More than that - the death has to look clean and sterile to observers. Decapitation by guillotine and long-drop hanging are both quick and essentially painless, but because they look gruesome they’re viewed as unacceptable. (Indeed, the latter came to be abandoned because botched hangings tended to result in the former.)
Hanging, guillotine, and firing squad are all very quick if done properly. My guess is that the same is true of the electric chair. Cyanide gas produces several minutes of pain and suffering if everything goes perfectly. Nitrogen gas is completely painless, and i doubt there are legal burdens to using it.
(Lethal injections are hard to do now, because drug companies are understandably loath about having their products used this way.)
I once read that Mark Twain wrote something to the effect, “I’m sorry this letter is so long; I didn’t have time to write a short one.” Yep.
So the doctor says, “We have bad news, good news…and terrible news. The bad news is you have a horrible disease that will kill you in a few months. The good news is that there’s a medicine that cures it. The terrible news is that the company that makes the medicine also makes lethal injection drugs for some states. Therefore no hospital or medical facility carries it: the medical establishment is sure patients wouldn’t accept a life-saving drug from a manufacturer that’s tainted by that association.”
We (Americans) have laws that hopefully reflect the will of the majority of the people. I may like the tax code or the speed limit or the abortion laws, or I may not. But if duly elected officials decided them, then they are what they are until and unless duly elected officials change them. I’m not at liberty to break those laws without leaving myself open to a variety of punishments. Likewise, the death penalty is the will of the government, in states where it’s used, because it was approved by representatives in the government.
Obviously pharma loves to have big government contracts (e.g. supplying medicine to military posts, VA hospitals, etc.) but when something that could be controversial comes around, they won’t go along with it? That means private companies are essentially overriding policy decided by elected officials when they deny the tools to implement it. Is that illegal? Unpatriotic? Ungrateful? I’m not sure. I know some claim ethics dictate their course, but big business being driven by ethics is often dubious IMO. I think it’s really because it could hurt their bottom line and that overrides cooperating with the government. That’s BS.
Maybe the government can’t force them to sell. The government can, however, not renew contracts they have with them or curtail what they buy etc. Maybe the government can produce their own chemicals or import from other countries that also use capital punishment.
I’m not particularly for or against the death penalty. For me it’s really about honoring what the democratically-elected representatives chose. I think with Trumpers trying to convince people the election was stolen, that idea resonates a lot with me these days.
Many of those drug manufacturers are based in the EU, which outlaws capital punishment and officially considers it barbaric. I don’t see how the US can force them to sell their products for something they may feel is morally reprehensible. I don’t think it should, honestly. And I don’t think some German drug company feels it ought to be “patriotic” to the US. (or really, to those US states that execute people, since many US states don’t.)
From their perspective, this is kind of like search engines giving the state-approved answers in dictatorships. Except that the dictatorships have said. “or otherwise you can’t do any business here”, and the US has not said that to the drug manufacturers.
I’d much prefer a firing squad.
From the trial of a 93 year old former SS officer:
The trial of a 93-year-old former SS guard has heard how the Nazis used a lethal pesticide to slowly and painfully kill over one million victims of the Holocaust. Former Auschwitz accountant Oskar Groening is on trial in Luneburg, Germany, for his involvement in the deaths of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at a Nazi camp in Poland in 1944.
Last Wednesday, 44-year-old Sven Anders, a coroner from the University Clinic of Hamburg-Eppendorf, delved into the horrendous properties of Zyklon-B gas, the pesticide used in the concentration camp death chambers. He described how Zyklon-B, which “attacks the brain”, causes extreme pain, violent seizures and kills anyone who inhales it from cardiac arrest “within seconds”. He explained how the gas was originally produced as a pesticide to cleanse large buildings like warehouses and barracks.
I’m afraid you haven’t got the story right. The “terrible news” in this story is that the life-saving drug is manufactured in other countries, such as the EU countries, and they are barred by their laws from selling it to countries who use that drug to kill their citizens.
Drug manufacturers in other countries have to obey their own laws. If those other countries have concluded that it is wrong to use those drugs to kill people, that’s a decision they can make.
