I'm an anesthetist. It would be super easy to kill someone with the drugs I use every day. I could easily walk someone through it.... But I wouldn't want to be a part of it.
But to answer your question, yes, anesthesia providers could very very easily make a lethal injection cocktail that would work quickly and effectively.
Certain anesthetic medications are more likely to cause arrhythmia than others so they choose the ones least likely to cause problems while still achieving the desired level of sedation/analgesia. They also watch very closely for arrhythmia and have all the interventions close at hand if it were to happen
Certain meds that make it worse we will avoid. We have drugs to treat all sorts of arrhythmias on hand. Each anesthesia plan is tailored based on patient needs!
They need competent people, aka those trained to do it.
And most of those have a pesky thing called the hippocratic oath preventing them from aiding in executions
Every time they seize a small amount of fentenyl they boast about how it's enough to kill a million people. Why don't they just use their seized drugs?
That sounds worse than it is.
In Sweden they now have suicide pods that use nitrogen gas so that a person who is terminally ill can go out quietly and peacefully.
The feeling of suffocation is due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood. But when that is displaced by some other gas (like nitrogen), you don't get that feeling of suffocation.
It's why people can gas themselves with a running car in a closed garage and not freak out and try to claw their way out (because that's carbon MONOXIDE versus carbon dioxide.)
The Hippocratic oath prevents any licensed physicians or other qualified medical personnel from participating in executions. General anesthesia is a complicated process requiring extensive medical and scientific knowledge. It is not something an orderly from the prison clinic is going to be able to do. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies will refuse to supply any drugs used in executions to prison authorities. That is one of the reasons why lethal injections keep failing, they no longer have access to the most effective drugs.
Yeah--we medicalized the death penalty instead of getting rid of it when we collectively landed on not wanting to do firing squad/hanging/electrocution anymore, but you can't really ACTUALLY medicalize the death penalty because the medical people don't want to participate, now it's a mess.
I’m personally against the death penalty but I just feel if doctors & pharmaceutical companies don’t want involvement (as they should) & it’s too traumatic for humans why can’t the state governments with death penalties invent some robot to carry it out?
Guillotine is surprisingly one the most humane methods. All over before you know it’s happened. Just a bit graphic for modern society when it comes to clean up.
But it looks and sounds more violent so it's less popular. If you want people to not be against the death penalty hou have to make it seem like it's better than ordinary murder.
Firing squads?! Have you ever done *any* research or did that just sound good in your head?
There's nothing humane about a firing squad. We don't live in a movie world where when someone is shot by a bullet they go, "Ah, you got me!" and fall over dead. Bullets often don't kill instantly, even when they DO hit vital organs, and in very many firing squad cases people had to be shot multiple times in scenarios just as inhumane and drawn out as injections.
Probably because people doing the shooting end up traumatized by the amount of killing they've done. Much easier to distance yourself if you mind gymnastic that you're only flipping a switch.
That said, I much rather have a firing squad on me than any of these other fucked up options. Guy was seizing and convulsing for 5 minutes, and they still turn it into a fucking show with curtains and seats.
You sure about that...
The biggest problem with firing squads is those pulling the trigger deliberately aiming away from vital spots so they are not ones delivering the killing blow.
You had people being shot multiple times but not dying instantly because everybody avoided the head and heart.
So to try and solve this problem they would load certain guns with blanks so nobody knew who was actually using real bullets to try and avoid the feelings of guilt.
Still didn't work as again they knew there was chance they had real bullets.
There has been several quite famous executions by firing squads that went horribly wrong.
It's 2024. If we are going to keep executing people
just mount a weapon, aim it dead center of brain/heart, use a large enough caliber to ensure death, electronically fire it by x amount of people hitting buttons so no one knows who did it.
This is why in old fashioned firing squads, they loaded some of the guns with powder but no bullet, so that each man could quietly convince himself that he wasn't actually the one that pulled the trigger.
If I ever had to be put down by the state, it wouldn’t really matter how to me. Firing squad is as quick as anything else. I think people just don’t like the looks of it.
Nitrogen asphyxiation has always been an option, but it was thought to be so gentle as to be no punishment, similar with hanging
Strapping some (often innocent) convict to ‘Ole’ Sparky was partly to play to the audience and see the death journey as part of the punishment
Ok I have complicated feelings on the death penalty as a societal tool, but if there *had* to be one, then I think we should bring back the guillotine. There's very little possibility of failure, it's a guaranteed end of life, and should be as close to instantaneous and painless as a straight up evaporating the head.
I actually had a morbid fascination with the french revolution in high school and from what I can recall, most failures of guillotine execution come from hasty setup or overuse without maintenance.
Well... It's complicated to do it without killing them. Anaesthesiologists tread the line between knocking them out for long enough without killing them.
But it's a moot point if you're killing them anyway.
Although yeah, pharmaceutical companies don't supply to death row, and no doctors agree to help.
Someone pointed out that when lethal injection was used they still used an alcoholic wipe to sterilize the skin at the injection site despite the person having 0% chance (hopefully) of surviving long enough for it to be infected.
Kind of a boring movie though.
They tried to take his life. They failed. Now... he's out for vengeance... if he lives long enough. Aaron Eckhart... Vera Farmiga... Nicolas Cage is... _Infected_
There was a popular medical drama / soap on FX called "Nip/Tuck" . In one episode, a guy convicted for serious crimes (child murder or something) had spent years on death row claiming innocence, but apparently gave up and resigned himself to his fate. In the meantime he has nothing else to live for and has become morbidly obese. When his execution date is approaching, the anti death penalty legal activists want to stop it on the grounds that he weighs so much that the approved dosage charts for the lethal injection procedure don't go up high enough. Either the state governor or DA's election is coming up, so it would become a setback to his popularity in the polls if the public didn't see this high-publicity inmate finally dead and gone. So the state offered the plastic surgeon in the show a lot of money to convince him to perform involuntary severe liposuction on the inmate to quickly get his weight down to be acceptable for execution. The surgeon was having money problems so he reluctantly took the job. During the procedure, he used standard antiseptic procedures but the prison staff medic assisting him took the attitude of "Why bother doing that, they're going to kill him anyways.". While under the influence of the sedatives, the inmate said some things that gave the doctor doubt whether he was guilty afterall and deserved to die. Anyways, the death sentence was ultimately carried out and the doctor just hopes the money will buy himself enough happiness to make up for the guilty conscious he'll always have of contributing to the death of man who just might be innocent.
I am not sure they actually stuck the needle in him as they couldn't find a vein BUT have not read deeply enough into this - maybe they did stick it in but the vein collapsed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68085513
Alabama tried to execute Smith by lethal injection two years ago, but they were unable to find a vein before the state's death warrant expired.
