Well, shoot. Guess Europe (all of it), Russia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, most of South America and Canada aren’t fair or just societies and nobody told 'em. They continue to exist in woeful ignorance of this important fact. You should probably write them to let them know.
(it’s cool, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China still are in the Club of Fair and Just Pals)
Well, sure. But I’m sure Rick Perry or Greg Abbott would love to have European drug companies tell them they can’t execute somebody. It would probably get them an extra five percent in the Republican primary if they promised to garrote the next guy personally with some rusty barbed wire.
If by “fair and just” we mean countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Burma, North Korea and the USA. No other western, advanced country retains the death penalty.
I love how people who won’t trust the government to run healthcare or other big projects have no problem leaving life and death decisions in their hands.
The article seems pretty biased: “makeshift drugs so that the local prison can kill someone.” Sounds like Sheriff Billy Bob has had enough with the town drunk and is asking his brother-in-law to give him a hot shot of xanax.
Anyways, the Supreme Court has never held the gas chamber, firing squad, or electric chair unconstitutional. If states are going to use the death penalty, then they need to use it or abolish it. Pennsylvania is the worst example. At least California is trying to do away with it while dragging their feet.
My state abolished the death penalty in 1965. But look at this list of executions from 1899 until then: http://www.wvculture.org/history/crime/executions.html. Note the time awaiting execution. Swift punishment, even in the 1950s. I understand the arguments on either side, but either use the DP or don’t. The current system is horrific.
As an excerpt from my link:
The murder was committed 11 days before his sentencing. I’ve studied his case because it had an interesting twist about resisting an unlawful arrest. He had two appeals before the State Supreme Court. He won the first one, but ole Jake wasn’t so lucky the second time around.
But my point is that he had two full hearings before the highest court in the state and the deed was still done within 1 1/2 years. None of this 30 years on death row nonsense.
I’m not sure that scenario is much worse than buying the drugs from a back alley driving school in London and then illegally importing them.
It’s not about revenge. It’s about justice. What is just about letting someone keep his life when he took the life of an innocent person?
Believe me…this is the only thing that makes me wonder about the death penalty. 
There are two very interesting posts about capital punishment on the Becker Posner blog. (a very interesting blog btw)
Posner notes that there is empirical research which shows that capital punishment prevents further murders.
“…but more recent work by economists Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul Rubin, and Joanna Shepherd provides strong support for Ehrlich’s thesis; these authors found, in a careful econometric analysis, that one execution deters 18 murders.”
He also notes that the possibility of executing an innocent man is very slight. “The number of people who are executed for a murder they did not commit appears to be vanishingly small. It is so small, however, in part because of the enormous protraction of capital litigation. The average amount of time that a defendant spends on death row before being executed is about 10 years. If the defendant is innocent, the error is highly likely to be discovered within that period.”
Here is Posner’s post: The Economics of Capital Punishment--Posner - The Becker-Posner Blog
Here is Becker’s post: More on the Economics of Capital Punishment-BECKER - The Becker-Posner Blog
No. But if they continue making it, I don’t support their objections to how its used once its sold
Well, that shows a completely predicable lack of thought on the subject.
In an article for the Standford Law Review, Donohue and Wolfers found major problems with the study done by Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul Rubin, and Joanna Shepherd. The regression that they claim produced the figure of saving 18 lives when run properly actually shows the opposite. That 18 additional lives are lost for every execution! Not that Donohue and Wolfers are suggesting that that model is accurate either. Instead they found the whole study to be fundamentally flawed. They argue instead that we just haven’t executed enough people since the Supreme Court injunction against capital punishment was lifted for there to be strong evidence either way.
And what makes you assume that killing him quickly is better? Death penalty cases involve so much time and appeals in large part because they are overwhelmingly examples of terrible policework and law. Is there virtue in swiftly executing some guy whose defense lawyer slept through the trial, or who was arrested and convicted because he was the first convenient black guy the crime could be pinned on?
You know, it’s really just symbolic. It’s not as if expired lethal injection meds aren’t good enough. Nearly all of the time, those expiration dates are just CYA and have no actual relationship to the decay rate of the drug.
And as other posters pointed out, they could execute a dozen ways - some of which sound less painful that the method they currently use. Poking a hole in a vein is painful, while a clear bag filled with nitrous oxide would be almost instant and probably somewhat pleasant.
Is life in prison really “their life”? But more importantly, you’re not advocating justice. You’re advocating revenge. It completely ignores the idea of rehabilitation, a core element in any modern justice system. It completely ignores that there is no return - you cannot free a wrongly accused person who is dead, and the number and blatancy of false convictions can be quite staggering. In fact, that you trust the government to correctly identify people who deserve to be killed but not to provide health care, stimulate the economy, or really do much of anything else…
Holy wall of text, batman. Okay, let’s address the claim about executing the innocent. For the 1352 executed since 1976, there have been 142 people freed from death row. That should say quite a bit - 10% of those on the way to their death have been exonerated. What’s more, I actually looked for one of those papers. The Joanna Shpherd paper. And I found this:
What’s more, those papers have come under serious fire by other economists and law professors who find the models flawed and oversimplified and the correlations too simplistic. Correlations too simplistic? Cited by cornopean? Perish the thought! :roll:
Quote:*
Is there, then, a danger that states will go back to more brutal methods of execution? To hanging, the gas chamber, the firing squad, or even the electric chair? *
None of these have ever been ruled invalid by SCOTUS. In fact, when done properly hanging is the most merciful. It brings immediate unconsciousness and near instantaneous death.
I don’t like lethal injection execution. It seems creepy. Sterile, surgical death comes across as Mengele-ish to me. And letting the monster peacefully drift off to death doesn’t infer a sense of consequence to anyone. The sounds of a trap door and snapping neck do!
***If ***the hanging is done properly.
Yeah, there is a slight element of intellectual disingeniousness to it – that it got adopted widely in the US strikes me as deriving more of seeking a way to make execution less *aesthetically *displeasing (no blood, discharges of body fluids, smoke and scent of burning flesh, gasping and convulsions), a preemptive strategy to make it so people could not challenge the method as “cruel” (as they would if you had a malfunctioning electric chair that took four zaps to do the job and caught on fire).
But every form of execution carries with it some distress and risk of botching the job. You want to minimize those elements but recognize they cannot be totally eliminated , and if you’re willing to take a life in the name of justice, then be willing to look at what it entails(but do NOT put in charge of it those who would delight in it. Capital punishment should be an extreme measure that is taken reluctantly and as a society we absolutely should care about NOT being sadistic ourselves when conducting an execution. Justice <does not equal> payback. ).
IMO the death penalty will eventually be mostly left by the wayside, the tide of history seems against it, and refusal by the suppliers of the tools may be one way that is driven forward but will not be itself what ends it.
Well, the original (flawed) study was done by economists. It’s not surprising practitioners of “the dismal science” got the numbers exactly backward.
Regarding the OP, I think it’s about time…there has been a lot of furor about local pharmacists (although not, I think, Big Pharma) refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control and/or “morning after” pills on moral grounds. If they’re against killing, this is the next step toward a logically consistent stance.
Wicked.