To be fair, the British got the method of blowing from the mouth of cannons from the Mugals.
Check out executedtoday.com it’s the TV Tropes for us morbid fucks.
Slithy Tove right.
Native rulers in India also sometimes executed people by having them trampled by elephants. (In some cases if the elephant refused to step on the person, after a few tries they released the prisoner and let them go free, so it served as a sort of trial by ordeal).
I’d take being shot in the head over lethal injection anyday. I don’t think this is anywhere near the first time lethal injection has caused slow suffocation, even with the old drug cocktail.
Supposedly the electric chair is the most humane execution method.
You know the regime that guy served guillotined more people than Robpierre ever dreamed. And of course, being technokrauts, they had to retinker the design.
Firing squads don’t shoot you in the head. An eyewitness account of Gary Gilmore’s execution by firing squad:
There are not “more” appeals, but appeals that are not applicable outside of a capital case.
Most appeals attempt to commute the death sentence to life in prison. If one is already sentenced to life in prison, these appeals become unnecessary. Other types of appeals would still be available.
Right dose of morphine they aren’t going to feel anything either.
I don’t think there’s any hidden agenda or nefarious motives at work regarding not using morphine for lethal injection; reading the link upthread, that’s really not too far off from what Ohio did. Hydromorphone, trade name “Dilaudid,” is extremely similar to morphine, such that your average dope fiend would be happy as a clam to get his hands on some. It’s more potent and is given at lower dosages than morphine, but there were still problems with it’s use in lethal injection:
Prolonged execution renews debate over death by lethal injection
There are several non-nefarious reasons why states would want to stick with the drugs that they’ve been using. The three drug cocktail that all states used until recently was developed by the ME of Oklahoma in 1977, and was known to work reasonably well, leading to an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it effect. Additionally, there was already a body of case law saying its use was acceptable, so when authorities start straying from that they open the state up to new lawsuits, like you see in the story above. There’s also the issue of morphine and hydromorphone being schedule II drugs, more tightly controlled and presumably harder to obtain (until recently) than the less regulated schedule III and uncontrolled drugs formerly used, I’m actually surprised that Ohio used hydromorphone and find myself wondering where they got it from - no doctor is going to prescribe it for a death sentence and pharmacy distribution of it is watched pretty carefully.
The victim has already been killed by the condemned, likely with no regard to pain.
I just wanted to say thank you for posting this link—I’d known about German use of the Guillotine, but I’d never seen in depth all the technical developments they’d made over the decades. Mechanically and historically fascinating stuff.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the guillotine an effort to come up with a more humane form of execution? Wasn’t that Dr. Guillotine’s motive in designing it?
If they wanted to save money and mess, why not a captive bolt pistol?
Or if there’s a shortage of the drug, they could just recover and purify it after use… Hey, the death penalty is meant to be a deterrent too.
Not the only time when the designer’s invention went in an unintended direction with the entrepreneur’s implementation. A machine designed to make dying easier also made killing easier. And when it was used to kill young women for distributing leaflets, as the Nazis did to Sophie Scholl and the French did to Giap’s sister, it taints its humanitarianism.
…so really, the cattle slaughtering machine is the least “tainted” form of execution.
(And it damned well ought to be—the FDA would never stand for tainted machines touching future food. Not without at least a good scrubbing.)
You’re proposing garrote vil? Really? Once we stopped burning witches, it was considered the cruelest form of execution.
The mere death of the condemned isn’t enough, because if it was, a gas chamber hooked up to a car’s exhaust would suffice.
The bolt pistol is okay, but the use of drug from a non-validated manufacturing process would be prohibited by the FDA.
This is not entirely a joke; that is the problem with lethal injection. The only approved manufacturer of one of the drugs is in Europe, which will not export it for use for lethal injection. One state in the U.S. actually purchased the drug illegally from a distributor in Europe, and refused to return it - that was just so wrong. If anyone is interested I can look up the news reports.
Validated scrubbing, validated.
Why exactly do these drugs need to come from Europe, which has belatedly discovered scruples ? — No doubt more from fashion in morals than any particular sticking-point.
America has more pharmaceutical firms than you could shake a stick at; if they all refuse ( which is insanely unlikely, as the country’s democracy approves of capital punishment and capitalists have no ethics unimposed by governance ), there’s Mexico and then Latin America.
And at the last, there is the motherlode: combining getting the right drugs with America’s favorite pastime; buying cheap crap from China.
China has deliberately modeled executions on the American mode.
China executes a fair number, and the 3-drug cocktail could be made to a surplus for overseas sale to either national governments or sociopaths.
Barring outsourcing executions to the Third World, the simplest method would be if the State Department asked the Chinese Government for a list of their preferred suppliers and expedited import licences for those states needing the good stuff fast.
With respect, your post does not indicate you are well informed about U.S. drug regulations, E.U. laws concerning the death penalty, or even current Chinese policy on medical product manufacturing. No U.S. company manufactures one of the three drugs in the approved “cock-tail”. You can probably track that down from the linked articles.
I repeat my offer. If you want me to track down news reports on this issue, I will. I won’t be able to post until tomorrow night, though. I think I have several saved on my work hard-drive. Because part of my job is keeping informed on this kind of thing.
If you just want to assume I don’t know what I am talking about, have at it.
Either way, let me know.
Actually, I am not that interested in the death penalty nor the methods of such. Especially not the methods.
That no US company manufactures the cocktail in no way prevents them from doing so. I would assume that Chinese policies can be altered with the right inducement. EU laws are unimportant if they were sourced outside the EU ( and emphasizes the point that ethics are driven by government rather than the sellers’ hearts — after all they sold it before ). US drug regulations, although no doubt determined not to cause harm to those they are about to execute, have not prevented the importation from Europe, so why should they prevent importation from other places if the chemicals are equally well-prepared ?
Here’s a link on the EU, the drugs, and the existential crisis facing the American Execution Industry.
… sodium thiopental, which served to kill the pain, was used as part of a three-drug lethal injection cocktail in all but two states with the death penalty. Pancurium bromide paralyzed the inmate. Potassium chloride stopped the heart.
Anyway, no discussion of the death penalty is complete without a quote from that dear old children’s favourite, so…
He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one’s throat, before
The hangman with his gardener’s gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air !