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Botched Executions Put Lethal Injections Under New Scrutiny
carmendrahl writes: "Lethal injections are typically regarded as far more humane methods for execution compared to predecessors such as hanging and firing squads. But the truth about the procedure's humane-ness is unclear. Major medical associations have declared involvement of their member physicians in executions to be unethical, so that means that relatively inexperienced people administer the injections. Mounting supply challenges for the lethal drug cocktails involved are forcing execution teams to change procedures on the fly. This and other problems have contributed to recent crises in Oklahoma and Missouri. As a new story and interactive graphic explains, states are turning to a number of compound cocktails to get around the supply problems."
I still don't understand why the lethal injection isn't just a bunch of heroin that's been confiscated in the latest raid. People OD on heroin without being horribly uncomfortable.
If people don't want to die a a horrid painful death they should choose their parents better - that way they'd be able to afford a better lawyer.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Bullets are cheaper than drugs and a cop firing a gun is cheaper than a doctor injecting drugs.
The constitution say no cruel and unusual punishment. The Soviets and Chinese have executed 10's of millions of people with a bullet to the head. It is quick, therefore not cruel and not unusual for it has been used millions of times.
I don't understand why nitrogen asphyxiation hasn't been used before in capital punishment. It's a simple procedure with a very abundant resource and is more "humane" as far as killing goes than other used methods. Just like going into a deep sleep, forever.
Or we could save a ton of money AND save the trouble of finding the right drug cocktail by eliminating the death penalty. It's not like it's a deterrent to crime.
Why not use the gas we euthanize dogs and cats with?
PS: I'm probably against the death penalty but it just seems an easy method to remove this objection to it, and use something that is not going to be hard to supply. And I'm sure some death-penalty supporters are also much more concerned with cat and dogs suffering so this is probably pretty humane.
Cheap, effective, quick ("humane"), and we don't need to rely on other nations to produce the materials.
Guillotine. The most humane method humanity ever invented.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Guillotine, Hanging, Firing Squad and the Electric Chair.
You could also take standard drugs like Sodium Thiopental that are used in countries that allow euthanasia
Sodium thiopental is used intravenously for the purposes of euthanasia. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, where active euthanasia is allowed by law, the standard protocol recommends sodium thiopental as the ideal agent to induce coma, followed by pancuronium bromide.
Intravenous administration is the most reliable and rapid way to accomplish euthanasia. A coma is first induced by intravenous administration of 20 mg/kg thiopental sodium (Nesdonal) in a small volume (10 ml physiological saline). Then, a triple dose of a non-depolarizing skeletal muscle relaxant is given, such as 20 mg pancuronium bromide (Pavulon) or 20 mg vecuronium bromide (Norcuron). The muscle relaxant should be given intravenously to ensure optimal availability but pancuronium bromide may be administered intramuscular at an increased dosage level of 40 mg.
It's also cheap too.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Have gnu, will travel.
- It's completely painless and humane; one's physiology doesn't notice the lack of oxygen so the person just goes to sleep and then dies. People who were revived from asphyxia like this reported they had no idea until they woke up
- It's practically free of charge as nitrogen is 80% of our atmosphere; there will never be a shortage of it
- Because it's universally available and free worldwide it can't be banned or restricted
- It's much safer (ie nitrogen leaks are harmless assuming the area is ventilated.)
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Give them a small mouth/nose mask attached to a nitrogen supply. Quick, painless, and you don't have blood everywhere.
I have heard from articles that the person just goes to sleep. Why do they rely on some hard to obtain or complicated mixture when it seems like there are very cheap and not very uncomfortable ways to do such a thing?
Export of Sodium Thiopental and similar drugs to countries that allow executions are banned throughout the EU. That's why the USA is now looking for shitty homegrown replacements.
When you kill a person who poses no present danger to anybody, without their consent, it is murder, plain and simple. The death penalty is nothing but state-sanctioned revenge killings. The whole idea of "humanely" murdering somebody is absolutely laughable. The death penalty is a travesty, and a nation that wants to call itself civilized should make it a priority to get rid of it.
