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Pfizer Blocks The Use Of Its Drugs In Executions
HughPickens.com writes: Erik Eckholm reports in the NYT that the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has announced that it has imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections, a step that closes off the last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions. "Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve," the company says, and "strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment." "With Pfizer's announcement, all F.D.A.-approved manufacturers of any potential execution drug have now blocked their sale for this purpose," says Maya Foa. "Executing states must now go underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injection." The mounting difficulty in obtaining lethal drugs has already caused states to furtively scramble for supplies. Some states have used straw buyers or tried to import drugs from abroad that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, only to see them seized by federal agents. Other states have experimented with new drug combinations, sometimes with disastrous results, such as the prolonged execution of Joseph Wood in Arizona in 2014, using the sedative midazolam. A few states have adopted the electric chair, firing squad or gas chamber as an alternative if lethal drugs are not available. Since Utah chooses to have a death penalty, "we have to have a means of carrying it out," said State Representative Paul Ray as he argued last year for authorization of the firing squad.
Just switch to nitrogen asphyxiation if you want a humane execution which isn't dependent upon strapping the condemned down to a table, having to have a non-professional put an IV in, trouble getting drugs, etc...
The supplies can be had at any welding shop for not much money.
I don't read AC A human right
A simple gas mask and a tank of Nitrogen and you've got a guaranteed execution toolkit. There is no need for "exotic" chemicals.
Search wikipedia for Inert_gas_asphyxiation
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I don't much care for drug companies, but I suspect it is a violation of the Hippocratic oath to kill your patient.
Put them in jail instead.
It's cheaper and a wrongful conviction can be reversed.
The majority of countries no longer have the death penalty.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
1: Millennials are now old enough to assume power of and chair their respective pharmaceutical boards, and they simply dont care for execution.
2: Pharmaceutical corporations realize the likelihood that with the rise of Millennials and ever encroaching data breaches, they could be implicated in human execution and would face nontrivial political and legal backlash in the coming years.
either way, well played.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So rare I hear someone supporting Citizens United around these parts, bravo!
More so, they are employing the same means available to other citizens... withholding consent.
Not everyone servers on a jury, let alone a capitol case where the jury has the option to impose the death penalty... but those that do are able to withhold their consent to impose that sentence, either by squirting the person or imposing life.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
But all they are doing is exercising their right to not sell you a product. There is no requirement for Pfizer or any other corporation to sell something to you if they don't want to. Of course you have the right to refuse to buy anything else from them and encourage others to do the same. But nothing they are doing is implicitly wrong.
What ever happened to good old inert gas asphyxiation?
It is an alternative execution method by law in Oklahoma.
Who is "we"?
How can a corporation have feelings?
Why is this utterly ridiculous kind of false expression accepted in society?
I get that people love to invent reasons to feel good and lap this shit up, but surely there are enough people of intelligence around that could point out that this is completely false and insidious in intent?
Corporations exist to nullify the interference of human emotion in business. That is their cardinal purpose. So be offended at falsehoods like this if you value your humanity.
"In keeping with our mission of serving our patients, Pfizer also announces an immediate reduction in pricing of all of our drugs......NOT!"
When the cost argument started to gain traction here in Florida, Rick Scott just tried to make it cheaper to kill people by speeding up the process. It's not about justice, it's about revenge.
The government should pass a new law that says "companies that make $chamicals_suitable_for_execution pay 98% income tax by default, allowing to use said chemicals in execution lowers that tax rate to $normal".
Except, of course, capital punishment isn't actually a deterrents.
It's vengeance, pure and simple, and while I understand why people want it, if it is going to continue, it shouldn't be wrapped up in the language of crime prevention, because it doesn't prevent crimes. Allowing capital punishment to be justified in this way is simply a way to make it more palatable, and state-sanctioned killings should be anything but palatable.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In the 1970's, the flower child generation spawned flower child researchers who used social "science" to arrive at flower child conclusions that they wanted. We are still feeling the effects of this bad research in many areas. This era was the plague that will not go away. Many of these are often discussed on these forums, I am looking at your gender wage discrepancy. There are many others.
If you stop and use the smell test a bit, tie to you own life. Threat of punishment is always in the calculus of a crime. If you steal that post it note, and the worst you get is a cold hard stare from an HR lady, you may do it. If it leads to your immediate termination, you leave that note the hell alone.
The death penalty will not deter a crime of passion. That is absolutely true. However, if you are thinking about murder, and you start imagining the needle is waiting for you.... Its a little different.
