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How To Execute People In the 21st Century
HughPickens.com writes Matt Ford writes in The Atlantic that thanks to a European Union embargo on the export of key drugs, and the refusal of major pharmaceutical companies to sell them the nation's predominant method of execution is increasingly hard to perform. With lethal injection's future uncertain, some states are turning to previously discarded methods. The Utah legislature just approved a bill to reintroduce firing squads for executions, Alabama's House of Representatives voted to authorize the electric chair if new drugs couldn't be found, and after last years botched injection, Oklahoma legislators are mulling the gas chamber.
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is also prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is also prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."
Don't.
I mean, you could just not execute people. You know, seeing as how so many innocent people have been sent to death by racist juries or prosecutors extracting confessions from them with unethical measures. And how it costs a lot more to execute someone than it does to keep them in prison for the rest of their life. But that's just crazy talk! We can't have a vengeance-based legal system with thinking like that!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Please stop killing people in the name of justice. Just stop.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
* Our atmosphere is around 80% nitrogen so usage can't be restricted, very inexpensive to purify, doesn't consume resources needed elsewhere (ie medically)
* Painless and humane: the victim just goes to sleep. They may become giddy beforehand
* No risk of leaks or poisoning as long as the areas around the chamber are open to the outside air... the chamber needs only be moderately airtight
Ideally this would be the time to reflect that perhaps, after numerous proven instances where innocent people were put to death or narrowly avoided it with a death-row exoneration, that a 21st century civilized society should abandon this barbaric practice, but if saner heads don't prevail at least there is this ideal method of it.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
The guillotine was originally adopted by the French as an evolved and humane method for taking a human life and, considering what we've seen with alternative methods this past century, I have to agree: It's fast, relatively painless (quite possibly completely painless when one considers the shock reaction of the body,) somewhat messy, but has great symbolic and even theatrical value. Granted, the upper classes world-wide hate this device with a fearful passion, but that is actually part of its value.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
It has been proven (as if it needed to be) that we've executed an innocent person.
http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
Any idea that you can "humanely" murder someone is a damned lie.
Moreover, remember the Central Park jogger case? Where they rounded up five minority scapegoats and said they brutally raped a pretty white girl? Everyone, including Donald Trump himself, was rallying to execute these kids. Now, it turns out they were all innocent. They spent 15 years of their lives in jail and they were LUCKY because they weren't executed. They had all of their primes taken away from them but they still get to live what's left.
The death penalty is for revenge, not justice. And the ones who pay the price when we're wrong isn't the prosecutors. Life in jail means innocent people have a chance. Death penalty removes that chance and replaces it with a false sense of faith in the system.
Or how about we stop this barbaric practice? It's 2015. We're not living in the fucking middle ages anymore.
What the fuck is wrong with Americans, I swear.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Right wingers: "No! The bad man must thrash and howl with pain as he contemplates his mortality or else my blood lust will not be sated!"
Left wingers: "No! We must have images of people thrashing and howling with pain to whip our protesters into a frenzy!"
It's called anesthesiology. Oh, sure, I learned how to keep people alive in a medically-induced coma while they're being cut open, but that also means that I learned a whole lot of different ways to flip the switch to the "off" position. Two sides of the same coin.
Sure, when people stop killing other innocent people, we'll stop killing them right back.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
... the death penalty is an effective form of revenge and piss poor at deterring crime.
Citation: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But justice in the USA is mainly about revenge. Legal types even have a fancy name for it: "retribution." Protecting society is a secondary purpose, but that doesn't require the death penalty. It only requires keeping people locked up until they are no longer a danger, but we can't even get that right.
If the main purpose of justice were rehabilitation, there would be no killing in the name of justice, and people wouldn't come out of prisons more dangerous to society than when they went in. And prisons would be much nicer places, more like hospitals or universities than like dungeons.
Unfortunately, we are not a very smart nation.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
If the nine jurors that rendered the verdict had to compose the firing squad, I would feel somewhat better about the death penalty.
Face it: Yes, it is wrong to kill any human being. Some people, however, have committed crimes so heinous that they no longer qualify as human beings, just because they happen to have a particular DNA sequence.
.. and some people decide that's because they don't believe in the same god, don't accept the same society rules, are homosexuals, ..