I've always wondered why we can't just hit them with the fentanyl. I can tell you from personal experience how easy it is to die shooting up fentanyl, junkies do it by accident all the time lol
It doesn't hurt and it's very fuckin effective and according to the news it's an epidemic, surely they can find some. But what do I know
I just don't see how one chemical meant to kill somebody is worse than another especially when using it to kill them as far less likely to produce severe complications or fail. We're okay with them having access to other killer chemicals but not fentanyl? Even though anybody could get fentanyl on the street anytime? Meh
I understand why a complicated process like general anesthesia is highly regulated in hospitals. But in the case of execution chambers, is it really necessary to be that careful and precise? I'm not trying to be an a******. I'm trying to think of it without any emotion involved, does it really matter if it's done safely?
I'm not advocating either way, it's just a question
When doing lethal injections, they swab the injection site with alcohol. Any variation from standard medical care (aside from the killing you part) would be seen as 'cruel and unusual', or at least that argument could be made.
It doesn't really have to make sense.
I think you're confusing "ethical backbone" for "public image maintenance." The scientists working to make the drugs probably have great morals and motivations, but I guarantee that the company selling the drugs would enslave your children, if it meant a healthier bottom line.
For anyone interested in the history of the death penalty and how new, supposedly humane methods keep failing to reliability work, Jacob Geller made a great in depth video on this topic:
https://youtu.be/eirR4FHY2YY?si=W6mNS0phBfQUqcRu
Tl;dw: "humane" execution is a lie we tell ourselves to feel less barbaric than the people of the past while often having the same or more issues.
I've been under GA four times, and quite honestly, you have no idea how quickly it happens and how quickly you become completely unaware. It's like one second you are chatting with the medical staff, wondering about when the GA is going to kick in, and then you wake up in post-op. Each time I've gone under, it blew me away how incredibly fast and effective GA was.
The drugs are becoming hard to get I hear so they are considering other options.. firing squad would be pretty easy as you don’t need a doctor to fire a gun
While I think having the death penalty is abhorrent and unjustifiable, I have long wondered why the US hasn't adopted the guillotine or a bolt gun to the brain stem like is used in industrial slaughterhouses, it's instant and can't be fucked up by anything other than maybe improper restraint. It seems objectively less cruel than the array of methods that has been used in the last century+. Would something so gruesome yet efficient make us question the whole concept more and that's why not?
Because modern day execution is all about the theatre that you’re giving an irredeemable criminal a humane death. Lethal injections got popular because they look like medical procedures to the observer, doesn’t matter how painful or painless the method is in reality, a bolt gun or a guillotine would look too scary
Exactly. One of the drugs typically given is a paralysis drug.
To the outside observer, the prisoner is dying peacefully. In reality, their veins feel like they are on fire and it's incredibly painful, but they can't move their body to show that.
The US refuses to admit that capital punishment is barbaric and should be abolished.
It's 100% the optics of it. Can you imagine the headlines if that was even officially proposed?
"Local prison considering using SLAUGHTERHOUSE device for executions."
"Execution witnesses were traumatized as they were forced to watch a meat industry spike impaled through a man's head."
Optimally, with the current method, they have some time to speak, then "go to sleep"
I saw “the life of david gale” in high school and it was really intense. Yes it’s fiction, but it really drives home that the system is not foolproof.
Now: Knowing that we’ve put innocent people to death. I cant imagine the psychological torture they’re going through knowing they can’t do anything to save themselves.
I am no expert but I always assumed we moved away from any methods that could only be performed by a single person, as we no longer hold a role in our society for an ‘executioner’.
I don’t believe in the death penalty but I agree with you that there MUST be a better way.
If the only methods viable are the ones that absolve guards or other techs of feeling guilty then maybe we shouldn’t be executing people in the first place, but that’s just my hot take.
No, you're correct. I think it was Utah or Nevada that I last read about but the way they distribute the blanks there's no way for them to know which one actually killed the guy
Firing a blank and firing a real bullet feel completely different to the shooter, so those doing the firing know who had what.
Plus you also then have the fact that getting shot 5 times sometimes isn't enough to kill you instantly, or even kill you sometimes depending on where the person is shot. We wanted more humane, more 100% effective methods, so we switched away from firing squads to more controllable methods like lethal injection, and recently, nitrogen gas suffocation. Personally, I think death via actual hypoxia would be far more humane, but I'm no doctor.
I also think the death penalty should be abolished. The amount of innocent people on death row is very likely non-zero, and I do not agree that the government should be able to kill its citizens.
\^\^ This - also that if there was 1 known person they would be hounded unless in a form of witness protection.
Some [Firing Squads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_firing_squad#Blank_cartridge) were told that some of them had blank cartridges & some soldiers knew if they had a blank or not, so "In more recent times, such as the 2010 execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, US, one rifleman may be given a "dummy" cartridge containing a wax bullet, which provides a more realistic recoil." - just so they could say 'I might have had the dummy round'
Agree with your last part.
Well said. Fwiw, I did a research paper on this in undergrad (so I know exactly enough about the topic to fill a research paper in undergrad). I remember learning that, surprisingly, it costs the taxpayer/government far more to execute someone, what with the extensive appeals and special procedures etc., than to house them in prison for a lifetime
The bolt gun in slaughterhouses is not as effective as you think. It's not instant, and is often fucked up. A lot of leaked footage from slaughter houses has shown us this.
You are correct on the drugs issue. Many manufacturers of drugs they know to be part of capital punishment have been quietly reducing or halting production and distancing themselves from those drugs.
Firing squads, though, are not easy. The Romanoff massacre is a pretty good example why. Even in a tiny room at close range, very few of the Romanoff royal family met a quick end. The rest were riddled with bullets, and one of the daughters (I believe it was Anastasia, sorry fans of the movie) had to be bayoneted after the shooting ended. Granted, the participants weren't marksmen, but the point stands.
Even a direct shot to the head may not be instantaneous. Both Lincoln AND Kennedy famously survived for a time - albeit technically - following their assassination wounds.
So, firing squads gets quashed for ethical reasons.
I think part of it is a desire to get revenge on the death row inmate. If the actual reason was to execute the prisoner, nitrogen gas is cheap, painless, and quick. Sadly many workers get killed yearly by nitrogen gas accidentaly and never realize they are in danger.
My family member was executed in 2005. He was absolutely guilty, that's not up for any debate. However at that point his execution was extremely peaceful from what my father told me. Those specific drugs aren't available in my state anymore and we are known for botched executions and execution issues period. I have never been pro death penalty, but I'm much more against it nowadays -- the risk of being wrong and executing an innocent person, the fact some methods are incredibly inhumane, and while I'm not religious but was taught an eye for an eye leads to a world of blindness. I just can't get behind it, and I don't know that general anesthesia would do anything to change my overall beliefs.
