If you’re gonna go to all that trouble, just use a guillotine and be done with it. Yeah, there’s lots of blood, but it wouldn’t be nearly as messy as the one the OP proposes. Do YOU want to be the one to clean up the slab? 
Hehe, you saw that too huh?
Personally, I don’t know how important it is to make the death humane and painless but if we are going to try and avoid inflicting any pain on someone who has committed a capital offense, then I agree, lethal injection seems kinda stupid.
I’d say give the condemned a choice. Hanging or shooting or Sir Ilyan Payne.
[Quote=Velocity]
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but the same applies to injecting drugs.
[/quote]
I was indeed being sarcastic, but you’re right that botching can always occur. Even the nitrogen-poison method which involves no physical intrusion into the body be it by hypodermic or blunt force, can be botched, if we think it’s possible whoever filled the nitrogen tanks screwed up and filled them with an acidic gas or something.
If execution is going to occur, though, I’ll favour the simpler method that requires as little specialized skill as possible and as few mechanical devices as possible.
Because there is an unconscious need for the method of execution to be a careful balance between painful and painless. Too gruesome and it appals people; too painless and the ghouls are not satisfied.
Just a note to say how proud I am to be a citizen of a State that has decided to avoid this problem by stopping killing people. Most civilised states have done so and the US is the only Western Democracy that glories in judicial killing. It makes Americans look like spoilt children demanding their own way. Sad.
Americans have no legal collective say on capital punishment due to the way our constitution is written. In so far as the Federal constitution intersects with this area of State criminal law at all, there was a brief period in the 1970s when a Supreme Court ruling temporarily stopped all executions. Since then only five States have regularly exercised it and many do not have it as a punishment at all, several banned capital punishment earlier than 1850, and in a sense Americans were one of the first places where capital punishment was prohibited by law.
I actually think capital punishment is the only appropriate and moral punishment for some crimes, but just don’t believe it can be morally executed by a State actor for a host of reasons. I don’t really see any intrinsic immorality in the State killing someone though, States kill people all the time–including those without capital punishment.
I would like to expand on the “makes Americans look like spoilt[sic] children demanding their own way”, what does that nonsense passage even mean? You seem to act as though it’s somehow inappropriate for a country to have different laws from other countries. There’s no legal or moral requirement for Country A to adopt a law just because Country A + B+C…have adopted a law.
I’d add to that: 1) popular sentiment, either in America or in Europe, isn’t exactly a good guide to right and wrong, and 2) it’s odd that you restrict your comparisons to ‘western democracies’, as if those are the only countries that might have something to teach us.
I would also add, personally, that I oppose the death penalty for common crimes (though I support it for treason, rebellion etc.) and in particular dislike lethal injection because of its pseudo-medical appearance. If you don’t feel OK with shooting or beheading someone, perhaps that’s a sign you ought not to be killing them in the first place.
Is Japan not a Western democracy?
I know the history and the politics of judicial killing well.
The problem with the US position is one of being out of synchronicity with more civilised states- much as they were in avoiding abolishing the slave trade for a generation beyond most other nations, and then being the sole political entity that continued slavery by another name for a further hundred years.
In thirty years time the current position on judicial killing will look much the same as we currently decry amputations, blindings and beatings under Sharia Law. Corporal punishment is medieval and not justified under any modern moral code that is why the civilised world has moved on and only China, Iraq, Iran, the US and Japan and other smaller immoral countries still insist on the right of the state to kill its citizens judicially.
And as to your snarky “(sic)”, if you had any interest in affairs outside the US you would know that the rest of the English speaking world uses spoilt rather than spoiled- once again the US is out of step with the majority opinion. I usually write in US English but in this case emotion took over and I wrote in my more usual British English.
Japan does not glory in execution, and has cultural reasons deep in the Japanese legal system and culture (which has been democratic only since 1950). Better is expected of you.
Nowhere else in the Western world is judicial killing used or gloried in. Even Russia has forsworn it.