I'm surprised the state of Oklahoma hasn't tried to make carrying out death sentences a profit center. There's no shortage of people in that state who wouldn't actually pay to be on a firing squad. And plenty of them would pay even more to get to do it up close and personal with a handgun.
They could even open it up to the residents of Texas and add in an out of state surcharge for the privilege.
In this case 'more humane' basically just means 'doesn't make the audience as squeamish'. As it turns out, this is a very poor indicator. Especially since the usual injection cocktail contains Pancuronium, or another curare-like muscle relaxant. Not an anaesthetic, or toxic in itself; but causes nice, peaceful-looking flaccid paralysis. Unless one of the other ingredients fully sedates you, or kills you, you just suffocate; but no unseemly twitching or spasms, no grimacing, gasping, any of that ugly stuff; because with the complete loss of muscle control, how could you?
The 'barbaric' methods, by contrast, don't look all nice and clean and medical; but they also don't involve deputy Cletus playing amateur phlebotomist with a dodgy, failure-prone, three-step injection process (compare to, say, how we put domestic animals to sleep, if you want to see somebody who knows their stuff handle a lethal injection...), they involve a lot of gore; potentially some peripheral nervous activity causing creepy corpse twitch; but they depend either on simple mechanical principles(as with the guillotine) or skills that prison staff likely have in more than adequate amounts (as with firing squads).
Personally, I'm not against the notion of capital punishment in principle; but the way we do it in the US is like a grimly parodic example of what not to do, and how not to do it. Despite the availability of trivially better procedures, we insist on using a variety of ass-backwards Mad-Libs protocols with a history of unreliability and no obvious merits. Our irrational, emotionally misguided, approach carries over to the selection of victims as well: (even aside from the documented cases where the whole trial was a frame-up, with gross prosecutorial, judicial, and sometimes even defense attorney, misconduct) we execute largely on the basis of emotional salience, rather than actual danger. Kill somebody, up close and personal, nice and gruesome? Potential death penalty in jurisdictions that conduct it. Kill a large number of people, by some polite, white-collar, epidemiological chicanery? Probably just a civil matter, you might even get to settle without admitting wrongdoing.
Nobody likes violent criminals, and they are notably unsympathetic characters; but (precisely for those reasons) their influence tends to be self-limiting. The really dangerous ones are smart enough to make it to a position of power and influence, where the rewards are better and the penalties oh so much smaller. If we were serious about rationally applying capital punishment, it'd be a lot easier to be taken out and shot for various flavors of fraud and corruption, rather than effectively impossible, as now.
We, they, are sadists. Nothing more. If it was an eye for an eye, that would be different. But it is not. That we use means that, as documented again and again medically, inflict suffering, shows just how disgusting the US has become when it comes to capital punishment.
We relish in death. The tradition of a bygone eras that, while fun on cinema, have no place in modern time. Leave 'The Old West', 'The Electric Chair', 'The Firing Squad', 'The Guillotine', 'The Stake', 'The Coliseum', where they belong: In the annals of history, and on the silver screen. Society is clinging to a ghost that is squeezing whatever morality and ethics this country once had, out. I'd feel absolutely disgusted with it all, but I have nothing left to give on the matter.
I have never understood why killing someone cleanly is so complicated to get right in the modern era. The French solved this problem back in 1792, and it worked fairly well up until they finally decided that having the government kill people was inherently problematic. The USA being a country that loves its guns so much, it's almost incomprehensible that there hasn't been a freaking research paper on the optimal angle for a shotgun under the chin. We have all manner of chemical designed to render someone unconscious or completely insensible or incapable of feeling pain, and if your goal is to kill someone you don't need to worry about its long-term side effects. The fabled chloroform rag is half-mythical, but even that was actually used medically at one point for anasthesia and we only stopped because we... accidentally killed people. Oh no! Whatever will we do if we accidentally kill the person we're trying to execute before we administer the drug that's guaranteed to kill?
We might not even need to pay for any new drugs. We probably have enough confiscated heroin by this point to happily overdose everyone on death row, and going to sleep and forgetting to breathe is about as peaceful as you can get. It's even a poetic punishment for drug crimes that killed someone.