Anyways, people resist these old studies, and they often find different conclusions. Here is one on this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Except, of course, capital punishment isn't actually a deterrents.
It's vengeance, pure and simple, and while I understand why people want it, if it is going to continue, it shouldn't be wrapped up in the language of crime prevention, because it doesn't prevent crimes. Allowing capital punishment to be justified in this way is simply a way to make it more palatable, and state-sanctioned killings should be anything but palatable.
Whether anyone is deterred by the possibility of a State Execution while contemplating an act that carries the Capital Punishment is debatable, once on Death Row they sure try mighty hard to get stay alive
Is that the same right conservatives claim when not wanting to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding?
I agree that state-sanctioned killings are disgusting. What about state-sanctioned euthanasia? In addition to being an option for terminal patients, perhaps offer euthanasia as an option to convicts who are undergoing life sentences. I'm not personally sure which is crueler; taking someone's life or forcing them to live in a prison for decades, where they can not contribute to society or even take care of themselves in any realistic fashion.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-Voltaire
You might want to look up "recidivism" in a dictionary, and then maybe some research into the "recidivism rate", which is not zero.
In a universe that contains "recidivism", but does not contain "zombie crime spree", execution must, by the definitions of the words involved, deter and prevent crime.
Q.E.D.
See that "Preview" button?
Not this case, there are many ways to kill people, none of them are humane...
Capital punishment is widely considered cruel and inhuman punishment in violation of the human rights convention.
The US and Japan is the last western countries to maintain this barbaric practice...
No, I think it's alright for companies to stand up against this issue.. Seriously, European countries have threaten local companies that they could face criminal charges if they exported drugs intended to murder people.
I'm not even sure that's so far fetched, when capital punishment is seen as a human rights violation, why shouldn't your company be held responsible for murder, if you export drugs for such purposes.
Maybe the board and management of Pfizer realised they are heading to being convicted of a crime that has the death penalty as punishment and are positioning themselves so that the tools to allow the punishment to proceed are not available.
Selling your drug to the citizens of a country that has leadership which performs horrible things or
Employing people in a country that has leadership which performs horrible things
vs
Selling your drug directly to an organisation which will do horrible things with your product.
The first part still isn't great, but there's still a world of difference.
It's turtles all the way down.
I don't want to be the one patronizing all you "helpful experts" suggesting wonderful alternative methods to get rid of (execute) your inmates. History has taught us endless options to end the life of fellow humans, there is no shortage at all, lest the need for more.
But a large part of the rest of this planet frowns upon this fixation and desire to implement the death penalty. I wouldn't hurt to look in your mirror critically and realize in what good company you guys are (think Saudi Arabia, Iran north Korea etc)
Please, use you're knowledge and good judgement, your academic independent view, to suggest options for the US to join the rest of the civilised world and to abolish the death penalty.
What you guys really need is a more humane society, not a more efficient way to kill humans. You already excel in that subject.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
Yes and no. Yes it is technically the same right, however certain types of discrimination are unlawful. You cannot refuse to serve someone because of their race is another example of unlawful discrimination.
However, if I sold hydroponics kit and you came to me wanting to use it for growing Pot I am within my rights to refuse you service. (Swap pot for tomatoes and the same rationale holds)
So the companies move out of the state (assuming they have any presence there to begin with), no more tax leverage.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Do you really think a mugger or whatever is thinking that far ahead?
Sure, it's going to stop the honest people who consider their actions and consequences but they already have plenty of things to stop them.
Criminals have a bad habit of not doing what they are told to do so your "sending a message" is unlikely to work. Maybe those "flower child researchers", some of who served in Korea and Vietnam, fit your definition of "a real man" more than any of the readers of this website and thus did not arrive at "flower child conclusions". Criminology isn't for the faint of heart after all.
Do they actually have the right not to serve someone? What if the the state or the executioner is black or homosexual? Does Pfizer lose its right to participate in commerce or get fined?
Back to reality now. This will blow up on them in the end. The feds execute people too. I expect to see fines and crap become enormous when a plant screws up or some drug has issues. I can see the ruling from a lawsuit too. How is a judge going to react in a product liability when some case he had or his pal had cannot be completed because the drug companies circumvented his ruling
I think I'll go with the subject matter experts on this one instead.