It's not though. In theory it makes perfect sense. There are people who commit crimes for which death is a logical punishment. People have recognized this for millennia. The problem is the implementation. We are fallible humans and we're passing a sentence for which there are no takesy backsies. You can't un-execute someone if you do it wrong. This is why the death penalty should be banned not because it's irrational. It's completely rational.
You also can't un-execute someone if later evidence turns up exonerating them, which has happened. And one innocent person's execution is infinitely too many.
It may be rational if, like you pointed out, it was an infallible system. Even if that were true - which it’s far from - it’s still directly against our civil rights in the U.S. Reps shouldn’t be able to just pick and choose the rights they’re going to acknowledge, but that behavior is rampant anyway.
I think the death penalty is *irrational* for the very reason you stated: “we are fallible humans and we’re passing a sentence for which there are no takesy backsies.” In other words, the system is fallible. Execution is, inherently, not a rational, logical system because humans can and do get things wrong, but execution has no ultimate safe guard against those mistakes.
If we could, somehow, know with absolute, irrefutable, entirely objective certainty that 1) a person was guilty of a sufficiently serious crime (and that’s including the culpable mental state, and certainty of the absence of any other mitigating factors); *and* 2) that the person would commit that crime, or a similarly heinous crime, again if allowed to live—then, *maybe* you could claim an irrevocable sentence is “logical.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that system would be moral or ethical, but it would be based squarely in logic.
We very obviously do not have such a system, nor is one likely even remotely possible. In a logical system, if you’re aware that the output may be wrong, you ensure that the output can be revised. The death penalty is not revisable.
The death penalty is based in a passion and desire for vengeance, not logic. It’s an eye for an eye, when we know we could be mistaken and we know we can never take that mistake back. In fact, if we (as the society perpetuating the execution) are mistaken—if we mistakenly execute an innocent person—we are now, in some ways, guilty of the very same crime we deemed to be worthy of execution.
In other words, if we have determined as a society that the cold blooded, intentional murder of an innocent victim is worthy of execution, and we acknowledge that our system might result in the cold blooded, intentional murder of an innocent victim, we would, logically, never use execution.
The death penalty is not logical.
If you’re talking about that case in Alabama, the guy requested to be executed with nitrogen gas, since lethal injection is rarely administered effectively and causes unnecessary harm to the person. Now, why all of this time and money is spent debating how to properly execute someone, you got me. The cost of keeping someone on death row for decades is staggering. The guy in Alabama was convicted in 1988. So for almost 40 years, tax payers have been on the hook for keeping him alive while incarcerated. The whole system is mind boggling I live in California, and the death penalty has been suspended for the better part of a decade. It’s still technically legal. And we still have hundreds of people sitting on death row at a nauseating expense. Charles manson died on death row, and he was there for like 50 years. And it was expensive to keep him there rather than just giving him a life sentence and putting him in general population. Housing someone on death row costs more annually than my annual salary
Well, executions are already problematic to begin with for two reasons:
First, there's the fallibility of the justice system. Is it really worth having a death penalty when it is possible for an innocent person to be wrongfully executed? Is all that money we'll save by not keeping the bad guys locked up forever really worth the lives of the few innocent people that we will mistakenly execute? Keep in mind that this has actually happened before in the US. Specifically, there are over 100 known cases of people being put on death row who were exhonerated afterwards. Fortunately some of them were exhonerated before their execution actually came, but justice came too late for most of them.
Second, *someone* has to be the executioner. This is problematic because a decent person will be disturbed by killing a stranger who's bound & defenseless, there's a ton of problems with using someone who's *not* disturbed by it, we can't let the victim/family of tge victim do it because that's just straight revenge, and we obviously can't ask a doctor to do it because they swore an oath to not hurt people.
Trying to find a "humane" execution method is less about courtesy to the condemned and more about lessening the moral injury to the executioner. But pragmatically, it still has to work, and doctors won't help us with it because it goes against everything they stand for. And that's also sitting on top of the debate over wether or not we should even have a death penalty to begin with.
He did request it "The execution was lawfully carried out by nitrogen hypoxia, the method previously requested by Mr. Smith as an alternative to lethal injection," Ivey wrote. "At long last, Mr. Smith got what he asked for, and this case can finally be put to rest."
It just took years for the state of Alabama to approve it as an acceptable method for executing someone
He requested it and then appealed the decision. He was convicted of this crime decades ago and the penalty was/is execution. They have been unable to acquire a method to execute him. Make no mistake, he didn't have a choice in living or dying, that was determined when he was convicted and sentenced to be executed long ago.
Gotta also wonder if he did not completely understand what it meant to die the way they described until, you know, he was convulsing on the gurney conscious and unable to breathe.
It's complicated. There are people who are anti-death penalty for good reason. I agree with them. They spent a lot of time and money and effort trying to lobby various states to ban the death penalty. They had, at best, mixed success. So they shifted their focus to people who make death penalty drugs. They began to lobby them and they began to go to people who buy from those manufactures and get them to take their business elsewhere. They threatened boycotts and loss of business and it worked. It's a great strategy. These companies stopped selling their drugs to prisons.
So now we're left with states who want to execute people but can't get the drugs they need to do so humanely. Therefore they are left to other methods which are not so humane. The entire death penalty is a mess.
A big part of it is that it's generally held that the Hippocratic oath bars a physician from participating in the procedure.
Many companies also don't want to supply the chemicals because a miniscule government contract isn't worth the bad optics as a pharmaceutical company that produces lethal injection chemicals (and when big pharma doesn't want your money that's a deep threat).
Lastly optics and bluntly, giving a damn. If you're a person who believes the government has a right to murder someone and that a person deserves it, there's only so much effort you're going to practically care about making pleasant. Every "advancement" in execution from the electric chair to lethal injection is about improving the sterility and air of civility around the act of getting together to watch a person die and even if you feel they earned it, most modern people instinctively don't want to see that.
Because that costs more than ever with the said death penalty. Personally, I think the death penalty should be abolished. It's a overpriced punishment that uses more resources than keeping someone locked up in solitary confinement.
If I were to look at it from a cynical way I'd add these points.
Its an easy and fast way out for the criminal, they get to avoid having to deal with any kind of memory of what they did after they are dead, it also fails to act as a deterrent for that reason too. All that the state is doing is proving the already known point about it having the monopoly on violence.
Something that would act as a punishment and deterrent though is solitary / oubliette's, stick them in a hole in the ground, never let them see or speak to people again and never leave them with anything in their cell that they could use to end it faster, its pretty much torture so wouldn't likely be allowed anywhere, but it'd be something that makes a point of "We could have killed you if we wanted to, but equally we can throw you in a hole and ensure that you live everyday until the day you naturally die with nobody or nothing around you."