That's what this is all about - chasing the "revenge" vote where it's more important for justice to be seen to be done instead of actually done. Such folk would be much happier with the Chinese system of a more than a 99% conviction rate.
But do we really want to go that way? Letting the state have that much power sets things up for the execution of people who annoy the state instead of commit what we normally see as capital crimes.
The USA is the only G7 country that still executes people and they don't care if it's a woman, a juvenile, or someone with autism. The only other countries that execute people with the gusto of the USA are China, Iran, and North Korea. Instead of trying to come up with new methods the US should be phasing out this barbaric practice.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
Try using that argument to opt out of the "income tax" portion of the social contract.
Executions are by no means done the most humane way, nor is anyone attempting to do them the most humane way. They're done the most telegenic way, so as not to bother the audience: Having your butt stuffed with cotton *before* being executed is not humane, but hey, that way no shit comes out when they kill you, and you die clean and smelling great !
To me, humane (if there is a "humane" way to kill people) would be quick and painless. Drugs or electrocution aren't. I'm fairly sure guillotine is the most reliably quick and painless way, but the blood ! You almost feel like you just killed someone !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The "social contract" is a fiction created by the elite to keep the rest of us in line. It's something to which we are all supposed to accede, yet it's only enforceable one way. Rich men don't go to jail unless they harm other rich men or have in some other way broken the elite's kleptocratic rules in some way.
The (very few) times in our history when there has been something like a working social contract were periods when there were grass roots movements to enforce those rules. Labor unions, the civil rights and women's movements of the 20th century were a few such institutions.
And make no mistake: the rapidly metastasizing surveillance state is nothing more than an effort to make sure such institutions can never again exist.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The only real term in a "social contract" is "Society (i.e. the government) may change the terms of this contract in any way, at any time, prospectively or retrospectively, and the individuals all remain bound by it."
In other words, it's bunk.
Consider at one extreme, public decapitation. However, only 'barbaric' cultures do this. So, the quest in the USA in particular was for a more 'humane' method, one that, incidentally, does not traumatise the executioner or the witnesses too much. (And that's a thing to consider. You probably don't want the sort of person who really, really enjoys their job to be an executioner in the first place [the normal solution to this is to appoint a condemned prisoner, but that has other problems]); and you probably don't want to send your humane executioner insane simply from doing their job either).
And so, the quest for 'humane' methods that don't traumatise anyone, which historically got side-tracked by the shiny of technology (poison gas, electricity).
Lethal injection goes to extreme lengths to pretend that all is sweetness and unicorns: victim is put gently to sleep, then paralyzed (so on-lookers don't freak out---of course if prisoner is not unconscious, this is the stuff of nightmares), then heart is stopped (apparently agonising if not unconscious). So. Many. Ways. To. Go. Wrong.
And it's all down to the pretence that the state can kill someone 'humanely'. Without upsetting anyone, not even the condemned.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
The funny thing is that stuff like the constitutions of democracies are the closest real thing to actual social contracts. But the people who speak of social contracts tend to ignore that stuff.
I completely agree...but isn't this what you are also doing too?
I don't think there's a need to feel remorse for ridding society of someone about whom otherwise never give another thought, but who comes to our attention for being a satisfied murderer of innocent people. Supporting the removal of that person from existence isn't the same as wanting to kill anyone.
If you want to argue for the death penalty then you need to restrict it to cases where the evidence is overwhelming and you need to make it rapid.
Overwhelmingly clear guilt, yes. Rapid enough to not be dragging the victim's family back into appeal hearings for decades - which is insane. But too hasty does indeed increase the risk of errors in judgement.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That is the failure of a criminal justice system based upon punishment and not rehabilitation. With a system based purely on rehabilitation, with specific crimes where risk of server consequence is high, no rehabilitation, no release. That becomes much more feasible where detention conditions are much more humane and the concern is protecting the public, whilst still endeavouring to achieve rehabilitation.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The "social contract" is a fiction created by the elite to keep the rest of us in line. It's something to which we are all supposed to accede, yet it's only enforceable one way. Rich men don't go to jail unless they harm other rich men or have in some other way broken the elite's kleptocratic rules in some way.