If it was global warming, astronomy, brain surgery or rocket science maybe - seems they are experts on everything according to some:)
Maybe I'm wrong and a Turkish economics degree is equivalent to a doctorate in criminology elsewhere, but I doubt it and I'd trust someone with the latter instead.
Where would an economist even start in researching something like this and who is going to pay them as they being themselves up to speed in a totally different field, and presumably spend the years required to get to the top of that different field?
If you stop and use the smell test a bit it stinks does it not?
It's not zero, so it must be 100, right?
Luckily, the universe doesn't work on definitions of words, but statistically.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Then they would either move, or stop selling to the USA entirely. The issue is that the EU refuses to do buisiness with companies who sell stuff for executions, and they are a bigger market than the US. It is our way to bring those Yankee murderers some civilisation.
Producing them in a state-owned company would be impossible I guess. Doing that is against the party-ideology in the US.
Pfizer scrambling for the moral high ground. Providing drugs to kill people damages their image and there's almost no profit in it so their PR flacks craft a nobly worded sentiment for their blurb. I worked for them through PhRMA and believe me, I saw no indication of concern from them for anything without a fcking $ sign in front of it. Evil people.
"Consult a doctor if execution lasts more than 4 hours."
I live in the EU, but dislike this law. Those who commit certain crimes have, in my opinion, crossed the moral event horizon (no matter what they do from now on, they should never be allowed back to society), you might as well shoot them and save some taxpayers money (and use normal bullets, not the ones that cost more than feeding someone for 50 years).
Recidivism is often caused by the conditions in (and after) prison. The better the conditions in prison, and lower prison sentences, the lower the recidivism rates. So the "tough on crime" people are making crime worse.
Learn to love Alaska
That 8th amendment argument has been attempted and failed. It's not popular but the firing squad is a method that has withstood constitutional challenge, thus Utah's choice to reinstate it as a method if injection components are not available. More states ought to look to it. It's quick and sure.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
If a state was being "humane" it wouldn't execute people in the first place. And that being so it should just drop the pretense and shoot them. Shoot them in the heart and they'll rapidly lose consciousness and die. It's quick, it's effective, it's cheap. And it could be done in a way that doesn't require a human firing squad if that's a concern.
And when they later turn out to be innocent the judge and executioner will be executed too? I would support such a law, no judge would dare giving someone the death penalty.
It's the same kind of mechanism that prevents EU companies doing business in Iran: the US is a bigger market so they can effectively enforce their sanctions over their border. Now they get a taste of their own recipe.
And when they later turn out to be innocent the judge and executioner will be executed too? I would support such a law, no judge would dare giving someone the death penalty.
Now be honest, this is just you not supporting the death penalty. There's nothing here saying that Pentium100 support the death penalty for all murders, much less all homicides. If the executed turns out to have been innocent, as long as they did their duty per the best of their ability, at worst it's manslaughter.
Now if, for example, the prosecutor didn't disclose exculpatory evidence, like has happened in the past? Now I start thinking about introducing said prosecutor to the same chamber. Because that's premeditated murder.
I don't read AC A human right
I would let the cops use them for target practice. There are plenty of cops who have the experience of executing people already so no need to train them.
Or I would use the guillotine. It worked extremely well during the French Revolution.
Bottom line, there are many ways to execute someone but people want it to be nice. The pain and suffering is plain BS.
They are just refusingly to knowingly participate in an execution, just like everyone else that objects to the death penalty. Note I'm not saying they took a moral stance, it's just that from a marketing perspective, their customers won't want to take "the execution drug".
If they only refuse to sell to a black or homosexual executioner, they are in trouble. If they categorically refuse to sell when the purpose is execution, they are within the law.
It is a deterrent for the guy you execute. It will deter said person from ever killing again.
Yes they have the right to not serve someone. Where they would fall foul of the law is if they served a Catholic executioner but refused to serve a Jewish executioner.
As for penalties Pfizer are just the last major organisation to make this decision. All the others have already done it and European based companies are prohibited from selling drugs for use in executions in the first place.
its eco-friendly makes for a good "Show" and can be made Quick.
just make sure the condemmed have big pockets to hold lead shot (amount TBA)
They "did their duty". Yes, unfortunately we in Europe have experience with this "befehl ist befehl" mentality. It's no0 valid excuse. It wasn't a valid excuse in the Neurenberg trials either.
I laugh when I hear about drug companies taking the moral "high road" when it comes to these issues.
This is an industry that has repeatedly milked every last cent out of life saving drugs. An industry that puts profit before human life has no moral ground to stand on.