Ah, so it’s not the “conscious” of the companies, but just that they need to follow the laws in their own countries. That makes sense.
I knew it had to do with EU feelings about executions, and the impact of those on drugs manufacturers in the EU.
It can also be the conscience issue for US drug companies. If they are committed to well-being of their patients, and don’t want to be associated with their drugs being used to kill people, that’s their choice.
Put bluntly, do they want to be lumped in with Farben/Bayer as companies that will help kill people’s , as mentioned upthread?
Yes, in the US, some governments have decided that it is okay for the state to kill people.
But in a democracy, citizens can always dissent from the decisions of their governments. There’s no law compelling drug companies to sell their drugs, so the example of income taxes or other laws doesn’t apply.
Slight nitpick…some of the drugs seem to be made in the US, but the company was bought by an EU company. (I didn’t realize we’d run out of American-owned suppliers for the recommened drugs.) This article was updated in Oct 2019.
Since lethal injection was introduced in the 1970s, sleep has been induced by an anesthetic called sodium thiopental. But the last U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, Hospira, closed its North Carolina plant in 2009.
Since then, American prisons have experimented with other anesthetics, including several still produced by Hospira. Pfizer acquired Hospira last year, assuming control of those products.
Anyway, that means we have foreign companies vetoing the government’s will.
I’m not pro or con DP but I’m pro on following what was legislated. @puzzlegal implies it’s barbaric and maybe so, but we consent to be governed…if the elected officials make barbaric policy and we don’t want to be barbaric, our recourse is to elect different officials. Also from the article:
According to a Gallup poll last fall, the death penalty is still favored by 6 out of 10 Americans.
So 6/10 of Americans are barbaric, and that’s a majority. But if the lawmakers didn’t have the foresight to realize they wouldn’t have a supply, that’s on them. From that same article:
Sharp argues against the notion that executions have been “botched.” He thinks that the availability of pentobarbital, another anesthetic, will allow for death by lethal injection to continue.
That implies they could acquire that, though again, the article is from 2019.
And of course they can always go back to other forms—firing squad, electric chair, hanging, etc. It seems ironic that this started because they were trying to create a more humane form of execution.
Which is precisely why they should be used. If people are going to insist on a barbarous punishment, rub their noses in its barbarity instead of making it “nice.”
I do think it’s barbaric. Furthermore, just as we allow citizens to be conscientious objectors, and not actually shoot the enemy in wartime, I don’t think that people or companies should be compelled to take active part in an execution, either by being made to pull the switch or to being made to sell their products for others to use to kill people.
I’m not going to go on message boards arguing that the guillotine is an extraordinarily cruel way to execute people, but neither do I want to be the one who sharpens the blade.
US law doesn’t apply to non-Americans doing business outside of the US. It’s not a “veto”.
It’s “your laws end at the shoreline”. With an added dose of “we have to follow the laws of our own countries, thanks.”
As for following what was legislated: did any of the death penalty states also pass a law that compels drug companies to sell their products for the purpose of killing under state law? Because unless there’s that kind of compulsion, drug companies aren’t disregarding “what was legislated”. There’s no law that applies to them.
A few things:
-Zyklon B isn’t actually a generic term for Hydrogen cyanide, it is a trademark for a specific formulation of Hydrogen cyanide. HCN has been used in the United States in gas chambers since the 1920s, and it was used for pest control back to the 1880s, the formulations used for pest control and gas chambers in the U.S. pre-1940 are not identical to Zyklon B, which was invented in Germany in the 1920s as a pesticide. Some posters have already alluded to this, but I wanted to get it front and center. It’s not dissimilar from the pesticide Permethrin–there are several specific formulations of it with different properties, the different properties of different Permethrin products affect how it can be delivered and used, this is a similar situation to the different HCN products that were invented in the first half of the 20th century.
So it’s more accurate to say that the product Arizona is looking to use has the same base chemical as Zyklon B, but so did a number of other products.