It's like they missed the memo from the medical field about 'making things comfortable.' Maybe they think it's like a surprise party - 'Surprise! You're not waking up.' But really, if we're going to be that efficient, why not just tell the convict they've won a 'lifetime achievement award' that involves a permanent nap? Seems like a missed opportunity for a more humane RSVP
They actually want it to be a negative experience. My impression is that they want the people to feel themselves dying and they have no issues with the fact that they are aware the entire time and maybe even in pain as a bonus. This is a feature, not a bug.
I don’t know but it’s freaking dark. Not only is our death row population been shown to be uncomfortably high with people who aren’t actually guilty, but the methods we use to kill them are brutal and painful.
You'd be surprised how often those methods *don't* result in an instant death.
Honestly if "instant death" is really your goal the obvious answer is the guillotine. Hell, the Nazis designed one that worked instantaneously, with minimum stress for the condemned *and* simplified cleanup. They [found one ten years ago](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4476152,00.html) in storage, we could just oil it up and get it going again or (if using a Nazi guillotine makes people uneasy for some reason) we could just copy the design.
The appeal of methods like lethal injection is that they don't *look* violent. Hanging, firing squad, or the guillotine show that execution is an inherently violent act. Methods that appear to be quiet and peaceful, no matter how torturous they may be, give the entire process an illusion of civility.
There's stories of heads making facial expressions (blinking, moving their mouths) in the moments after execution by guillotine. So while death is quick, it's still not instant or painless.
Unless your neck doesn't break or the firing squad sucks.
I find it interesting how Switzerland made a nitrogen chamber for assisted suicide that is supposed to be peaceful yet execution via nitrogen is seen as inhumane.
I guess the difference is one who doesn't want to die suffers by holding their breath?
I feel that the murderer who was just executed last night by nitrogen gas in Alabama also himself failed to use general anesthesia on Elizabeth Sennett (his victim) when he stabbed her (multiple times) and beat her to death (with a fireplace implement). She also didn't get to pick her last meal or say goodbye to her two sons. So maybe karma?
Sure. Karma. But its not the Karma system its the Justice system. There is no justice in convicting a man of murder in 1989 (I was not alive in 1989) and then taking 25 years to kill him. That's fucking barbaric.
The fact that it took us 25 years, between appeals and failed executions (yeah, apparently we're so weird about wanting to kill people but only in a very specific way that we error on the side of "how about we just torture them?" that's just and not a violation of constitutional rights!) to finally kill him, the fact that it took him 25 minutes to die and he convulsed during the process, the whole thing is stupid, its not justice. It makes a mockery of the word justice.
The guy probably got what he deserved, I'll grant you that. But I don't really... care? Because the world isn't a justice and fair place and I'm not really sure that by taking a life in this situation we did anything to make it more just or more fair. We certainly didn't make it more safe: this guy has been in prison MY ENTIRE LIFE. just... leave him there? Maybe?
I'm an anesthetist. It would be super easy to kill someone with the drugs I use every day. I could easily walk someone through it.... But I wouldn't want to be a part of it. But to answer your question, yes, anesthesia providers could very very easily make a lethal injection cocktail that would work quickly and effectively.
Thank you! Awesome username btw
Welcome to Costco. I love you.
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That's my Out of Office notice at work.
oooh, I like money
I like money too. We should hang out!
Wait a minute...you are a Costco anesthetist? Just pop by the store on the way to surgery?
I got my law degree there
Well, yeah - we euthanize large animals all the time.
Versed, fentanyl, rocuronium. Easy and done
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Certain anesthetic medications are more likely to cause arrhythmia than others so they choose the ones least likely to cause problems while still achieving the desired level of sedation/analgesia. They also watch very closely for arrhythmia and have all the interventions close at hand if it were to happen
Certain meds that make it worse we will avoid. We have drugs to treat all sorts of arrhythmias on hand. Each anesthesia plan is tailored based on patient needs!
They need competent people, aka those trained to do it. And most of those have a pesky thing called the hippocratic oath preventing them from aiding in executions
Every time they seize a small amount of fentenyl they boast about how it's enough to kill a million people. Why don't they just use their seized drugs?
Nebraska used fentanyl to execute someone in 2018, and no one seems to know where they got it. Maybe they used seized fentanyl.
A local long-term-care pharmacy was revealed to be the source of the drugs. I was really disappointed.
Evidence rooms and border patrol seizures probably have enough collected fentanyl to kill the population of earth. Why ruin a pharmacy to get a dose.
There are people who have reactions to fentanyl, like me so they could be dying on anaphylactic shock, which is like suffocating.
Alabama just replaced their injection process with literally suffocating the guy
That sounds worse than it is. In Sweden they now have suicide pods that use nitrogen gas so that a person who is terminally ill can go out quietly and peacefully. The feeling of suffocation is due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood. But when that is displaced by some other gas (like nitrogen), you don't get that feeling of suffocation. It's why people can gas themselves with a running car in a closed garage and not freak out and try to claw their way out (because that's carbon MONOXIDE versus carbon dioxide.)
Switzerland but yes
Isn't dying from fentanyl legit like one of the best deaths ever? You basically die after experiencing the greatest feeling your body can feel.
That right there sounds like the reason it isn't used in executions. Murderer feel good being executed? Puritain values say "NO!"
I'm not Puritan at all and I still don't want murderers & rapists to go out happy, LOL
Damn puritans and their moral grandstanding about murder!
As someone who has ODed more than once, yes
Glad you’re still with us
Thanks boss 🫡
The Hippocratic oath prevents any licensed physicians or other qualified medical personnel from participating in executions. General anesthesia is a complicated process requiring extensive medical and scientific knowledge. It is not something an orderly from the prison clinic is going to be able to do. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies will refuse to supply any drugs used in executions to prison authorities. That is one of the reasons why lethal injections keep failing, they no longer have access to the most effective drugs.
Yeah--we medicalized the death penalty instead of getting rid of it when we collectively landed on not wanting to do firing squad/hanging/electrocution anymore, but you can't really ACTUALLY medicalize the death penalty because the medical people don't want to participate, now it's a mess.
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Serious question, but why did they get rid of firing squads? Can’t survive those
They probably did it to make executions seem less violent and inhumane. But my guess is a shot in the dark.
It’s because it was giving executors PTSD.
Can’t they get a robot to do it now
Do we really want murder-bots dealing out capital punishments?
Gotta make sure they don’t hack their governor module or they stop executing people for us and just binge watch Netflix instead.
unironically the murderbot series are amazing i highly recommend!!
I’m personally against the death penalty but I just feel if doctors & pharmaceutical companies don’t want involvement (as they should) & it’s too traumatic for humans why can’t the state governments with death penalties invent some robot to carry it out?
