruesome method, for criminal executions, that’s exactly what these two state governments are doing.

Louisiana legislators and Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) earlier this year approved nitrogen asphyxiation as an approved method for the death penalty. Last week, every Republican on a House committee, ignoring pleas from Jewish leaders who said the gas use evoked memories of the Holocaust, voted down a bill by Democratic state Sen. Katrina Jackson-Andrews to undo that approval.

Three weeks ago, Gov. Kay Ivey (R-AL) set an overnight Sept. 26-27 date for her state’s next nitrogen execution a week after Alabama’s Supreme Court granted the state’s request to do so. The decision is unconscionable.

Objections to this method of death need not rest in objections to the death penalty itself. One can cogently argue that sometimes death is the only punishment that can fit truly heinous crimes such as premeditated murder or torturous, aggravated rape. The case can be made that if the penalty is clear in advance (and setting aside the absurdly convoluted appeals options available in the United States), it is the criminal, not the state, who has triggered his own death sentence by the very act of committing such a monstrous crime.

Even so, the state has an obligation, both constitutional (under the Eighth Amendment) and moral, to carry out its duty, as determined by the representative consent of the governed, as quickly and painlessly as possible. The punishment entails the end of life but definitively not torture.

Torture, though, is what appears to be happening. Even veterinary scientists have almost universally ruled out nitrogen for use on animals, as tests have shown it causes “panic and distress … and seizure-like behavior” or “convulsions.” Nonetheless, Alabama carried out the nation’s first-ever nitrogen gas execution in January after the state promised the gas would make the all-too-human inmate unconscious “within seconds.”

Even though Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall insists the execution was “textbook,” that’s not what direct witnesses from numerous media outlets reported, all in agreement with each other. To quote the Associated Press, once the gassing began, inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith “began to shake and writhe violently, in thrashing spasms and seizure-like movements. … The force of his movements caused the gurney to visibly move at least once. Smith’s arms pulled against the straps holding him to the gurney. He lifted his head off the gurney and then fell back. The shaking went on for at least two minutes. … Smith began to take a series of deep gasping breaths, his chest rising noticeably.”

It wasn’t until a full 10 minutes later that his breathing became no longer visible.

To most rational people, this shouldn’t sound like a humane execution — it sounds like a sick revenge fetish. Surely there are quicker, less agonizing methods of meeting a legal, societal obligation for even such a morally fraught sentence. One need not be a scientist to think quite readily of several methods that almost surely would be entirely painless.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Ivey has access to all these reports from Smith’s execution. So did the Republicans on the Louisiana House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice. But, hey, why should politicians worry about 10 minutes of agonizing torture when they want to burnish their tough-on-crime reputations? Humane concerns, apparently, are for suckers.

If so, all of us should be suckers. And nobody who so blithely continues the death-by-suffocation regime should be writing our laws — much less, well, executing them.