That said, this is an ineffective protest - states will not simply drop the death penalty when far cheaper and easier forms of execution exist. I suspect if these drugs can no longer be found the gas chamber and firing squad will be brought back. Bullets and hydrogen cyanide are pretty cheap and very effective.
Seems messy.
In history executing a dangerous person was really the only option. Is a rural town supposed to have a prison guarded 24/7? The resources to do so aren't available. Take desert island with 12 people. If one murders another the death penalty is a moral action.
But in modern economies we have the capabilities to lock someone away for life for not much money. This is preferable because there is always a risk the person is actually innocent.
In reality the whole concept of the modern criminal justice system is flawed. The whole purpose should be to restore the victim as much as possible. Prisons should only be used to confine people to work off their debts to restore their victims. The problem with this is that it requires an actual victim which eliminates 90% of the crimes which are committed against the "state"
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Other states have experimented with new drug combinations, sometimes with disastrous results, such as the prolonged execution of Joseph Wood in Arizona in 2014, using the sedative midazolam.
If you experience an execution lasting longer than four hours, contact your warden immediately.
That is unfortunate. Luckily that's not really the way things work. I don't think, even in Europe, that prosecutors and judges go to jail when someone they locked up is freed on appeal.
The purpose, and not the person, is what these people are objecting to.
CO
Morphine (chops to all the other psoters, u wun)
Heroin (redundant, I know)
A multitude of anesthetics.
Modern firing squad. Pros: Plenty of volunteers for the squad, trust me on this; no cost, the volunteers willingly undergo training and will provide their own approved ammo. Cons: Outrage from the many who will be offended by this; more outrage from the many who will be outraged by this; rampant misunderstanding of the process.
Sadly, none of these will be simple to implement:
- Testing. On animals. This will offend someone.
- Developing the actual process. This will also offend someone.
- Defending the practice of capital punishment.
Is this permissible, that a drug maker should refuse to provide products for legal use? Seems they provide them for off-label uses, which are merely unapproved, not necessarily illegal. But it's their business.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
save some taxpayers money (and use normal bullets, not the ones that cost more than feeding someone for 50 years).
If you live in EU, you should know we don't have life sentences here. Depends on the country, but maximum real sentence is about 25 years.
It's actually about giving the rest of society an incentive to not engage in the same crimes for which someone else was found guilty.
No it isn't. The US has gone WAY beyond the level of penalties that have a beneficial effect in deterring crime. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation and yet it doesn't have lower crime rates. In fact the US has HIGHER rates of several types of violent crimes. No, the penalties that are handed out and conditions of the prisons has everything to do with politics and very little to do with crime prevention. Being "tough on crime" gets votes regardless of the effectiveness or morality of the actions that result.
Just like the police do not come until a crime is happening, or after the fact, a disincentive can not be given until someone is judged guilty by a jury of their peers.
Police routinely show up in places where a crime is reasonably likely to occur. Police being present in a location with no crime being committed mostly makes it less likely that a crime will occur. Happens all the time.
Handing out increasingly disproportional punishments for crimes does nothing to improve deterrence of crimes further.
The police are not there to save you from a crime, they are there to clean up after the fact.
Incorrect. They are there for both purposes. Police are both a deterrent and and enforcement mechanism.
We need more executions to reduce overcrowding in prisons. There are some people whose crimes affect thousands or even millions of people. Authors of malware and hackers who carry out data breaches can harm millions of people with one crime. There's no good reason why we should pay to incarcerate these criminals or release them back to society to commit more crimes. The best solution is to execute them. We should be increasing the number of executions, not phasing them out.
Good stuff, the world needs less 'Murcans!
Heres an even better idea; execute any 'Murcan who ever killed anyone, ever. The last person to die will be the executioner committing suicide. And then 'Murca will be at peace.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Is that the same right conservatives claim when not wanting to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding?
Forcing someone to perform the act of baking is just cruel
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Lithuania is part of the EU and has the "lock you up and throw away the key" punishment reserved for very heinous crimes.
I think this is good. I would not want someone who, for example, raped and murdered somebody to ever walk free (as I believe there is nothing you can do to "repent" for such a crime - if there is a god (not that I believe that), then he may forgive you, but I won't).