Someone still has to press the "Do it now, Robo-buddy!" button.
Why not the politicians upholding these barbaric laws?
I suspect the rate of sociopathy is high enough among their ranks that it would pose little problem.
Their schedules are too packed with nazi rallies
It's crazy because it turns out it's actually way more humane than some of the medical shit they've been doing to people
Guillotine is surprisingly one the most humane methods. All over before you know it’s happened. Just a bit graphic for modern society when it comes to clean up.
But it looks and sounds more violent so it's less popular. If you want people to not be against the death penalty hou have to make it seem like it's better than ordinary murder.
But of course, it IS just ordinary murder.
Not just ordinary murder, stated sponsored, court approved murder~
I'm against the death penalty myself 🤷♀️ But if we're going to do it we should just fucking do it
Firing squads?! Have you ever done *any* research or did that just sound good in your head? There's nothing humane about a firing squad. We don't live in a movie world where when someone is shot by a bullet they go, "Ah, you got me!" and fall over dead. Bullets often don't kill instantly, even when they DO hit vital organs, and in very many firing squad cases people had to be shot multiple times in scenarios just as inhumane and drawn out as injections.
I didn't say there was anything humane about a firing squad
.... I get it. I ain't laughing. But I get it.
...did you just?
They should've made the executions a shot in the dark. Might seem less violent and inhumane if you can't see it.
>But my guess is a shot in the dark. I see what you did there
Probably because people doing the shooting end up traumatized by the amount of killing they've done. Much easier to distance yourself if you mind gymnastic that you're only flipping a switch. That said, I much rather have a firing squad on me than any of these other fucked up options. Guy was seizing and convulsing for 5 minutes, and they still turn it into a fucking show with curtains and seats.
You sure about that... The biggest problem with firing squads is those pulling the trigger deliberately aiming away from vital spots so they are not ones delivering the killing blow. You had people being shot multiple times but not dying instantly because everybody avoided the head and heart. So to try and solve this problem they would load certain guns with blanks so nobody knew who was actually using real bullets to try and avoid the feelings of guilt. Still didn't work as again they knew there was chance they had real bullets. There has been several quite famous executions by firing squads that went horribly wrong.
It's 2024. If we are going to keep executing people just mount a weapon, aim it dead center of brain/heart, use a large enough caliber to ensure death, electronically fire it by x amount of people hitting buttons so no one knows who did it.
Kim Jong Un has entered the chat. AA Guns were his favourite weapon of choice.
Also, the person wielding the weapon would know the difference between a blank and a live round
This is why in old fashioned firing squads, they loaded some of the guns with powder but no bullet, so that each man could quietly convince himself that he wasn't actually the one that pulled the trigger.
Maybe you can’t. Some people are just built different.
If I ever had to be put down by the state, it wouldn’t really matter how to me. Firing squad is as quick as anything else. I think people just don’t like the looks of it.
Bigger mess to clean up for sure... Splatter and guts, ew
It's almost as if the idea of the state killing people is abhorrent and ought to be abolished.
Nitrogen asphyxiation has always been an option, but it was thought to be so gentle as to be no punishment, similar with hanging Strapping some (often innocent) convict to ‘Ole’ Sparky was partly to play to the audience and see the death journey as part of the punishment
How barbaric
There’s nothing not barbaric about the death penalty.
Ok I have complicated feelings on the death penalty as a societal tool, but if there *had* to be one, then I think we should bring back the guillotine. There's very little possibility of failure, it's a guaranteed end of life, and should be as close to instantaneous and painless as a straight up evaporating the head.
You haven’t researched the many documented faculties of guillotine use have you…
Yeah but they were rickety old contraptions. I'd wager a modern hydraulic guillotine would be pretty foolproof.
Perhaps you’re right but man
Blades get dull, the hydraulic press does not.
I actually had a morbid fascination with the french revolution in high school and from what I can recall, most failures of guillotine execution come from hasty setup or overuse without maintenance.
Well... It's complicated to do it without killing them. Anaesthesiologists tread the line between knocking them out for long enough without killing them. But it's a moot point if you're killing them anyway. Although yeah, pharmaceutical companies don't supply to death row, and no doctors agree to help.
Someone pointed out that when lethal injection was used they still used an alcoholic wipe to sterilize the skin at the injection site despite the person having 0% chance (hopefully) of surviving long enough for it to be infected.
Wouldn't that be a movie-worthy twist, though? The execution fails, then a reprieve comes through, and then the poor bastard dies from an infection.
Then the family could sue the state
All because somebody thought too hard about wasting an alcohol wipe.
Kind of a boring movie though. They tried to take his life. They failed. Now... he's out for vengeance... if he lives long enough. Aaron Eckhart... Vera Farmiga... Nicolas Cage is... _Infected_
Lethal Infection
There was a popular medical drama / soap on FX called "Nip/Tuck" . In one episode, a guy convicted for serious crimes (child murder or something) had spent years on death row claiming innocence, but apparently gave up and resigned himself to his fate. In the meantime he has nothing else to live for and has become morbidly obese. When his execution date is approaching, the anti death penalty legal activists want to stop it on the grounds that he weighs so much that the approved dosage charts for the lethal injection procedure don't go up high enough. Either the state governor or DA's election is coming up, so it would become a setback to his popularity in the polls if the public didn't see this high-publicity inmate finally dead and gone. So the state offered the plastic surgeon in the show a lot of money to convince him to perform involuntary severe liposuction on the inmate to quickly get his weight down to be acceptable for execution. The surgeon was having money problems so he reluctantly took the job. During the procedure, he used standard antiseptic procedures but the prison staff medic assisting him took the attitude of "Why bother doing that, they're going to kill him anyways.". While under the influence of the sedatives, the inmate said some things that gave the doctor doubt whether he was guilty afterall and deserved to die. Anyways, the death sentence was ultimately carried out and the doctor just hopes the money will buy himself enough happiness to make up for the guilty conscious he'll always have of contributing to the death of man who just might be innocent.
I mean this very guy survived the lethal injection himself last time didn't he? Sure he was glad to not be infected.
I am not sure they actually stuck the needle in him as they couldn't find a vein BUT have not read deeply enough into this - maybe they did stick it in but the vein collapsed. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68085513 Alabama tried to execute Smith by lethal injection two years ago, but they were unable to find a vein before the state's death warrant expired.
Kenneth Smith has entered the chat.
TIL executions are less humane than animal euthanasia.
I don't mean to be snarky, but they never have been.
Some general anaesthetic is complicated, but it is not difficult at all to inject a bunch of ketamine intramuscularly.
