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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."
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.
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.
Ive always wondered the same thing. If I had to take a guess id say the reason we dont use gas (eventhough nitrogen would be the most humane way to go if you ask me) has to do with the Holocaust. Im sure people would bitch and moan that the gas chambers are a throwback to nazi germany and therefore cant be used. I have no proof of this, but its the only reasonable(not really though) argument I can think of
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a sure fired way to make sure they don't become repeat offenders.
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.
fire.
I've seen a couple of shows about the death penalty and you always see a couple of people against using things such as Nitrogen or Carbon Monoxide because the death is too good for the offender. Capital punishment is about revenge for them and the messier the better.
Hear hear. We know the effects of nitrogen asphyxiation from those who have been pulled to safety before suffering permanent damage - you pass out in under a minute, probably without ever realizing there's a problem, and die a few minutes later. You don't even need a gas chamber, an anesthesia mask and a cut-rate tank of nitrogen get the job done fine.
My only theory as to why it's not used is that it's not violent enough. After all one of the major purposes of a criminal justice system is to slake the victims' desire for revenge well enough that they usually won't take the law into their own hands. Once you admit that, then it makes more sense that we don't use a cheap, easy, safe, and effective method of execution - victims get no closure watching someone fall asleep peacefully in mid-sentence.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
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...
exactly, everything is all roses these days, there are no more bad guys only good guys. oh yeah, and every little girl gets their pony
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
And that they stop filing those oh-so-boring appeals which are just full of pointless legal mumbo-jumbo like "I didn't do it" or "I never confessed, even though that police officer says I did". Who needs all that?
i can understand that. On the one hand, I dont care if the person suffers and i personally think they should suffer for their crimes. Having said that I know most people dont agree with me and figure that nitrogen would be a nice in the middle of the road thing.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
Except the last execution in the US using the gas chamber was Walter LaGrand in Arazona on Mar 3, 1999.
It worked for Michael Jackson, it will work for inmates.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Eh, it is not quite as effective as people like to think. People on the internet have really latched on to nitrogen asphyxiation and suicide bags, but it is a case of the idea being better then the implementation and a significant number of people who try it find that it can go pretty wrong, resulting in significant pain and injury but not death.
With over 33,000 assaults annually on prison staff by inmates I would hardly consider an incarcerated violent criminal to be "no present danger to anybody", not to mention inmate on inmate assaults. Until such time that all prisons are run by robots, a violent offender, even behind bars, has the potential to cause bodily harm to someone else.
That is not a defense of capital punishment, just a statement of fact.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
... 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.
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...
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!
I agree it isn't a deterrent to crime. That being said, who is eliminating the death penalty going to save money? The alternative would be life in prison. The average age of a person subjected to the death penalty is 42 years old (as of 1/1/2005.. Please let me know if someone has better numbers). If the average of someone dying in prison is, say, 50 (which I'd bet is rather low), you have 8 years of paying for the prisoner.
I think it would be much more of a deterrent if sentences were carried out quickly and very very publically (the proverbial town square). I know punishing a child for something they did 3 weeks ago isn't a deterrent to them. Why would a 10 year delay from sentencing to execution be different?
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
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
If it's not painful enough, have somebody else punch them in the stomach at the same time.
In the case of suicide, people sometimes don't have access to the right materials, don't know the proper way to handle them, and may also have (subconscious) doubts about suicide. I'm sure if somebody is strapped down, the mask is applied properly, and you leave it on for a few minutes after the heart has stopped, nobody's going to survive.
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.
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
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
I do wonder if anyone is counting the assaults on inmates by prison staff and what would that number be....
I've heard that the real reason they don't do that is because it actually feels good to die that way, and the bible-thumper types can't stand the idea of a prisoner enjoying his execution.
I call BS. Bible thumpers beleive that the person is going to spend no less than trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of billions of trillions of years to the power of infinity years suffering the most unbelievable abject torture and suffering in hell ( sorry, im trying to get across the sheer magnitude of time that is a literal eternity ) for their crime.
You think humans can be unbelievably cruel? Thats nothing compared to what God has in mind.
Ignore the fact that the punishment in no way befits the crime, its all OK because its sanctioned by God.
Oh, and before you say its not Gods fault ( it is ) and Hell is controlled by the devil, you would be wise to remember that God is Omnipotent and has the power ( but not the will ) to stop this atrocity.
Who cares how well the criminal lives, Hell and all of eternity of torture and suffering is waiting for him/her.
Drugs not working? Lead and electron injections have a long history of success. No needles required!
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
That being said, who is eliminating the death penalty going to save money?
The cost of an actual execution is nothing. The costs for death penalty is focused on court costs, which is part of why if I'm charged when actually innocent I'd almost rather have a death penalty case - I think that the extra attention means that the truth is more likely to come out. Second is that holding a prisoner on death row tends to cost twice as much per year. So 20-30 years on death row equates to 40-60 years in the general population* AND you have drastically increased court costs, easily adding up to more than enough to keep the prisoner for life.
*Not always true/possible. Some LIP convicts will cost more as well due to special handling requirements**
**Just because the average Life in prison sentence is cheaper than the average execution sentence, doesn't mean exceptions wouldn't exist. An 18 year old violent psychopath might be so dangerous he has to stay in solitary at all times anyways and be young enough to have lots of time in prison for costs to add up.
I don't read AC A human right
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 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
Free hits for the victims?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
I don't get it, why don't they just use asphyxiation in an atmosphere of Helium? Cheap, painless, easy.
... Put Death Sentence Under New Scrutiny
There, I fixed it.
It is appalling that a supposedly progressive, modern society needs a revenge-based law.
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...
You aren't, because there's no such thing. There's no mention of a concept of a Christian Nation in the Bible, the collective is a "church". The Old Testament has a nation (of a sort) which is Israel but they aren't bound by the political structure centering around the judges and later, kings, but around a common identity based on Abraham as the recipient of God's covenantal promises - promises which extended explicitly to Abraham's physical descendants, which is the common identity of Israel.
As for whether Christians ought to support the death penalty, the idea is absurd. For on thing, the vast majority of Christians understand that any punishment devised will ultimately apply to them, since on average the daily experience of Christians is one of persecution, loss and hazard because of their faith. To promote the death penalty, knowing that it is applied to Christians in other places and times merely on account of their faith, is repugnant to a thinking and faithful Christian.
For another, when Jesus speaks he doesn't speak in a code that allows Americans to continue doing or believing whatever they want. You've simply excused your inherited ethical code by eisegesis, instead of exegesis.
Good lord.
And they say that it's nothing to do with revenge...
Definitely very interesting. The fellow at the end is properly chilling.
If they are offenders in the first place.
Who says that? Without the hunger for revenge breeding feuds we could have just stuck with Code of Honor systems.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, the convicted man who did this may be called a monster if you wish. However by killing him in the manner that you describe, then you become a monster yourself. In essence you are no better.
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)