There are a lot of arguments about whether we ought to be having executions at all, and I'm not going to get into those here, but I can't really come up with any reason why we have to risk torturing someone to death other than someone wanting the chance of 'accidentally' torturing someone to death.
It seems like it should be easy with either one drug or two at most.
There seems to be dozens of drugs used for anesthesia that should work for a single drug. When I've had surgery it seems like "count backwards from 10" gets me to about 8.5 before I'm out. And at that point they could just inject enough after that to kill you.
Even if they had to use two drugs, again there's plenty that would make you unconscious and they could inject nasty stuff to finish you off.
Disclaimer: Im against the death penalty.
But I don't understand why its so hard to kill someone. Making someone unconscious for major surgery seems to be a solved problem. Once someone is unconscious, and paralysed, how hard is it to kill them?
If you are unconscious, no oxygen will kill you in a few minutes without pain. Even if you are concious, from what I understand its CO2 in the lungs that causes pain.. just filling a room with helium should probably kill you without you feeling much pain in a few minutes.
Why these injections are taking 20+ minutes to kill people who are in pain, I don't understand.
Nitrogen gas is the most humane way of dispatching these criminals.
Greater complexity = much greater chance to screw up.
I don't get why execution has been made this complex.
We need to do away with the whole special death row areas, telling victims months ahead when they are goona get executed, the green mile walk, and multiple different hard-to-get injections conducted in stages by multiple different people.
Whats wrong with an unexpected trip to a disguised room and a quick bullet (or 6 to be sure) to the head? Ideally when the victim isn't even slightly expecting it.
Simple and immediate. I therefore think it would be ultimately much more humane too.
If we're going to do executions, then the whole "pain-free" premise should go right out the door. We're killing the criminal in retaliation for a crime. Why does it need to be so painless? I mean, don't torture the criminal by starvation or dehydration or anything like that. But hanging, guillotine, firing squad, etc. are all effective means. You could even give some local to ease the pain on some of these methods.
Otherwise, all you're really doing is admitting that execution isn't right, but trying to get away with it anyway.
Make it much bigger and sharper than the olden days. It's hard to botch an effective way of cutting off someone's head. Quick and painless. Donate the organs.
If it is illegal to kill, it should be for the state as well. Anything else is hypocritical. Period. It is not about justice, nor does having capital punishment provide a deterrent that significantly affects violent crime rates.
I heard on the radio just this morning that due to the supply difficulties, Tennessee is passing/has passed a law to bring back the electric chair. Now that's humane!
Capital punishment is largely about one thing. One thing that politicians tend to do very well to keep their constituents in line. Fear-mongering. See.. I am tough on those rapin, theiving, murderin (insert carefully chosen group that panders to your audience here).
Silence is a state of mime.
Look, there's an easy, dignified way to execute condemned prisoners: build a room with bulletproof glass (so they can't smash or damage it) that's equipped with a HVAC system capable of quietly flooding the room with pure nitrogen (and later, oxygen). Put a comfy recliner in the middle. In fact, have a few in different styles (including rocking chairs and an Aeron chair), and let the prisoner pick one... he'll feel empowered, and will probably be more cooperative on execution day.
Nitrogen asphyxiation is, hands down, the most efficient and humane way you can kill someone. No sense of suffocation or air hunger, no green foamy vomit to upset the witnesses, and maybe a second between "Hey, I think I'm starting to feel drow" and "{...NO CARRIER...}".
Best of all, nitrogen is the most abundant gas on earth. It's cheap, readily-available, and has no lingering toxicity. Re-oxygenate the chamber, and it's 100% safe for the clean up crew.
I believe they could even get around the "Unusual" objection by offering the condemned prisoner a choice between it and something less "unusual", like "firing squad" or "electric chair". After a few dozen or hundred executions, it'll cease to be "unusual", and they can eliminate the other methods since at that point they'd mainly just serve to allow the most deranged prisoners to go out with a big, public bang.