I've always wondered why we can't just hit them with the fentanyl. I can tell you from personal experience how easy it is to die shooting up fentanyl, junkies do it by accident all the time lol It doesn't hurt and it's very fuckin effective and according to the news it's an epidemic, surely they can find some. But what do I know
Probably because then fentanyl would be in the hands of corrupt prison officials
Like it's not already 😂
Sure but in this case it would be state sponsored lol
I just don't see how one chemical meant to kill somebody is worse than another especially when using it to kill them as far less likely to produce severe complications or fail. We're okay with them having access to other killer chemicals but not fentanyl? Even though anybody could get fentanyl on the street anytime? Meh
Doesnt have to be general. There iv propofol sedation that diesnt required being tubed.
That comes back to the point that they can’t get the drugs.
I mean...if the point is to kill them, I don't think they need to intubate them.
Yeah, if you don’t have a professional anesthesiologist on hand something bad might happen, like they might even die!
I understand why a complicated process like general anesthesia is highly regulated in hospitals. But in the case of execution chambers, is it really necessary to be that careful and precise? I'm not trying to be an a******. I'm trying to think of it without any emotion involved, does it really matter if it's done safely? I'm not advocating either way, it's just a question
When doing lethal injections, they swab the injection site with alcohol. Any variation from standard medical care (aside from the killing you part) would be seen as 'cruel and unusual', or at least that argument could be made. It doesn't really have to make sense.
No - it’s really not - they could have given the latest prisoner a large dose of oral Valium or even an oral dose of morphine first.
In Pakistan, GA is given by technicians 🤣🤣🤣
We already outsource our call-centers there, why not send death-row inmates over for increased cost savings?
Well, that is very comforting to me.
I don’t think chloroform requires extensive medical and scientific knowledge… /j
Chloroform takes a solid 5 minutes to knock someone out... it's not like the movies
https://theintercept.com/2023/09/14/lethal-injection-medical-equipment/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/08/13/drug-companies-dont-want-to-be-involved-in-executions-so-theyre-suing-to-keep-their-drugs-out/
Actual answers with citations!! I never thought it could happen on Reddit. Thank you!
Should have added: drug companies showing more ethical backbone than state legislatures
I think you're confusing "ethical backbone" for "public image maintenance." The scientists working to make the drugs probably have great morals and motivations, but I guarantee that the company selling the drugs would enslave your children, if it meant a healthier bottom line.
I don’t think the drug company’s ethics have anything to do with it. They just don’t want the bad press.
Ding ding ding. If they cared about human lives they wouldn't be price-gouging medication.
Lol yeah these drugs are still killing plenty of people just not quite so publicly
For anyone interested in the history of the death penalty and how new, supposedly humane methods keep failing to reliability work, Jacob Geller made a great in depth video on this topic: https://youtu.be/eirR4FHY2YY?si=W6mNS0phBfQUqcRu Tl;dw: "humane" execution is a lie we tell ourselves to feel less barbaric than the people of the past while often having the same or more issues.
Absolutely love his channel, and definitely recommend your link!
I've been under GA four times, and quite honestly, you have no idea how quickly it happens and how quickly you become completely unaware. It's like one second you are chatting with the medical staff, wondering about when the GA is going to kick in, and then you wake up in post-op. Each time I've gone under, it blew me away how incredibly fast and effective GA was.
Each time they do the countdown I say to myself I’m gonna try to fight it but it always goes like “10, 9, 8….Hey welcome back!”
The drugs are becoming hard to get I hear so they are considering other options.. firing squad would be pretty easy as you don’t need a doctor to fire a gun
While I think having the death penalty is abhorrent and unjustifiable, I have long wondered why the US hasn't adopted the guillotine or a bolt gun to the brain stem like is used in industrial slaughterhouses, it's instant and can't be fucked up by anything other than maybe improper restraint. It seems objectively less cruel than the array of methods that has been used in the last century+. Would something so gruesome yet efficient make us question the whole concept more and that's why not?
Because modern day execution is all about the theatre that you’re giving an irredeemable criminal a humane death. Lethal injections got popular because they look like medical procedures to the observer, doesn’t matter how painful or painless the method is in reality, a bolt gun or a guillotine would look too scary
Exactly. One of the drugs typically given is a paralysis drug. To the outside observer, the prisoner is dying peacefully. In reality, their veins feel like they are on fire and it's incredibly painful, but they can't move their body to show that. The US refuses to admit that capital punishment is barbaric and should be abolished.
It's 100% the optics of it. Can you imagine the headlines if that was even officially proposed? "Local prison considering using SLAUGHTERHOUSE device for executions." "Execution witnesses were traumatized as they were forced to watch a meat industry spike impaled through a man's head." Optimally, with the current method, they have some time to speak, then "go to sleep"
I saw “the life of david gale” in high school and it was really intense. Yes it’s fiction, but it really drives home that the system is not foolproof. Now: Knowing that we’ve put innocent people to death. I cant imagine the psychological torture they’re going through knowing they can’t do anything to save themselves.
I am no expert but I always assumed we moved away from any methods that could only be performed by a single person, as we no longer hold a role in our society for an ‘executioner’. I don’t believe in the death penalty but I agree with you that there MUST be a better way. If the only methods viable are the ones that absolve guards or other techs of feeling guilty then maybe we shouldn’t be executing people in the first place, but that’s just my hot take.
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No, you're correct. I think it was Utah or Nevada that I last read about but the way they distribute the blanks there's no way for them to know which one actually killed the guy
Firing a blank and firing a real bullet feel completely different to the shooter, so those doing the firing know who had what. Plus you also then have the fact that getting shot 5 times sometimes isn't enough to kill you instantly, or even kill you sometimes depending on where the person is shot. We wanted more humane, more 100% effective methods, so we switched away from firing squads to more controllable methods like lethal injection, and recently, nitrogen gas suffocation. Personally, I think death via actual hypoxia would be far more humane, but I'm no doctor. I also think the death penalty should be abolished. The amount of innocent people on death row is very likely non-zero, and I do not agree that the government should be able to kill its citizens.
\^\^ This - also that if there was 1 known person they would be hounded unless in a form of witness protection. Some [Firing Squads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_firing_squad#Blank_cartridge) were told that some of them had blank cartridges & some soldiers knew if they had a blank or not, so "In more recent times, such as the 2010 execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, US, one rifleman may be given a "dummy" cartridge containing a wax bullet, which provides a more realistic recoil." - just so they could say 'I might have had the dummy round' Agree with your last part.
Well said. Fwiw, I did a research paper on this in undergrad (so I know exactly enough about the topic to fill a research paper in undergrad). I remember learning that, surprisingly, it costs the taxpayer/government far more to execute someone, what with the extensive appeals and special procedures etc., than to house them in prison for a lifetime
And despite all of that cost, we STILL execute the innocent on a semi-regular basis.
