Long story short: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments brought by a condemned man that lethal injection is unconstitutional because the drug cocktail used in the exercise cannot guarantee death without pain.

I want to get this out up front. I am ambivalent about capital punishment. Not because it kills people - show me a case where a serial killer or a rapist killed or raped again after he got the chop - but because of its application in the United States. Apart from its falling most heavily on the lower classes who cannot afford Dream Team-style lawyers, there is also the matter of fact that it costs millions for the State to get to the point where the condemned have the needle in their arm and the death cocktail flowing through their veins.

If you cost it out, given the cost of locking up one prisoner versus the cost to keep a prisoner locked up long enough for the appeals process to be exhausted and said prisoner to be executed, the cost of the appeals process is often more than what it would cost to keep the prisoner locked up in a life-without-parole scenario! So why not just do that? Lock the murderers, rapists and terrorists up in supermax prisons without social contact and simply leave them there. They will be just as out of society as if they'd been executed; and if by some chance DNA evidence later proves they did not in fact commit the crime, they will be alive to be released somewhere down the line. That ought to make the anti-capital punishment crowd happy.

Of course, if you insist that evildoers must be executed for their crimes and the Supremes say all the existing methods - lethal injection, electrocution, poison gas, hanging, firing squad, beheading, hanging, etc. - are "cruel" under the Constitution because they all cause pain, we do have an alternative. There is a way to execute condemned prisoners without causing them pain, and it's within the state of the art right now. Here's how to do it.

Strap the condemned into a hyperbaric chamber, seal it and begin exhausting the air from it. (You might remember this kind of chamber from the Richard Gere movie, An Officer and A Gentleman.) When the reduced pressure is equal to an altitude of 25,000 feet or so, continue exhausting the chamber but introduce pure nitrogen gas into it. When sensors show pure nitrogen gas is being exhausted, shut off the fan and continue pressurizing the chamber to one atmosphere, sea level air pressure.

This technique would have the effect of inducing nitrogen narcosis in the condemned. There would be no pain. The prisoner would simply fade into unconsciousness and die of anoxia in ten or twelve minutes. In Hollywood terms, it would be a literal fade to black.

Fading out to death can hardly be called cruel. The fact that the major component of Earth's atmosphere is the active agent can hardly make it unusual. Anoxia by nitrogen gas would satisfy the requirement that the punishment meet Constitutional standards. That would leave only the morality and economic sense of capital punishment versus life without parole to be debated, and that's outside the purview of the article I am discussing.