Strictly speaking, there's not even much real need to restrain them once they're locked in the chamber, besides avoiding the possibility that they might decide to strip nude and/or masturbate in front of the witnesses as a final act of defiance (something that sadly, would be almost guaranteed to happen at least occasionally).
despite all the jokes you've heard we're pretty damn resilient and it takes a surprising amount of effort to kill us. The trouble is once you start killing someone our bodies will rebel (trying to get us to get away from whatever it is that's killing us). That's pain in a nutshell.
There aren't a lot of ways to kill a man without significant pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or ignorant.
Now, a better question is why are we still killing people when at least 4% of ppl killed are verifiable innocent? I guess it's cheaper than dealing with the lawsuits for false imprisonment.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'll set aside, for a moment, that capital punishment is barbaric and should not exist in a society that wishes to call itself free and humane.
But what is so difficult about performing an execution properly without subjecting the executee to unconscionable suffering? If an anesthesiologist can induce a patient into a temporary coma with perfect precision, so that the patient will feel no pain and be without consciousness during a surgical procedure, why the hell can't a prisoner be put into exactly the same state and *then* given a lethal dose of the death cocktail?
even better put it up on pay per view and balance the budget!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Just banish the death penalty.
Saves words, saves grief, saves huge amounts of money !
But it won't happen, because otherwise people PRO and CON
would focus on other things like how shitty their governments are.
I think when you are killing over 4% of people who are innocent then you need to be talking about whether you should be using the death penalty in the first place.
The EU opposes the death penalty and has proposed its worldwide abolition. Abolition of the death penalty is a condition for EU membership.
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
Execution is not humane, no matter how you do it. If you cannot accept that, then you should oppose execution. Conversely, if you support execution, you should accept that it is cruel no matter how it is done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
Life in prison is cheaper than execution... why we bother to spend all this time and money putting them to a morally questionable end when we could just lock them up for half the price I'll never understand. Even if you're out for revenge, why put them out of their misery? Isn't 60 years in prison worse than 5 years of trials followed by an injection?
Because then the drugs used to induce unconsciousness are considered as having been used for execution, and other countries (notably, EU) will stop supplying them for any purpose due to that death penalty embargo that they have. And, a lot of drug manufacturing is done in EU...
Also, a qualified anesthesiologist cannot participate in such a procedure, because it would be a violation of his oath of office - doctors heal, not kill (with very few exceptions where killing is a last resort thing). A lot of those botched executions are because of that, actually - because they are administered by people who are not qualified medical professionals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_country
It worked for Michael Jackson, it will work for inmates.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
... would be having the guy stand at the center of an explosion that would be big enough and quick enough to vaporize their brain or at least their brain-stem.
Short of that, a carefully-aimed sufficiently-large-caliber bullet is probably the quickest most humane death.
Unfortunately, the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" quotient of using explosives is way too high and the margin for error in aiming the gun for the "perfectly humane" shot is also much greater than zero.
In both cases, there is also the violation of the moral rights of the condemned person's family to give the person a burial looking as close to life-like as any other corpse. In other words, the state shouldn't unnecessarily disfigure the person's body.
--
By the way, for execution purposes I would consider "instant death" to be "perfectly humane" when it comes to executions. Yes, I know that some other forms of death last long enough for brain endorphins to be released, giving a supposedly-more-pleasant death. And yes, when I die I do hope it takes long enough to get that endorphin rush. But if we are to have executions, those being executed are entitled to a humane, as-painless-as-possible death. They are not necessarily entitled to go out on an endorphin high.
--
For the sake of argument let's assume that the person is guilty of a capital offense and according to applicable laws qualifies for the death penalty. I'm not going to get into the obvious inhumanity of executing someone who doesn't deserve to die nor am I going to get into the argument about whether capital punishment is inherently inhumane or not.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
so if a Guillotine is unacceptable because the head lives for a few seconds, why not use a steam-powered hydraulic ram?
Stick the condemned's head into the hole. Press the shiny red button, and BAM, head is crushed into a fine-red-mist in a milisecond.
Satisfies the bloodlust, minimum of suffering, no euphoria, guaranteed instadeath.
Best yet, the mechanical genius who builds the thing can make royalties off of executions. Nothing more American than that. If he plays his cards right, and a religious prophet is executed using his device, he (and his descendants) can also make royalties off of the various figurines, and religious emblems that will be made to honor the deceased's divinity, maybe for thousands of years!
