First off, the United States has a mandate against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in our consititution, which is a legal grounding against causing pain to prisoners above and beyond the moral grounds which don’t appear, from what I’m reading, to be popular across the board. If anyone objects to this you can lobby your federal and state representatives to pass a constitutional amendment repealing the clause; “good luck with that.”
Second, China doesn’t necessarily shoot people in the head. Many are shot through the heart (or through what the shooting soldier assumes is the heart; there is the odd “whoopsie”), frequently once to save money on the ammo. A race then commences to remove kidneys, corneas, skin and other organs from the condemned, without a whole lot of concern for prisoner comfort or even death status.
This link shows what a government can do if people set their minds to it without all those nasty anti-cruelty mandates.
Yes that is true, but they pain they usually feel is from the surgery they are undergoing. If the purpose of the anesthesia is simply to cause death (and therefore there is no cutting up of body tissue involved) where will the pain come from?
Not to be snarky, but are you NUTS? Drowning? Try holding your breath for 3 minutes or so, let us know what a pleasant experience it is. Plus, I don’t have a source, but I’ve read that most drowning victims actually die from laryngeal spasm… their throats constrict to keep the water out.
Myself, I always wondered about executing people with heroin. Supposedly there’s no better feeling in the whole world than heroin, and an overdose kills people, so let’s just inject people with an absurdly large dose of heroin.
It’s not too much of a problem to get relatively hard drugs if your a medical professional and the stuff is regulated properly. IIRC, cocaine is still used in certain dental surgeries.
What about those states that don’t border the ocean? What’s the smallest body of water you’d allow?
Except for those pieces of rotting corpse that float to the surface as the body decomposes. There are plenty of species of marine life that would help this along by eating the corpse.
The hell it is. Drowning was already adressed in this thread.
Cost of guards wages while condemned is transported from prison to boat. Cost of wages of transport vehicle. Cost of other unused vehicles to throw protesters and paparazzi off the trail. Cost of gas for the boat. Unless they happen to find a heavy stone with a large metal staple already embedded in it, cost of mold, cement, and a large metal staple. The condemned can be attached to the weight using existing shackles, but unless they retrieve them (which adds the cost of a police scuba diver and the air he’s using) they must be replaced.
Wrong. Provided the condemned can afford it, or somebody else covers the costs, they decide how their body is disposed of. If the deceased has specified something other than burial at sea, the cops would then have to retrieve the corpse and hand it over to whichever funeral home the deceased picked. If they simply left the corpse in the ocean, they would open themselves to civil suits from the deceased’s family, and possible religous descrimination suits as well.
Besides cocaine sometimes being used as a local anasthetic, doctors can obtain morphine and many other things that are illegal for the general public to have. The average vet has no problem getting ketamine.
This may be an urban legend, but I thought that narcotics divisions also kept some confiscated drugs in order to use them in stings.
I don’t mean to push this thread to Great Debates, but the Great One’s article seem to imply that people are conscious under anesthesia because [list=A][li]the muscle relaxants make it impossible for them to signal their awareness, or [*]that not enough anesthesia was administered out of the normal concern for the survival of the patient.[/list]I don’t know why muscle relaxants would be used, and since survival is not a concern, higher levels of anesthesia can be used.[/li]
Plus I am reasonably sure that a convict would die in much less time than the duration of the average surgery. So at least the suffering would not last long.
is that it might be painful, or at least not “serene”. That hardliners consider the fear resulting from, say, being placed under a guillotine to constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” has been established in this thread. The effects that actually kill the condemned once he’s under may well be painful – other posters have suggested general anesthesia followed by rabid badger attack – or may not. Still, the chance for overwhelming physical or psychological pain is there.
Let me be very clear: I am not taking a stand either way on this. As I see it, the OP inappropriately posted this question to GQ for the purpose of knocking down (either in person or by like-minded posters) all suggestions, which makes it a GD post. Are there any absolute guarantees? Obviously not. To knock down lethal injection right off the bat already shows that this is an absolutist post.