Nitrogen asphyxiation.
Firing squad*. No blindfold, but I’m not sure they give you a choice. Lethal injection is at the bottom. It always seemed so grotesquely clinical, so if you’re going to kill people, don’t pretend it’s a simple medical procedure. Guillotine might be cool. It may not open a capital punishment debate, but the news will be stuck for awhile on the proper way to pronounce “guillotine.”
As I understand it, crucifixion = slow suffocation, maybe with exposure mixed in. Try holding your hands above your head for several minutes, imagine that for hours or days.
*Note to self: must commit crime in Utah or Oklahoma. Also must have done it in the past to be grandfathered in. Try to become heavy IV drug user before, so that they can’t find a vein.
I don’t even remember that poll, but apparently I voted for “death by elephant”. Which was probably a rash decision, but too late to change the future now…
Like thelurkinghorror, I’d definitely choose firing squad over lethal injection. Bullets are so much more manly, and call me silly, but I’ve always had an irrational fear of needles.
Sent back in time and left to live a long life, ala the Weeping Angels. Technically, that still fits the “dead by this time next month” rule.
At least it gets you out in the open air.
Again, my point in making this thread was that you don’t have to choose any legally recognized execution method. You just have to choose something guaranteed to kill you.
I like the “being tossed out of an airplane without a parachute” option, too, but’cha can’t beat getting blow’d up.
I don’t think Oklahoma has ever actually shot anyone. but yeah, that would be interesting if you could swing a deal to be executed by firing squad. “I’ll confess, but you have to shoot me.”
I think it says that they maintain it if lethal injection and electrocution become cruel and unusual.
The weirdest gun execution (Wikipedia classifies it as “execution by shooting” and not "firing squad) is of Andriza Mircovich, who was killed by a “shooting machine” when nobody wanted to do it. Funny enough, a blank round was included, likely to spare the steampunk robots feelings. And that was the birth of SkyNet.
A parachute not opening - that’s a way to die. Getting caught in the gears of a combine. Having your nuts bit off by a Laplander, that’s the way I wanna go.
Hey! Peter! I can see your house from here!
Would you not be just a little curious to see if it is true though?
If anything involving technology currently in use is acceptable, I want them to take me up into space, put me in a spacesuit with a few hours’ worth of oxygen, then push me out the airlock. If I’m gonna die, at least I can enjoy a view while doing so that I’d be unlikely to experience otherwise.
If we restrict the range of options to current or historical means of execution, I’m going with the guillotine. If I’m conscious at all after my head is severed, it will be quite brief because no more oxygen will be delivered to my brain cells, and what’s left of my nervous system will likely be in too much shock for any pain to register during that brief interval.
If anything technologically possible is OK, and expense be damned, then I want the means of execution to be being sent on a one-way mission to Mars. Being briefly the first human being on the Red Planet would be a pretty cool way to go.
That’s it. Always look on the bright side of death.
What’s cruel and unusual is strapping a guy down to a table, chair, in a gas chamber. While they sit there wondering whens it start, what does it feel like, should I try and hold my breath. OHGODDAMNTHISHURTSAIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…Now…personally I may feel that 1-5 minutes of excrutiating agony is a small price to pay for whatever got them there. But if you really want to keep the pain down:
4 man firing squad behind partitions (in case of ricochets) aim for the head. Execution guaranteed to be over in seconds. I think the con of it being grotesque and a pain to clean up doesn’t outweigh its effectiveness.
Equipment list:
1 desert
1 sunset
1 thermonuclear device (large)
1 platform
1 deckchair
1 one-hour timer (with attached randomiser)
Booze (lots)
Method:
- Place large thermonuclear device in desert
- Place platform over nuke
- Place deckchair on platform
- Start drinking booze
- Start timer (randomiser ensures that the device will detonate at an unknown time within one hour of activation)
- Drink more booze
- Watch sunset.
repeat steps 6 & 7 until boom.
OD on euphoric drugs (pump me with heroin and ecstasy until I die). That or be shot in the back of the head. I know hanging is supposed to be painless, but it looks scary.
The last two Hyperion novels have something like that, a “Schrödinger box.” It covers a loophole in that you are not executed as the RNG can go off in a few minutes or decades, and you may die of old age, although trapped in a cramped spacecraft in the middle of nowhere.
That and, if fiction is correct, you will have the indignity of pooping yourself.
I would choose death by drowning. 
Dunno…depends on whether you’re the snu-snu’er or snu-snu’ee and if that matches up with your preferences.
Some of the cited methods are a little peculiar, if your aim is to lessen the torture for the condemned. I mean, we use drowning (waterboarding) as a method of torture for crying out loud… My own preference, having experienced part of it already, is the method used in the ‘organ banks’ era of Larry Niven’s Known Space series: general anesthesia, and then complete organ removal for later transplantation. IME, anesthesia was like flipping off a light switch, with the only discomfort being the initial IV emplacement. OTOH, you know it’s happening, as Dale Sams indicated already
With his method though, you still know you’re going to be killed. I’ve read the old Soviet Union used to kill the condemned, when they had time to do it at leisure, by telling the condemned they could leave their cell to write a personal appeal to Comrade Stalin. The end of the movie Katyn, is how it was probably done when they didn’t have much time… It is a horrifying scene, and incredibly moving.
They would have been led to a room with a table, writing material, and a chair. (Just ignore the reddish-brown stains in the wood, zek.) Once the condemned was seated and writing, an executioner would quietly step out from behind the door, place a pistol near the back of the victim’s head, and fire. Provided the executioner was good at their trade, and some of them had lots of practice, death should be unforeseen by the condemned, with loss of consciousness almost instantaneous.