Question – if there’s a botched execution, do they give a reprieve, or try again? On an episode of Law & Order, they let the guy live, when they fucked up the execution.
Willie Francis was unsuccessfully electrocuted in Louisiana in 1946, and after legal appeals was executed a year later by the same method. Ohio botched an execution in 2009 and the guy is still on death row. Of course it’s five years later and he’s still alive, so who knows, but the state still intends to kill him eventually.
This was an episode of *Monk. *
The guy ate his last supper, then dropped dead. So the mystery was: who the hell would poison someone just before his execution?
Isn’t a good reason for this that there may be new evidence found proving the condemned person’s innocence right up to before they are executed, so until then you should treat them as deserving of life as you would any other person?
I can imagine it would be just as awful to let a condemned-but-actually-innocent person die and decline to administer lifesaving medical treatment as it would be to execute him.
Having recently reviewed my personal Advanced Directives, I can tell you that DNR refers specifically to resuscitation. Hemostasis |= resuscitation. Apendectomy |= resuscitation. Etc.
Before the UK outlawed the death penalty, it varied. There are cases of people being hanged and surviving and then being let free (e.g. Margaret Dickson in 1724), and there’s the case of the execution of John Lee in 1885 being aborted after the trap door failed three times.
Back then, a botched execution might have been taken as a message from God. Less likely nowadays.
And…?
Weekend at Bernie’s. Only with Barney Stimson. Prop him up, go through all the rigamarole and everybody goes home thinking it happened.
Until society decides whether executions are intended to be painful revenge or humane eliminations, it should avoid them altogether.
Humiliating example is another motive.
Its hanged till death, or electrocuted till dead. Legally speaking, the botching is irrelevant to the sentence.
That’s a very good point, and answers the question, in my mind.