The interesting point is that every Liberal Democracy and many less liberal but democratic regimes have given up judicial killing and have suffered no problems with this. If it is not necessary in similar polities, then it becomes an indefensible position as it is obviously not a necessary evil, but an act of barbarism.
I’d guess an overdose of the drug that killed Michael Jackson would work. Getting someone to write a prescription for it might be an issue.
I understand carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is pretty painless. They’d have to build an airtight chamber, though. Unless they wanted to use a face mask, which could be problematic.
It might work medically, but it wouldn’t work politically. Missouri was going to use it but the EU threatened to limit exports to the US.
There is so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to begin.
-
The United States wasn’t the last country to abolish slavery. The sultanates of northern Nigeria, Chad and Niger; Nepal; Ethiopia; and the Gulf Arab states all practiced slavery into the 20th century, fully legally. The French and Belgians practiced certain forms of forced-labour (with massive body counts) in their African colonies right up until the 1920s.
-
I support corporal punishment, actually, and at least one country (Bolivia) reintroduced it in the last few years. Of course it is ‘medieval’, but how does that make it wrong? Unless you commit what C.S. Lewis liked to call the ‘chronological fallacy’, where you believe in a sort of cult of Progress, and old practices are bad simply because they’re old. Do you care to actually provide an argument against corporal punishment, other than ‘um, medieval! bad!’
-
I’m not much a principled believer in democracy, so stating that ‘other western democracies do X’ isn’t particularly likely to convince me. I’m not particularly fond of Islam either, but maybe in some regards the Muslim states have something to teach us.
-
There are actually good arguments against the death penalty, that I find mostly convincing (again, I believe in executing some kinds of criminals against the state, but not murderers, rapists, or other criminals, and so if I had my way the death penalty would be much rarer than it is, in peace time). It’s a pity you stick to such terrible ones.
Slavery was abolished in 1833 in the British Empire and only a generation later in the USA. In those days of British hegemony, the US was an outlier. Being proud of the fact that the US was not the last to abolish it is amusing. Then slavery was allowed to continue in the US in all but name for a further century. It amazed Brits that the US still had segregated military units in WWII- seemed so racist and anachronistic. Until the Civil Rights Acts in the sixties, many of the effects of slavery were maintained, even though it was technically abolished. The state of Virginia was still fighting mixed marriages in the late sixties. The USA has form for being socially behind most of the world which it claims to lead, the current example being health care which is universal through all Western Democracies and a patent failure in the USA.
I used Corporal punishment as any punishment of the body including capital punishment. As a further note on the US as an outlier in such matters, it is one of the few countries with advanced western claims to still allow the beating of children.
And such pressure will be placed on the US from those countries that consider Judicial Killing to be in error. We will not extradite if killing is the proposed outcome. We will not be party to judicial killing through commerce. The European Convention on Human Rights is quite clear that any flirting with such barbarous practices is illegal. It is our right to refuse to countenance such activities in the same way that we oppose slavery, racism, sexual inequality and other matters that are seen as basic to our shared moral stance.
I wonder why, since frankly, we are a mess of a country founded on wonderful ideals we’ve seldom managed to live up to. We were late on slavery, late on gay rights (by European standards), we have a love affair with guns and violence, we still haven’t figured out health care or social welfare. We avoided committing in both World Wars for as long as we could (and since then have swung towards meddling). You can expect… you’ll be disappointed. I live here and I’m disappointed.
I don’t see why we need to wring our hands about new and elaborate methods of execution when hanging and beheading work just as well and are if anything more humane, since death occurs almost instantaneously and there is little to no opportunity for the condemned to feel pain.
By all accounts, Kenneth McDuff was executed humanely.
His victims, not so much.
You seem to have me confused with some kind of American patriot here. Far from it.
I believe in corporal punishment and (specifically for treason) capital punishment, not because of who practices them, but because of the principles involved. Corporal punishment is for the record, illegal in America (as a judicial punishment), which is why I mentioned other countries where it’s legal.
And you haven’t answered my question: why is it only the western democracies that you think we should learn from? There are plenty of countries in the world that are neither western nor democratic.