Here's a short list of recent crimes that I believe the perps should never walk free again:
A bunch of guys kidnapped a girl (she was waiting for a bus, they forced her into their car), raped her, then locked her in the trunk of their car and set the car on fire. The girl managed to call 112, but the cops could not locate her phone in time). They actually got sentenced to life in prison. Good. Their victim (what's left of her) rots underground, they rot in prison.
A girl arranged with someone on Facebook to give her a lift to some city. However, he raped her, then tied her up and left her naked outside to die from exposure. Then he tried to get rid of his car, but since the conversation was on Facebook, the cops quickly found him. He got 20 years, so I guess after 20 years he can rape and murder again.
There also were two girls who got a third girl (their classmate) to come to their flat, then murdered her, cut her body up into parts no more than a few kg and threw the parts away in multiple dumpsters (all parts were never found) - what gave them away was that they kept one part of the body (about 1.2kg) in their fridge for eating. They also got 20 years. The act was premeditated.
Now, I believe that these people should never be free again. I sure as hell will never trust them to not commit such crimes again.
Maybe a rapist (who did not kill the victim) in my opinion may be allowed back out after 20 years, but only without his "tools". Or he can keep his "tools" and stay safely away from potential victims, that is, behind bars.
Risk and punishment are more complex than most people want to argue. A few years back, someone started the argument over whether the death penalty does or does not deter murder. I went digging through data and got conflicting results: in some areas, a repeal of the death penalty didn't do anything; while in others, a repeal of the death penalty caused as much as a quadrupling of homicides in the following two years, and reinstating the death penalty immediately pushed those levels back down--not completely, leaving a long tail of normalization.
I've since figured that there's confounding involved. In low-crime areas, the biggest fear is state retribution (you break law, you get arrested; people in upper-middle-class suburbs have historically associated committing murder with running from the law until you're inevitably captured and executed). In high-crime areas, gang crime will kill you before police; there's so much of it that they'll never find you, anyway, since you left behind just another dead body that anyone from any gang could have produced. Some areas have a sort of hostile-respect social behavior (Texas, where everyone wants to make it clear they're happy to shoot you for standing too close to their property); other areas are full of people who are scared of everything, inviting would-be criminals to do stupid things. Raising or lowering the purported consequences of criminal actions may have a large, small, or non-existent impact on criminal behavior, depending on these and other factors.
From that standpoint, it's hard to make a decision on the death penalty. If you execute 14 murderers per year and 2 are innocent, that's a net-win if abolishing the death penalty results in 3 or more additional murders per year; the blood of the innocent is on your hands either way, so you should try for less blood. If the death penalty is a non-factor in gangland, then maybe you shouldn't bother.
It gets more complex if you consider inmates not slated for execution as "innocent" when a murderer penned in jail for life realizes he's not getting any worse punishment, and so proceeds to stab someone in the throat because he doesn't like the guy. Then you have America: if you're convicted of child molestation or just possession of child pornography, you can go to jail for 8-40 years (!); and while in jail, someone will rape and murder you, and we as Americans tend to find this a good thing. Is that not as much blood on your hands as an execution? I wouldn't call it justice; if it were justice, we would be proud to do it by our own hands.
Then you have the common opinion that we can put someone in jail for 15-25 years and then letting them out because we found out they were innocent. That doesn't absolve you of DESTROYING THEIR LIVES COMPLETELY. For many, even a few weeks in prison will destroy their finances and their careers, leaving their lives in shambles; a few short years destroys all your social connections; and after the 10, 20, or more years many inmates spend on death row before actually getting executed (average is over 15 years), you've missed your dating window, your career building window (in case you wanted to start a career or rebuild your broken one), and really have been excluded from everything people consider "living". Prison is cruel and unusual punishment, and the long prison sentences people swear you can just release an innocent man from after you realize you were wrong cannot be undone by giving the guy a house and a car and some money as an apology.
But, you know. Moral victories. Even if you concretely proved that abolishing the death penalty in a given area directly caused some number of additional innocent murders per year, people would claim they're at least innocent of those murders and have washed their hands of the affair. No responsibility for the problems you cause as long as it's someone else's hands holding the knife. That's why nobody will admit jail time is disproportionate to almost all crimes; we can't even get them to admit 15+ years mandatory SERVED is ludicrous for minor possession of drugs.
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Rather than deal with the implications of the death penalty (moral and otherwise), revoke their citizenship and banish them to an island. It seems that they would either learn to work hard to survive, or they would die trying. Australia comes to mind as a success story in this method.
In the world of moronic comments, yours may be the most moronic yet.