Perhaps the fact that doctors won't participate and pharmaceutical companies will go so far as to exit the U.S. market if necessary to stop the use of their products in executions should give them a message or two?
Short drop hanging method, when calculating the body mass works. Firing squad works, gas chamber works. The problem is the execution process shouldn't be painless for a couple reasons. If others see how painful it is, and we did them quicker than 15-20 years from the time they were convicted, perhaps they wouldn't do it.
Because you know, maybe one day the US might actually want to become a first-world-country...
Everybody is commenting "Why aren't we using Nitrogen, Why don't we just use chemical X, why is it so hard to kill someone?"
Comments like those miss the point. It isn't hard to kill someone. It is hard to find trained medical professionals that are willing to be part of an execution. Not everybody agrees with capital punishment, and there is a strong correlation with being highly educated (like doctors are) and being liberal (who are typically against capital punishment). I'm sure there are enough doctors who support capital punishment, but they still have to maintain professional affiliations and relationships with organizations who may be more liberal and may not support capital punishment. It just isn't worth it.
Two problems both of which, ironically enough, caused by the anti-death penalty groups and both of which are described above in several other posts.
1) Due to medical licensing regulations, most medical professionals in the US are not permitted to take part directly in executions. That in conjunction with the relative rarity of executions means the people administering the lethal cocktail are generally poorly trained.
2) The manufactures of many of the drugs that would be considered more humane for the purposes of lethal injection directly prohibit their use for that purpose. This leads to the people from problem #1 messing with less effective drugs to try and create a new lethal cocktail.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Well, we're a Christian Nation, aren't we?
Shouldn't we respect life, forgive and what not? After all, "Thou shall not kill" is in the Ten Commandments. Isn't that what this (The US) country is based on?
I do not understand.
But yet, if those same people were a fetus or embryo, they'd would be defended until death.
I do not understand.
Landru....Lanndru....guide me!
Killing and claiming it is moral and correct. Not so sure that at least looking at the process of the dying should be optional for everyone involved.
Hiding it from public view, because people will be shocked, is nothing but a PR effort to keep it a legal path.
I think it should always done in public for all to see, every time. And yes, there will be outrage, and soon after it will cease to exist.
Totally agree. Too bad so few people don't see the problems inherent in letting the state have the power to kill people (except in case of war, and we need to stop invading countries just because we want their oil).
Quite simply the world is a better place without these people in it. Bullet to the head and then put the body out for the weekly trash pickup. Treat them as garbage.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You sound like some brain washed marxist hippie. So what if some low IQ nigger savage suffers? Hell, what if we just used gas chambers like they did in the Holohoax?
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaooooo!!! Fucking cool lineup!!! Gonna mosh the fuck out!! A... shit!! Sorry... it says "Botched Executions"... I read Sadistik Exekution for no good reason. Crap, I have to stop listening to this kind of stuff while browsing the web.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
A gun, a bullet, DONE. Total cost : a few cents.
Quick, Easy, nearly painless since the body cannot feel the pain of getting shot square in the head. Use a higher caliber to make sure he dies in one hit. Don't want to be the one who shot the guy? Sedate him, tie him up, put a gun right between his eyes and remotely shoot it.
How about abolishing execution, period. If even one person is killed because of a wrongful conviction (which of course is realistically a very low number), then the state is no better than the murderers.
If you want to cheaply and painlessly kill, use pure helium; If you had a generally air-tight cell(less -in-out pipes for the exchange) you could painlessly kill someone and they wouldn't even notice it, unless they were speaking. Other gases could be used as well but helium is the well known one(used in euthanasia in some cases).
If you wanted to be super conservative, tie them to a table/chair just as they do now, and force a respirator on their face piping helium; we are talking less than $150 per execution, possibly as little as $10.
spoken as a true idiot. I have personally visited the camps in dachau. Get at me when you have seen more of the world than what you see behind your monitor
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yes, I rather like that idea. OR.... someone could just pony up the $0.30 for a single bullet...
There were some 'experiments' back in the day with asking the condemned to blink certain codes after their head was removed. Results were inconclusive.
