Not all states administer the “sleepy shot”. Some just give a paralytic and then KCl. Having a heart attack while suffocating is probably not pleasant, but since you’ve been paralyzed you don’t demonstrate any observable discomfort. There’s also the issue of the drugs being administered out of order due to malfunction or incorrect setup.
That’s something no one seems to be considering. How humane are these methods when they don’t work quite as well as intended? What sort of risks do they present to the workers even when all goes well? What sort of controls do you have to have in place on the means of execution?
How about that opioid gas the Russians used in that hostage-situation a few years back? Not exactly an unpleasant way to die. A few (U.S.) states still have gas chambers left—maybe they could be retrofitted to use the stuff instead of hydrogen cyanide.
(For the record, I’m still in the “physically destroy the brain via mechanical means” camp, myself.)
Good luck finding a doctor willing to kill a healthy patient. That’s why so many lethal injections are botched; the needles are frequently inserted by a guard or other prison employee with little medical training, because an execution would be a violation of a doctor’s Hippocratic oath.
Nope, the anecdotal reports are all bollocks. What people are seeing is involuntary twitching at best.
The bullet in the brain isn’t as good because while it damages whatever part of the brain you shoot at, it doesn’t do anything to the rest. The result is often violent bodily convulsions (ask any hunter). Besides, which, you still have blood flow and breathing until the heart and lungs stop. It’s faster than lethal injection, but not faster than the guillotine.
A gunshot to the head is probably the best method as you can harvest the organs and it is probably painless to the victim. However it reeks of totalitarianism as gunshot murders have been the preferred method of execution the world over by the state.
Failing that, CO or a non-oxygen gas poisoning (argon, nitrogen, neon, etc) would be best.
I am somewhat a fan of using a large trebuchet to fling the person into a bunch of giant stationary knives. You could even make them wear a random animal-type jumpsuit, like on Happy Tree Friends.
Regarding the “beheadded heads” business, this I just pondered. A lot of animals worldwide are still slaughtered live, generally in onindustrialized countries. Many (I would guess) by beheading. Chickens for instance–their bodies flop around of course, but what to the heads do? Anything? If you ned to slaughter a cow and you’ve only got a machete, a chop through the spine in the neck seems the first course of action. That’s not technically a complete beheading, but it’s reasonably close enough to view any post-effects, isn’t it?..
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