Study after study shows first of all that punishments that come long after the crime will not prevent other crimes. For any punishment to be an effective deterrent, it must come quickly. So, to my mind, if you want capital punishment to have a hope in hell of deterring anyone, have a swift trial, and then take the guy out into the courtyard and do the deed. Having a trial months or even a year or more after the criminal is caught, and then leaving the person on death row for years or even decades so removes the punishment in temporal terms from the criminal act as to utterly negate any deterrent effect.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Locking someone up prevents them from killing to, so even if that's its purpose, it's a failure.
But as I said, that isn't capital punishment's purpose. These are all just rationalizations. Capital punishment's purposes are revenge and catharsis. Everything else is just layers of justification to make people feel better.
Frankly, I think executions should be shown. In fact, I think it should mandatory for the residents of every state where capital punishment watch at least one execution every five years. If the cause of capital punishment is so incredibly righteous, then how could this be bad?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That logic fails to allow for the presumption by the criminal that they will not be caught; and if caught, they may not be convicted; and if convicted, they may not receive the death penalty.
The very existence of, and huge participation in, lotteries should tell you without any doubt at all that people constantly do things with almost no chance at an outcome in their favor, because they are convinced that there is, in fact, a worthy chance at an outcome in their favor.
TL;DR: People suck at figuring out risk, benefit, and reward. Also: If that doesn't apply to you, that still doesn't mean it doesn't apply almost everyone else.
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
It's funny, pharmas were just busted for promoting off-label use. Why isn't this considered just another off-label use?
Simple and effective, reusable and quite painless if the condemned is first sedated on a gurney with common surgical anesthesia. Do not allow witnesses to view the beheading. Simply allow them to see the body from the shoulders down. Allow him to say his final words, knock him out with the drugs, then wheel him into the device face up so that his head goes through the opening. Begin the countdown and then have a doctor pronounce him dead once everyone sees his body shudder as the blade drops. Public spectacles were a mistake with the original guillotine and undermine it's simplicity and effectiveness.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Congratulations on the slippery slope Godwin.
There was no due process in the camps. There was no due process with the kill squads. Why not hold the prosecutor responsible? He's the one pressing the charges, displaying evidence, and pushing for the death penalty, after fall.
I don't read AC A human right
Things may get complicated when Pzizer wants one of their drugs put one the States' Drugs approved for Medicaid list, and they've opted not to sell to that States Dept. of Corrections, most inmates are on Medicaid so DoC is a big customer.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
As alternatives go, I'm shocked (heh) that any state would use the electric chair in this day and age. That has got to be one of the more painful, drawn out, gruesome ways to kill someone. Firing squad or drop hanging would be a lot more humane.
If they're going to execute regardless, for the most instant, painless, but messy execution, just put their head in a high power, high speed hydraulic press that slams down with several tons of force. They'd never even know what hit them. I'd hate to be the janitor though.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Except, of course, capital punishment isn't actually a deterrents.
It's vengeance, pure and simple..
Not vengeance. It's justice. At least, if we're talking about a multi-murdering monster like, say, Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy, then it's removing a piece of living, breathing feces off the planet so it can do no more harm, ever, nor unjustly cost anyone to support. Deterrence/prevention would of course be great but serial murderers aren't exactly in touch with reality anyway. That's not why this is done.
Consider this scenario:
1. Serial murderer lives two lives: has his own small family by day, but at night goes out and regularly preys on and kidnaps girls in their late teens, rapes them, murders them, and hey, maybe rapes them again.
2. Young girls are someone's cherished daughter, or sister, or friend. Her violent and debasing end causes unimaginable amounts of pain, horror, and grief to parents, family, friends, etc...
3. Serial murderer kills several more girls before being caught, tried, and with overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence against him, found guilty.
IMO, here's the difference between justice and revenge:
* Revenge: So that the murder fully feels the extent of the pain and suffering he's caused, in great anger, his own daughter is arrested, and then in front of him, butchered in the same manner as his victims. Weeks pass. Only then is the murderer is executed after having time to process and suffer the loss of his daughter. This is revenge, where an innocent girl (the murder's daughter) has been hurt in the name of an eye for an eye. Unfortunately, in olden days, vigilante mobs might've done something like this.
