Portillo finds himself at the grandly titled Centre for Man and Aviation in Soesterberg, Netherlands.

There, he is given access to the altitude chamber and also the air force's centrifuge which permits a person, usually a fighter pilot, to pull a potentially fatal 9-G, nine times the force of gravity.

....becoming hypoxic does his intellect no good. As pressure inside the altitude chamber is reduced, Portillo is subjected to a series of infantile tests – and fails spectacularly.

"What is eight minus three?" asks Wittenberg. "Four," Portillo replies.

...He says today: "At the end, they turned to me and said, 'How do you feel?' and I replied, 'Great! I got all the questions right!'"

Porti...

Portillo finds himself at the grandly titled Centre for Man and Aviation in Soesterberg, Netherlands.

There, he is given access to the altitude chamber and also the air force's centrifuge which permits a person, usually a fighter pilot, to pull a potentially fatal 9-G, nine times the force of gravity.

....becoming hypoxic does his intellect no good. As pressure inside the altitude chamber is reduced, Portillo is subjected to a series of infantile tests – and fails spectacularly.

"What is eight minus three?" asks Wittenberg. "Four," Portillo replies.

...He says today: "At the end, they turned to me and said, 'How do you feel?' and I replied, 'Great! I got all the questions right!'"

Portillo also has no idea of how close he was to dying.

"Two whole minutes of my life had disappeared, simple as that," he says, throwing his hands into the air.

"What was extraordinary was that I had no fear or concern or distress, just this massive self-belief.

"I believed I had beaten the system, but I had fooled myself."

This is the crux of the issue. With hypoxia there is no raging against the dying of the light, more a friendly welcome that throws the four other methods of execution Portillo examined into shameful relief.

...Portillo realises the multi-million-pound machines placed at his disposal by the Royal Netherlands Air Force could not replace every noose, gas chamber, electric chair or lethal injection in the world. But, in a research facility at Bristol University, he witnesses footage of a pig truffling for apples in a box filled with noxious gas.

The gas sends the animal into a hypoxic state by painlessly reducing the oxygen in its bloodstream. The pig breathes in the gas, staggers and falls unconscious to the ground. But when it comes to, it immediately returns to the apples, proving they have no association with fear or suffering.

"It was," says Portillo, "simplicity itself."

Were the ga...

...Portillo realises the multi-million-pound machines placed at his disposal by the Royal Netherlands Air Force could not replace every noose, gas chamber, electric chair or lethal injection in the world. But, in a research facility at Bristol University, he witnesses footage of a pig truffling for apples in a box filled with noxious gas.

The gas sends the animal into a hypoxic state by painlessly reducing the oxygen in its bloodstream. The pig breathes in the gas, staggers and falls unconscious to the ground. But when it comes to, it immediately returns to the apples, proving they have no association with fear or suffering.

"It was," says Portillo, "simplicity itself."

Were the gas mix and method of delivery to be converted for a human being, they would be unconscious within seconds and dead within perhaps a minute, their final moment filled with self-belief and happiness. It would be cheap, infallible, painless and, ultimately, humane.

Delighted with his discovery, Portillo returns to America to discuss it with those involved in the ongoing debate. But he finds that just as the fact of capital punishment divides opinion, so does the need for humanity in its execution.

Professor Robert Blecker, of New York Law School, a leading death-penalty supporter, tells Portillo: "If the killer who smashes their victim on the side of the head with a hammer and slits their throat goes out on a euphoric high, is that justice? Punishment is supposed to be painful. Were the victim's last moments euphoric? Will our last moments be euphoric? You are insisting that humanity and painless death are equated – they are not. A painless end is inhumane to the victim of the crime."

Correct and simple. First unconscious and then death.

This was a BBC Horizon documentary. The site that I quote is really a transcript.

The gas sends the animal into a hypoxic state by painlessly reducing the oxygen in its bloodstream. The pig breathes in the gas, staggers and falls unconscious to the ground. But when it comes to, it immediately returns to the apples, proving they have no association with fear or suffering.

Were the gas mix and method of delivery to be converted for a human being, they would be unconscious within seconds and dead within perhaps a minute, their final moment filled with self-belief and happiness. It would be cheap, infallible, painless and, ultimatel...

Correct and simple. First unconscious and then death.

This was a BBC Horizon documentary. The site that I quote is really a transcript.

The gas sends the animal into a hypoxic state by painlessly reducing the oxygen in its bloodstream. The pig breathes in the gas, staggers and falls unconscious to the ground. But when it comes to, it immediately returns to the apples, proving they have no association with fear or suffering.

Were the gas mix and method of delivery to be converted for a human being, they would be unconscious within seconds and dead within perhaps a minute, their final moment filled with self-belief and happiness. It would be cheap, infallible, painless and, ultimately, humane.

I don't know how difficult it is to figure out the cause of death in an autopsy! Perfect murder!!!