-The fact that poison gas has been used since the 1972 Furman v Georgia case, that case required any state wanting to reimplement the death penalty to go through a few legal processes. Any form of execution that has survived court challenge since 1972, thus is much more likely to move through appeals processes with greater speed, and survive legal challenges. Nitrogen suffocation is all but certainly more humane and easier to engineer a system for than HCN, but because it would be a de novo execution style with no judicial precedent, litigation around it would be extremely long lived and expensive. The state would almost certainly ultimately prevail, but that litigation cost is a major incentive to consider using methods that already have survived many judicial challenges.
-I’m against the death penalty on procedural grounds. I don’t believe it can be administered fairly in our system of justice. On moral grounds in rare cases where guilt is certain and the crime reaches certain moral thresholds, I am okay with it, but those cases are rare enough, and the administration of the system is so flawed, that I support its abolition in the United States because the few cases where I think it would be just don’t justify the downside.
-That being said, if we’re going to execute, and we likely will continue to do so for a few decades, I think we should do it in a way that is humane. I believe firing squad is the best method of execution in the United States. Why? Because 4 rifle rounds to the heart leads to massive loss of blood pressure and unconsciousness very close to instantaneously, and death follows with certainty very shortly afterward. So it is humane. Second, we have a huge amount of highly trained riflemen in this country. We have a huge number of safe and effectively designed gun ranges. These are the physical mechanisms of safely setting up a firing squad. No other form of execution do we have such expertise sitting around. Hanging required a pretty damn good an experienced hangman, and “mistakes were made” frequently, we have basically no experienced hangmen in the United States. Gas chambers were the most complicated, most dangerous, and probably least humane execution system we used in the 20th century, and have been mostly disused for 50 years. The design and operation of them will involve lots of non-experts setting up really dangerous shit. The electric chair is similar, only being different in that it was used a bit more frequently and more recently than the gas chamber, but we haven’t electrocuted that many people since 1972, fuck up rates with the electric chair were not uncommon.
To really hammer down making a safe gas chamber, electric chair and even lethal injection, could be done, but it would require the expertise and involvement of professionals who almost certainly will not want to be involved in the “organs of execution.” Chemists, doctors, engineers etc. On the flipside we have millions and millions of trained riflemen in the United States, many of whom are ardent supporters of the death penalty.
I wanted to point out that you didn’t explicitly call it barbaric at first, but I gathered you thought so. I didn’t want to put the word in your mouth, though.
That poll result—6 in 10—doesn’t really surprise me. That doesn’t mean they must be right, of course. I don’t usually think of that percentage of Americans being barbaric but maybe I’m naive. Remember when Michael Fay got caned for damaging those cars in Singapore? Sometimes other cultures look barbaric to us but maybe we tolerate a lot…until we don’t. I don’t know how to reconcile that 6 in 10.
@Northern_Piper What was legislated is that there be a death penalty in certain states. I don’t know if they specified the method but I doubt it. I’m just pointing out that they don’t seem to be shying away from it, abolishing it, or anything like that. The people wanted it and apparently still do.
You’ve convinced me. Firing squad, made up of people who freely choose to do that, sounds like the best practical option at this time.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean a non-government actor has to assist, particularly non-Americans outside the US. It’s not a veto, and it’s not disobeying “what was legislated”.
It doesn’t really matter whether i think it’s barbaric. What matters is that the EU considers it barbaric, and that’s where those drugs are made.
Just to note, the poll you linked was from 2015. Support has dropped to 55% in the more recent poll last year. Also interesting, when the question was asked “which do you think is the better penalty for murder – the death penalty or life imprisonment, with absolutely no possibility of parole,” 35% favored the death penalty and 60% favored life in prison.
But now there is a movement to end Life Imprisonment.
I always thought the guillotine was dropped (haha) because concerns that the decapitated head remained conscious a few seconds after. Even the master, Cecil Adams, has admitted that it may be possible.
"One can of course never be certain that anyone in this predicament is aware of his surroundings and realizes (briefly) what has happened to him. But I concede the possibility that he might.
Cecil Adams"
~Max