* Justice: The serial murderer, who has no respect for life (other than his own or maybe his hypothetical daughter, who knows), who has murdered repeatedly, has thus forfeited his own right to live through taking other innocent lives where no provocation was extant; furthermore, he is a clear and present danger to society with no redeeming values and absolutely no chance of true rehabilitation. Instead of rewarding him by giving him 3 decent meals a day, access to a gym to ensure his good health, television rights, and quite possibly a lucrative book deal and media attention, while using tax money to support him, his person is eradicated from the planet so that he can positively never hurt anyone again, nor sponge off of them. The monster is simply gone. There is no joy, but there is relief in the certainty that he can harm no more (should a jail break occur, even).
FWIW, I feel capital punishment should only apply in cases where:
A) the evidence is incontrovertible, and
B) the murderer is not someone who committed murder as, say, a one time act of passion (shit and mistakes happen), but is a proven calculating nutcase who has murdered helpless people repeatedly for the sheer joy of it, and who shows little to no remorse, a hollow shell who is devoid of empathy for his fellow man.
Now go ahead and say I or the executioner in this case is no better than he, and I'll tell you that's absolute nonsense. He, unlike his victims and his own daughter, is NOT innocent of unprovoked murder. I would never, ever, advocate killing someone who was innocent of murder themselves, nor even just a "bad person". Serial murderers, OTOH, do just that, they target innocent people. They are inhuman, irreversibly broken. So in extreme cases, I would support capital punishment though it's still ugly. No, I would not like to be the one who presses the button or flicks the switch. But then I wouldn't want to be a cop either, but someone has to do it.
I do tend to think though that the states that use CP tend to overuse it just because they allow it.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
And I get voted down for asking how refusing to sell based on a political or ethical view is different in this case vs gay marriage.
Frankly I am anti death penalty but I am pro law.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No I don't. But where I live it would be illegal for a company to discriminate on those grounds. Here we have a whole class of areas where discrimination is not permitted such as race, religion, political affiliation, age, disability, relationship status, status as a parent / carer, spent convictions, trade, or association.
So in Australia the baker would not be allowed to discriminate based on not wanting to make a cake for a gay couple if they also made cakes for straight people getting married. They would, however, be within their rights to refuse to make cakes for any weddings.
Actually, you are only half correct. The objection is not to selling a cake or anything to anyone. The objection is to having to show up at the ceremony and coordinate with it.
You see, unless you are holding your wedding at white castle or something, the wedding cake is not made and completed for someone to swing in on the way like for a birthday party or something. The layers are transported separate and assembled on site and the decorations and finishing touches are done on site but often due to the heat, needs to be done last minute else it melts into a mess.
If the wedding cake was as simple as someone stopping by and loading it into a prius, the objections wouldn't be there. This is evidenced by the long standing commercial relationship with the gay people who filed suit I
From Franquin's Idées noires
First panel:
The law is clear: anyone who intentionally kills another will be beheaded. The executioner to do his office!
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
So, lesser punishments like incarceration and fines are deterrents, yet the harsher sentence of capital punishment is not? That's not credible.
Incorrect. I kept going on and on about the topic and you kept going on and on about the email triviality with some odd stuff about governors not having anything to keep secret.
Are you mixing me up with a different person or being dishonest?
Either way, it's a little odd that you are consuming more time claiming that you provided that information than the time it would take you for a quick cut and paste. Not a good look.
One more thing I thought of that should have been in other posts - by 1970 the death penalty had been suspended in the USA and it was only reinstated in 1977 due to a serial killer in Washington DC causing a change in opinion.
Think about who you are calling "the flower child generation" - Richard Nixon and a bunch of criminologists who had built up their reputation before the flower children even turned up. Outside of political nepotism it takes years before a person is considered an expert good enough to listen to when setting policy - even more so in the conservative corridoors of power in 1970.
Erm...
"Tough on crime" actually correlates with lower sentences, not higher. In typical liberal fashion, you are blaming the opposition for the results of your own policies. (And I apologize if you are not actually liberal, but merely using their tactics. I'm too busy to check your post history tonight.)
Lower sentences also correlate with pro-active policing, and by policing, I mean the whole operation, from cops to prosecutors to judges to jailers.
Imagine a hypothetical statistical quantity, c, which isn't measured directly, but correlates well with criminality, police involvement, prosecution, etc. This is similar to g which isn't measured directly, but correlates well with IQ tests, education success, job success, etc.
c has some sort of distribution, probably similar to a normal distribution, with a big hump in the middle and small tails on each side. The big hump is normal people, the left tail is saints, and the right tail is cold blooded, casual multiple murderers.