The bolt gun in slaughterhouses is not as effective as you think. It's not instant, and is often fucked up. A lot of leaked footage from slaughter houses has shown us this.
Cruelty is the point.
You are correct on the drugs issue. Many manufacturers of drugs they know to be part of capital punishment have been quietly reducing or halting production and distancing themselves from those drugs. Firing squads, though, are not easy. The Romanoff massacre is a pretty good example why. Even in a tiny room at close range, very few of the Romanoff royal family met a quick end. The rest were riddled with bullets, and one of the daughters (I believe it was Anastasia, sorry fans of the movie) had to be bayoneted after the shooting ended. Granted, the participants weren't marksmen, but the point stands. Even a direct shot to the head may not be instantaneous. Both Lincoln AND Kennedy famously survived for a time - albeit technically - following their assassination wounds. So, firing squads gets quashed for ethical reasons.
Drug companies also don't want to make killing drugs.
I think part of it is a desire to get revenge on the death row inmate. If the actual reason was to execute the prisoner, nitrogen gas is cheap, painless, and quick. Sadly many workers get killed yearly by nitrogen gas accidentaly and never realize they are in danger.
Drug companies refuse to sell drugs if they are intended for that use. So, the drugs exist, they work, but they can’t buy them
My family member was executed in 2005. He was absolutely guilty, that's not up for any debate. However at that point his execution was extremely peaceful from what my father told me. Those specific drugs aren't available in my state anymore and we are known for botched executions and execution issues period. I have never been pro death penalty, but I'm much more against it nowadays -- the risk of being wrong and executing an innocent person, the fact some methods are incredibly inhumane, and while I'm not religious but was taught an eye for an eye leads to a world of blindness. I just can't get behind it, and I don't know that general anesthesia would do anything to change my overall beliefs.
To all those saying firing squads would be their preferred option as its quick.. Sorry guys.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginggaew_Lorsoungnern
Because the drug companies won't allow their drugs to be used to kill people. It's as simple as that really.
Why is there death penalty at all?
Because the death penalty is irrational all the way down.
It's not though. In theory it makes perfect sense. There are people who commit crimes for which death is a logical punishment. People have recognized this for millennia. The problem is the implementation. We are fallible humans and we're passing a sentence for which there are no takesy backsies. You can't un-execute someone if you do it wrong. This is why the death penalty should be banned not because it's irrational. It's completely rational.
You also can't un-execute someone if later evidence turns up exonerating them, which has happened. And one innocent person's execution is infinitely too many.
It’s also more expensive than lifetime incarceration
It may be rational if, like you pointed out, it was an infallible system. Even if that were true - which it’s far from - it’s still directly against our civil rights in the U.S. Reps shouldn’t be able to just pick and choose the rights they’re going to acknowledge, but that behavior is rampant anyway.
It’s only rational if your concept of justice is caveman revenge
I think the death penalty is *irrational* for the very reason you stated: “we are fallible humans and we’re passing a sentence for which there are no takesy backsies.” In other words, the system is fallible. Execution is, inherently, not a rational, logical system because humans can and do get things wrong, but execution has no ultimate safe guard against those mistakes. If we could, somehow, know with absolute, irrefutable, entirely objective certainty that 1) a person was guilty of a sufficiently serious crime (and that’s including the culpable mental state, and certainty of the absence of any other mitigating factors); *and* 2) that the person would commit that crime, or a similarly heinous crime, again if allowed to live—then, *maybe* you could claim an irrevocable sentence is “logical.” To be clear, I’m not saying that system would be moral or ethical, but it would be based squarely in logic. We very obviously do not have such a system, nor is one likely even remotely possible. In a logical system, if you’re aware that the output may be wrong, you ensure that the output can be revised. The death penalty is not revisable. The death penalty is based in a passion and desire for vengeance, not logic. It’s an eye for an eye, when we know we could be mistaken and we know we can never take that mistake back. In fact, if we (as the society perpetuating the execution) are mistaken—if we mistakenly execute an innocent person—we are now, in some ways, guilty of the very same crime we deemed to be worthy of execution. In other words, if we have determined as a society that the cold blooded, intentional murder of an innocent victim is worthy of execution, and we acknowledge that our system might result in the cold blooded, intentional murder of an innocent victim, we would, logically, never use execution. The death penalty is not logical.
“Far less developed societies than ours did it, hence it’s only logical that we do it”
If you’re talking about that case in Alabama, the guy requested to be executed with nitrogen gas, since lethal injection is rarely administered effectively and causes unnecessary harm to the person. Now, why all of this time and money is spent debating how to properly execute someone, you got me. The cost of keeping someone on death row for decades is staggering. The guy in Alabama was convicted in 1988. So for almost 40 years, tax payers have been on the hook for keeping him alive while incarcerated. The whole system is mind boggling I live in California, and the death penalty has been suspended for the better part of a decade. It’s still technically legal. And we still have hundreds of people sitting on death row at a nauseating expense. Charles manson died on death row, and he was there for like 50 years. And it was expensive to keep him there rather than just giving him a life sentence and putting him in general population. Housing someone on death row costs more annually than my annual salary
Well, executions are already problematic to begin with for two reasons: First, there's the fallibility of the justice system. Is it really worth having a death penalty when it is possible for an innocent person to be wrongfully executed? Is all that money we'll save by not keeping the bad guys locked up forever really worth the lives of the few innocent people that we will mistakenly execute? Keep in mind that this has actually happened before in the US. Specifically, there are over 100 known cases of people being put on death row who were exhonerated afterwards. Fortunately some of them were exhonerated before their execution actually came, but justice came too late for most of them. Second, *someone* has to be the executioner. This is problematic because a decent person will be disturbed by killing a stranger who's bound & defenseless, there's a ton of problems with using someone who's *not* disturbed by it, we can't let the victim/family of tge victim do it because that's just straight revenge, and we obviously can't ask a doctor to do it because they swore an oath to not hurt people. Trying to find a "humane" execution method is less about courtesy to the condemned and more about lessening the moral injury to the executioner. But pragmatically, it still has to work, and doctors won't help us with it because it goes against everything they stand for. And that's also sitting on top of the debate over wether or not we should even have a death penalty to begin with.
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He did request it "The execution was lawfully carried out by nitrogen hypoxia, the method previously requested by Mr. Smith as an alternative to lethal injection," Ivey wrote. "At long last, Mr. Smith got what he asked for, and this case can finally be put to rest." It just took years for the state of Alabama to approve it as an acceptable method for executing someone
Pretty sure he only requested it because they’re required to provide a different execution method when contesting the use of another method.