I still think that most executed prisoners have an easier death, pain wise, than normal people, who generally die of a painful heart attack, long cancer, illness, etc...
My vote's for nitrogen asphixiation.
1. No need for injections. Just give them some anti-anxiety medication to swallow.
2. No need for drugs obtained from secret sources in order to protect supply lines. Any welding supply store should do. Heck, they can purchase a machine to produce the necesssary nitrogen, or even carbon monoxide. I'd suggest a couple canisters just to 'keep it simple'.
3. Still doesn't mess up the body.
4. All evidence is that it's a fast, painless, and peaceful death.
I don't read AC A human right
Onion news network has already covered this topic: Supreme Court: Death Penalty Is 'Totally Badass'
Now, a better question is why are we still killing people when at least 4% of ppl killed are verifiable innocent?
Do you happen to have a citation on this?
I don't read AC A human right
How about some fed legislation that says if a state wants to execute prisoners, the method is going to be firing squad and if you're too squeamish to watch or know that's going on, then don't vote to allow capital punishment. This shouldn't be about how queasy someone's stomach is that had nothing to do with the crime - you don't have the stomach to see or know that people are being killed instantaneously without pain but it happens to be messy? Simple, then you don't vote to allow capital punishment. It's ridiculous that people think they're entitled to complain about how the dirty work they want done gets done.
"Well, we're a Christian Nation, aren't we? Shouldn't we respect life, forgive and what not?"
Well, according to progressives, we're not... so, no, we need not respect life at all we can wipe-out anybody the majority says are less-evolved, and do it by any means the majority approves of.
If, on the other hand, you DO want to take the position that we're a "Christian Nation" then you still have some issues: The Bible NEVER instructs society to tolerate rape, pillage, plunder, murder, etc - there's NO command to not punish criminal activity. The instruction to "turn the other cheek" is in the context of somebody insulting you with a cheek slap, and you being told not to respond to an insult with physical violence. The statement that "those who live by the sword die by the sword", you will note, is not a cammandment at all - just a warning that violence tends to be responded to with violence, and people who try to solve everything with violence are likely to meet a violent end. The prohibition on "judging" others is in the context of moral sins, judging souls, and presuming to know who's "going to heaven" and who's "going to hell". When Jesus saves the prostitute from being stoned ("Let him who is without sin cast the first stone") he's NOT saying prostitution is not a sin or should not be punished; Jesus specifically tells the woman to "go forth, AND SIN NO MORE". He simply pointed out to the men involved that they too were guilty of sins and were in no position to judge her sins... God, however, (being without sin) is still in a position to judge. While a thing like murder may be BOTH a sin AND a societal criminal offense, those are two different things. The fact that a victim of a crime may forgive the criminal does not put ANY Biblical obligation on the society to not punish the criminal for his crime. This is one reason why, in the US justice system, the very same government that prepares to executa a murder (punishing the physical person for the CRIME of murder) will provide the convicted man with access to a priest - the fate of the physical man and his body is DEATH, but the man's soul is between him, his preist, and God (the civil society is not getting into the matter).
"After all, "Thou shall not kill" is in the Ten Commandments. Isn't that what this (The US) country is based on?"
Actually, no. EVERY serious student of the Bible knows full-well that the translators of the King James Bible were overly-broad in their translation out of caution; They took their work seriously and did not want to be responsible for somebody obeying what they translated and still losing his soul because the translation was too narrow and did not cover everything it was supposed to. As a result, it's well-known that the ancient Hebrew text of that particular commandment would, if translated today into modern English, read as "You must not commit murder", and there are translations that basically read like that (don't have one at hand at the moment to properly quote). This slightly-broad translation has always been properly understood by most Christians anyway who never took it as a prohibition on "killing" plants or animals etc. but has long been an example dishonest people used to claim the Bible was full of contradictions (it says "Thou shalt not kill, and then elsewhere God tells some of the characters to kill other people" is the accusation - which is only apparently valid if you are ignorant). Incidentally, unlike the Koran, the Bible does not contain ANY general instruction for Christians or Jews to kill people who are not Christians or Jews - the "Old Testament" passages where God commands someone to kill are at a specific time and place in history, and even the "Old Testament" laws that carry a death penalty are, like the modern legal system, penalties for individuals committing a particular violation of law.