The crime debate can be summarized as where to put the c threshold for police involvement (and remember, I mean the whole justice system, not merely physical policemen). To the right, and only the most serious crimes are prosecuted. To the left, and more minor infractions are too. The "tough on crime" guys want it a little to the left of where it is now, the liberals want it a little to the right.
By pushing the c threshold to the right, only the most serious offenders get into the system. Thus, higher sentences, worse conditions (who cares how murderers in cages live?), more recidivism upon release.
Also note that this is a totally static analysis. A person turning to crime has a much better chance of straightening out if they encounter serious pushback from the justice system early on, when their crimes are still minor. A guy can come back from a year in prison for grand theft auto, or attempted robbery. Not so much after 20 years for home invasion with rape and/or murder.
If you want to see this in action, check on any state or major city that has been under Democrat rule for more than a few decades. Hilariously, those are the same places where other Democrats are wagging their fingers because their prisons are nearly all black men. I leave the racial mystery as an exercise for the reader to solve. I'll give you a hint that it is the same reason why the Fields Medal is so biased.
See that "Preview" button?
I must just be too old. I remember the resurgence in "tough on crime" in the '80s under Reagan. I lived it. 3-strikes, life for an ounce of weed, and other things were pushed through as "tough on crime", and anyone that pushed for the "more policing, less punishment" schemes were liberals who were accused of being "soft on crime".
Learn to love Alaska
That is the law not morality. So if you can refuse to conduct a sale that is completely legal for moral reasons they why should you not be allowed to refuse sales based on any moral reason?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That would be nice. After all, the purpose of patents is to allow the inventor to sell the invention without competition (for a while). If the inventor refuses to sell the product (for any price), someone else might as well do it.
I don't really know how to answer this as I feel it is kind of self obvious, but I'll try to explain my rationale.
All of the things that are listed as things you are not allowed to discriminate on would result in sections of the community being ostracised. This will cause your community to begin to break down and will cause social tension. It therefore is in the interests of the greater good of your society to not have that type of discrimination, and depending on your moral compass that alone is moral justification.
No but a hammer manufacturer could require that no hammer is sold for the purpose of killing someone.
Also Pfizer are not refusing to sell to the bureau of prisons, they are refusing to have their drugs used in executions and will not sell them if they are for that purpose. This means that there will be a contract around the sale of the drugs.
You may be forced to buy a particular class of product by law. But unless there is only a single monopoly provider you would not be forced to purchase it from a particular company. Ie you may have to have medical insurance but there is no reason you couldn't refuse to buy that from "Evil Insurers R Us"
You may indeed be too old, since you appear to have memories of things that never happened. For example, no states enacted 3-strikes laws in the 80s. Which means, of course, that none came during the Reagan era, nor even during his Vice President's single term as President.
On the other hand, 24 states enacted such laws during Bill Clinton's Presidency, in the '90s.
See that "Preview" button?
Except, of course, capital punishment isn't actually a deterrents.
It's vengeance, pure and simple, and while I understand why people want it, if it is going to continue, it shouldn't be wrapped up in the language of crime prevention, because it doesn't prevent crimes. Allowing capital punishment to be justified in this way is simply a way to make it more palatable, and state-sanctioned killings should be anything but palatable.
Whether anyone is deterred by the possibility of a State Execution while contemplating an act that carries the Capital Punishment is debatable, once on Death Row they sure try mighty hard to get stay alive
Judging from the last few such cases here in Connecticut, they seem to request an end to appeals and that they be put to death at least as often as they try to get out of it.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You might want to look up "recidivism" in a dictionary, and then maybe some research into the "recidivism rate", which is not zero.
In a universe that contains "recidivism", but does not contain "zombie crime spree", execution must, by the definitions of the words involved, deter and prevent crime.
Q.E.D.
Except where the existence of the death penalty has a causative effect on the murder rate. For instance, where the perp recognizes that he has to kill all the witnesses so he won't get the death penalty after one person gets killed. Or where they decide the best approach is to kill everybody up front so as to reduce the odds something goes real wrong during the crime and they end up captured and on death row. Or they get the clear message that it's ok to kill people who deserve it, and they can think of a few. Etc etc etc. See also "Why you can't end terrorism by just killing all the terrorists"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Despite claims that RoundUp is totally safe to drink (by a Monsanto lobbyist who was then offered a glass, and refused), they could let the person drink a bottle of Monsanto's RoundUp. It does not only clean up pavement, but society too.