Very much this. A more elaborate form is "It is God's will", thereby neatly cutting of any avenue of discussion or escape, especially if the religion in question is executing people rejecting it.
And make no mistake: the rapidly metastasizing surveillance state is nothing more than an effort to make sure such institutions can never again exist.
I fully agree. The surveillance-states currently being busily established and justified with lies, lies and more lies are motivated by one thing: Those in power are terribly afraid of those they are supposed to serve.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
By leaving him in prison, we avoid creating provocation that might induce the impulsive with legitimate grievances to kill Hitler. I'd hate for a sixteen year old whose grandmother died in the camps to spend some time in jail for shooting Hitler or worse. And given that there's no compelling reason of justice to cut short Hitler's sentence, I think this concern reasonable.
Honest question, since there's a list of nazis up above: if an elderly Adolf Hitler were forced to live in prison for 50 years and released into modern life, what more harm could he do?
I dare say he could produce an astonishingly smelly old man diaper.
In a Machiavellian sense, he could be used, for example, as a figurehead to drum up support from the people who he was able to drum up support from before, in order to follow a political agenda. He could also be used in a campaign of renewed anti-semitism, and he could function as the Nazi equivalent of Nelson Mandela when he was jailed for his statements (which he would be, in Germany). At which point he could be a martyr. He could also be assassinated via a false flag operation in order to create a martyr. If he weren't senile, he could run for Chancellor - there's precedent for ancient men as Chancellor: Konrad Adenauer, born in 1876, was elected in 1949 at the age of 73, and served until 1969, when he was aged 87.
I could think of many dozens of ways he could himself cause trouble, and I can think of many more dozens of ways he could be symbolically used by someone else to cause trouble. Who would have thought a presumptive nobody like Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria could have been used to touch off WW I? And Hitler would have not really been a presumptive nobody, had be been released under the conditions you imply.
You think you should kill people without remorse because they killed people without remorse.
It's psychopaths all the way down.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Only retarded idiots think that it's psychopathic to remove a clear threat to one's safety, just because that threat happens to be a human being.
Case in point: A man was released from prison early to make room. He was in for murder 1. He proceeded to hook up with his girlfriend (who was mentally retarded) and murder a couple by pouring bleach down their throats. The wife was pregnant. This happened within months, perhaps sooner, of his release.
Due to backwards morals like yours, a true psychopath was freed to murder 2 more innocent people in a truly horrific way.
While that story is terrible, I am a bit sceptical. Do have any evidence to show that it actually happened, and is not just an urban legend that you're repeating with no supporting evidence? I found nothing related when I did a quick search for the story. Fundamentally, it seems a bit unlikely that the system would release someone who was convicted of murder in the first degree to "make room", and double unlikely when he seems to be highly unrepentant and has not been in prison long enough for his "mentally retarded" girlfriend to move on.
Of course, the recidivism (ex-convicts committing another crime after release) rate is highly variable between countries, for instance Canada has a recidivism rate of around 13% while the United States has a recidivism rate of around 60%. However, even in the United States the recidivism rate for people charged with murder and released is around 1.2%, the vast majority of released murder convicts never commit another crime (let alone another murder). The criminals most likely to be caught and sent to prison again are burglars, drug dealers, fences and illegal arms dealers. And they would never be subject to the death penalty, anyway. I suspect the very low murder recidivism rate for murderers is because most murderers are released long after their most violent years have passed.
So you might frame the question, should society murder the 98.8% of murderers who will never commit another crime to stop the 1.2% who will?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I'm with you -- certain heinous crimes deserve the death penalty. However:
In many cases, we cannot be certain that the individual who has been judged guilty, actually is. We know from the various exoneration projects, where convicted death row inmates have been proven innocent with more advanced forensic techniques (DNA, etc.) that the system regularly makes horrific errors, sentencing the innocent to death. Even just a cursory understanding of how our justice system works will make any reasonable person aware that it is error-prone. And we must not put people who are not actually guilty to death. Ever.
Consequently, this is my position: Until or unless technology allows us to unequivocally, zero-possible-doubt, 100% certain determine actual guilt of the actual crime they are being tried for, we cannot afford to engage in killing as punishment without becoming the very worst kind of criminals ourselves.
So as things stand right now, I am solidly against any use of the death penalty.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.