"I do not understand."
I suspect you DO but are just being snarky/sarcastic ... but I'll continue to play along...
Let's see ... a convicted murderer (who repeatedly raped a young woman, then shot her in the head, and then when she survived his incompetent "marksmanship", buried her alive - finally killing her), struggled a little and MIGHT have have felt some pain before he died.
Um? REALLY?
The only way I can see this as "botched" is that the state failed to dowse him in gasoline and light-him-up .... and then resuscitate him and do it again. In fact, I cannot comprehend of ANY manner of death for that monster that would have been cruel enough to balance the scales given that HE was a viscous thug and his victim was an innocent young woman. I'm just glad I do not live in an uncivilized nation with such a screwed-up value system that it thinks a few years of limited freedoms for a murderer is always of equal value to the complete life of an innocent person and that therefore bans the death penalty.
If you do it often enough, it's no longer "unusual" ... and if its "cruel" but not "unusual", then any competent geek can tell you it fails the ban on "cruel AND unusual punishment" and is therefore permissable.
Drugs not working? Lead and electron injections have a long history of success. No needles required!
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
The ethics of executing someone.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Couldn't they just centrifuge death row convicts off this mortal coil? Supposedly, it's fun like a theme park ride, right up until you pass out and die from lack of blood flow to the brain. The only change they'd have to make to go from "fighter pilot training" to "execution" is to stay at maximum speed until the condemned is dead.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Why not let them have a wedding and use drones? Seems to be OK for far away countries.
Captcha: nations
Why not use gas asphyxiation. A simple carbon monoxide mixture would put people to sleep and then they would die from lack of oxygen.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I know it sounds all "conspiracy theory-ish" but some time ago the US government sent out bids for guillotine devices. As gorey as that sounds, it doesn't have to be. Consider that only a select few connections need to be severed between the head and the rest of the body and the head never has to look like it was removed even if it has been in effect. Combine that with common anesthesia and you have a humane way to put people down that will not [likely] fail.
You know what scares me about that study?
There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place.
The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution
resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply
Sounds like you're more likely to 'make it out alive' if you're sentenced to death than life in prison....
Conclusion: The rate at which innocents are convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole is most logically higher than those who are convicted and sentenced to death. The rate for those who are sentenced to prison for lesser crimes than murder are likely even higher.
Does not make me happy.
I don't read AC A human right
Not quite correct. Companies in the EU can not provide the drugs if they can not show that they are not being used for executions.
The last american company that manufactured thiopental manufactured it in Italy. They could no longer make that guarentee so they stopped making it. It is still manufactured by other companies although it has mostly been surplaced by drugs that are not quite so difficult to manufacture and store. It does still have uses in induced comas though (and as a truth drug in yet other countries)
It is not banned from being imported to the US. It just has to be very carefully tracked and cannot be sold for the purpose of exeution.
It is one of the drugs used for Euthenasia in some countries.
And in addition to that, the US companies might not have the patent to produce said substance.
Very likely, the patents are in the hand of the same EU companies, and they are as likely to accept selling the patent for execution-related application as they are likely to sell the substance it self.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That is not ironic. That is a sad state of afairs.
A) people who know how to execute people with life saving drugs do not want to.
B) people selling those drugs want to make money (and perhaps even help people) and can't if they have to jump through hoops to stop the drugs being used for executions.
C) It reall does not look good if the state buys said drugs on the black market to ensure they keep on schedule.
D) so now they have less qualifed people and less knowledge and are making mistakes? well no shit. Perhaps they should stop until they figure it out.
E) Mandating the electric chair if drug supplies are not tennable seems to be unbelivebly warped.
The fabled chloroform rag is half-mythical, but even that was actually used medically at one point for anasthesia and we only stopped because we... accidentally killed people. Oh no! Whatever will we do if we accidentally kill the person we're trying to execute before we administer the drug that's guaranteed to kill?
It boils down to the fact that you need a killing procedure which is in a way a single point in time.