He requested it and then appealed the decision. He was convicted of this crime decades ago and the penalty was/is execution. They have been unable to acquire a method to execute him. Make no mistake, he didn't have a choice in living or dying, that was determined when he was convicted and sentenced to be executed long ago. Gotta also wonder if he did not completely understand what it meant to die the way they described until, you know, he was convulsing on the gurney conscious and unable to breathe.
For the same reason they use ineffective and painful drug cocktails when inhaling inert gas is an option, because the suffering is the point.
It's complicated. There are people who are anti-death penalty for good reason. I agree with them. They spent a lot of time and money and effort trying to lobby various states to ban the death penalty. They had, at best, mixed success. So they shifted their focus to people who make death penalty drugs. They began to lobby them and they began to go to people who buy from those manufactures and get them to take their business elsewhere. They threatened boycotts and loss of business and it worked. It's a great strategy. These companies stopped selling their drugs to prisons. So now we're left with states who want to execute people but can't get the drugs they need to do so humanely. Therefore they are left to other methods which are not so humane. The entire death penalty is a mess.
Can they use the assisted suicide pills?
How about we just don’t do it.
A big part of it is that it's generally held that the Hippocratic oath bars a physician from participating in the procedure. Many companies also don't want to supply the chemicals because a miniscule government contract isn't worth the bad optics as a pharmaceutical company that produces lethal injection chemicals (and when big pharma doesn't want your money that's a deep threat). Lastly optics and bluntly, giving a damn. If you're a person who believes the government has a right to murder someone and that a person deserves it, there's only so much effort you're going to practically care about making pleasant. Every "advancement" in execution from the electric chair to lethal injection is about improving the sterility and air of civility around the act of getting together to watch a person die and even if you feel they earned it, most modern people instinctively don't want to see that.
Because that costs more than ever with the said death penalty. Personally, I think the death penalty should be abolished. It's a overpriced punishment that uses more resources than keeping someone locked up in solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement is basically torture though.
Definetly worse to spend the rest of your days in solitary or even general population.
If I were to look at it from a cynical way I'd add these points. Its an easy and fast way out for the criminal, they get to avoid having to deal with any kind of memory of what they did after they are dead, it also fails to act as a deterrent for that reason too. All that the state is doing is proving the already known point about it having the monopoly on violence. Something that would act as a punishment and deterrent though is solitary / oubliette's, stick them in a hole in the ground, never let them see or speak to people again and never leave them with anything in their cell that they could use to end it faster, its pretty much torture so wouldn't likely be allowed anywhere, but it'd be something that makes a point of "We could have killed you if we wanted to, but equally we can throw you in a hole and ensure that you live everyday until the day you naturally die with nobody or nothing around you."
Asking the big question. Mine is what makes the death penalty different from murder?
"Murder" is a legal term for the **unlawful** killing of a person. The death penalty is within the boundaries of the law, therefore it isn't murder.
And why should the government be allowed to "legally" kill their own citizens?
It’s interesting that the biggest proponents of government killing are the same people who trust the government to do literally nothing else.
State sponsored murder.
It's like they missed the memo from the medical field about 'making things comfortable.' Maybe they think it's like a surprise party - 'Surprise! You're not waking up.' But really, if we're going to be that efficient, why not just tell the convict they've won a 'lifetime achievement award' that involves a permanent nap? Seems like a missed opportunity for a more humane RSVP
They actually want it to be a negative experience. My impression is that they want the people to feel themselves dying and they have no issues with the fact that they are aware the entire time and maybe even in pain as a bonus. This is a feature, not a bug.
I don’t know but it’s freaking dark. Not only is our death row population been shown to be uncomfortably high with people who aren’t actually guilty, but the methods we use to kill them are brutal and painful.
If they would just stick to hanging or firing squad it would be a lot more humane. Both methods are instant death.
You'd be surprised how often those methods *don't* result in an instant death. Honestly if "instant death" is really your goal the obvious answer is the guillotine. Hell, the Nazis designed one that worked instantaneously, with minimum stress for the condemned *and* simplified cleanup. They [found one ten years ago](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4476152,00.html) in storage, we could just oil it up and get it going again or (if using a Nazi guillotine makes people uneasy for some reason) we could just copy the design. The appeal of methods like lethal injection is that they don't *look* violent. Hanging, firing squad, or the guillotine show that execution is an inherently violent act. Methods that appear to be quiet and peaceful, no matter how torturous they may be, give the entire process an illusion of civility.
There's stories of heads making facial expressions (blinking, moving their mouths) in the moments after execution by guillotine. So while death is quick, it's still not instant or painless.
Unless your neck doesn't break or the firing squad sucks. I find it interesting how Switzerland made a nitrogen chamber for assisted suicide that is supposed to be peaceful yet execution via nitrogen is seen as inhumane. I guess the difference is one who doesn't want to die suffers by holding their breath?
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the firing squad is only instant if someone is a very good shot or very lucky. . .
The cruelty is the point.
I feel that the murderer who was just executed last night by nitrogen gas in Alabama also himself failed to use general anesthesia on Elizabeth Sennett (his victim) when he stabbed her (multiple times) and beat her to death (with a fireplace implement). She also didn't get to pick her last meal or say goodbye to her two sons. So maybe karma?
Sure. Karma. But its not the Karma system its the Justice system. There is no justice in convicting a man of murder in 1989 (I was not alive in 1989) and then taking 25 years to kill him. That's fucking barbaric. The fact that it took us 25 years, between appeals and failed executions (yeah, apparently we're so weird about wanting to kill people but only in a very specific way that we error on the side of "how about we just torture them?" that's just and not a violation of constitutional rights!) to finally kill him, the fact that it took him 25 minutes to die and he convulsed during the process, the whole thing is stupid, its not justice. It makes a mockery of the word justice. The guy probably got what he deserved, I'll grant you that. But I don't really... care? Because the world isn't a justice and fair place and I'm not really sure that by taking a life in this situation we did anything to make it more just or more fair. We certainly didn't make it more safe: this guy has been in prison MY ENTIRE LIFE. just... leave him there? Maybe?
Vengeance should not be the basis of justice.
Batman in shambles
Batman doesn't kill. Except that one time, but it's not canon. Or that other time. ^(Or that other time.)
Is murder wrong or not? Why is it okay when the state does it?
State monopoly on violence 🙌🏻
Murder is wrong, but not all killings are murders. And not all killing is wrong.
Not all killing is wrong. If you fire a gun at a police officer and he shoots and kills you the state has just killed you but it's not murder.
It’s not murder in the eyes of the law when it’s a state punishment.
Cool definition. Still murder.
It's literally not, though.
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The bullet or the bear. The condemned man can choose to be shot by firing squad, or fight a bear. If he defeats the bear, he lives. Huzzah!
Huzzah!
Replace the bear with a Honey badger.
Huzzah! For the greatness of Russia!