It won’t. The bends happens because high pressures deep underwater increase the amount of gaseous nitrogen that can be carried dissolved in the bloodstream, if a diver depressurises too fast the body cannot exclude that dissolved gas via the lungs, instead it abruptly forms countless tiny bubbles in-situ.
Imagine a 2L bottle of lemonade when you unscrew the top - then imagine that happening inside you.
Just leaving someone in a nitrogen atmosphere at ambient atmospheric pressure won’t have anything like the same effect.
The most terrifying bit about must be knowing it’s coming and trying to hold your breath to avoid it. It’s not like the chair or an injection where you are strapped in and someone else flicks a switch. That two minutes or he spent desperately trying to hold his breath after he knew the nitrogen was switched on must have been excruciating. I can see the comparison with being held under water as you know as soon as your involuntary breathing reflex takes over you’re gone.
It must be very hard to untangle all the things that were going on in this guy. The horror of knowing that you’re about to be killed by whatever means might well make you fight and struggle and, if you can, scream. Or is there some pain causing that ? We can’t know without stopping the process and asking, assuming we can trust the answer.
The threat of nitrogen as an insidious killer was well known among those of us who used it every day in liquid form. The whole point was that it was dangerous precisely because it didn’t hurt. You went dizzy and mentally degraded and then you fell over and died unconscious. Every so often someone did make a mistake, as here for example
(describing it as a ‘chemical’ is misleading as there would be little chemistry going on - it’s a chemical in the same sense that water is a chemical but no-one describes drowning as a chemical accident).
When I was a gradutae student I built a high voltage generator with the works insulated by transformer oil contained in a steel tank that was big enough to climb into. For the testing phase though the oil would have been a nuisance. So we insulated it with a very dense gas, Arcton-12. I was once working in the tank without paying enough attention to where the Arcton/air interface was. I became dizzy, tunnel-visioned and confused. There was zero pain. Fortunately I had enough wit left to climb out of the tank and after 5 minutes regular breathing I was OK. I never went back in.
Many postmortem reports revealed that death wasn’t instantaneous and the prisoner felt considerable pain before death.
Remains an option in some states but not really used anymore. It’s traumatic for witnesses as well, especially if the setup is botched and things like face melting a occur
There was that case back in the 50’s (?) of a young black kid who was convicted of bludgeoning a white girl to death with a massive wood beam or rsj type thing. He was kind of known for constantly carrying a big family bible around with him. When they came to execute him they found he was too short for the chair, so the sat the poor lad on his bible so the helmet thing contacted his head.
Years later it was proved he couldn’t possibly have used the murder weapon. The Green Mile featured his story iirc.