You do action X and the victim is dead. Or you don't do it and the victim is still alive.
You don't want a protracted procedure, that takes 2 hours to kill someone, and might result in heavy brain dammage?
If the governor phones in to give pardon, while you are in the middle of a lengthy slow killing protocol, what do you do ?
"Oh sorry, you're a bit late, at the step we've reached, it's better to continue with the protocol and have him dead in 1 hour"
or
"Okay, we abord everything, but if he wakes up, he might live the rest of his live as a vegetable".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
First if we just have to execute people (which we don't) then it should serve some purpose. Public executions have always been greatly attended as entertainment. Perhaps if we did it in the school yards with the children watching we might discourage them from future crimes. But oh no! We simply have to turn it into a huge ritual involving a lot of people and a whole pile of big bucks. Prisons close all roads for miles around before an execution. There have to be vigils, witnesses, wardens, doctors, technicians and a ton of nonsense. A simple and easy way to do an instant execution and assure no pain at all is felt is to ask the inmate to suck on the barrel of a twelve gauge shotgun. A click of the trigger and he will never feel a thing. His brains and half of his head will spray many feet behind him. His lungs will explode. His blood pressure for a moment will be so high it can't be measured. His belly will explode from the shock wave as will his kidney's, bladder and liver. Painless and instant death for the cost of one shotgun shell. Now with a pig pen full of captured, wild pigs just toss the corpse in their pen and his body will vanish in no time at all. Alternately a gator pit could do a great job as well. Easy, peasy and not at all sleazy, we can send these folks to the next life with great ease.
Why don't we subject death row criminals to high doses of THC? It causes the shrinking and redistribution of gray matter in the brain, decreases motivation, and induces depression. This would make the offenders incapable of doing anything meaningful with their lives. The only dangerous side effect is schizophrenia and cardiovascular problems.
I don't get it, why don't they just use asphyxiation in an atmosphere of Helium? Cheap, painless, easy.
Because life imprisonment is equally barbaric and serves no purpose other than extending the suffering of the condemned?
... Put Death Sentence Under New Scrutiny
There, I fixed it.
It is appalling that a supposedly progressive, modern society needs a revenge-based law.
Good lord.
I find the notion of treating a creature humanely that did monstrous things to innocent beings an insult to intelligent beings everywhere. I don't care if it takes 27 hours of excruciating pain or nine attempts to end a life that deserves it. In fact, the longer and more painful the better. That alone, I feel, would deter the majority of death-penalty related crimes. I would also limit the number of appeals to two and the time they must be handled to less than one year. Then they die. No more thirteen years on death row during which time they file nineteen appeals, work out in the gym, learn the Japanese art of Origami and watch cable television on our dime.
Ughh.. Are the authorities so inhuman to make another human soul suffer for long? He's going to die anyway so just slice his head off so he won't feel much.. Why do you have to make him suffer to his death...
Answer is in TFA.
Professional licensing bodies for doctors, anesthesiologists, etc. deem capital punishment, or any involvement with it (even just in an advisory capacity) as unethical. i.e. Not only can the medical professions not be involved in administering the fatal cocktails, they can't be involved in anything directly leading up to it, either. As a result, the people carrying out executions don't have the knowledge/skills to do what you are proposing. The only way around this would be if the state/govt were to hire someone straight out of med-school before they'd built a career around the training they'd just spent their family's life savings on obtaining and promised to pay them a salary comparable to what a doctor would earn for a full years' work, despite their only performing a handful of executions a year. They would need to pay so much because anyone who accepted this offer can essentially kiss goodbye to ever working in the medical profession (which was probably their intention in going to med-school in the first place). Even then I doubt there would be many who would take them up on the offer.
You then have the further problem that the pharmaceuticals they had been trained to use would not be available to them for use in executions, rendering all that training essentially worthless.
tl/dr: It boils down to 2 things:
1) The medical professions won't let their members be involved
2) The (mainly European) pharmaceutical companies won't let their products be involved
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
I don't see the problem. A couple of .22 shots to the back of the head. Virtually guaranteed to work, painless, field tested, and proven successful. The Mafia has been using this method for years.