Unless you’re particularly vain, like Marshal Joachim Murat, who gave the command to his own firing squad:
Yes. I did a double red donation a few weeks ago and they had a nice selection.
Back when we were doing underground nuclear tests, I always thought of securing all the current crop of executees to the bomb in question. Instant vaporization.
You’d screw up some of the test results, I’d think, as crazy as that might sound. Reading old descriptions of tests, and what the researchers were looking for, it looked like some of the signals they were trying to capture were very transient, “bomblight,” which a bunch of people sitting next to the device might obscure or interfere with. Or might not; a lot of open air tests had “shot cabs” and other machinery surrounding the device.
Another, more practical concern is I had thought many of the tests were conducted within narrow boreholes, barely wider than the device. The holes were then cemented in around whatever cables and supporting wires led to the device.
The movie Katyn shows a very gripping example of this towards the final reel. Very efficient, and very horrifying. The movie was available in its entirety on youtube, and though in Polish, it was easy to follow what was happening.
The primary executioner during the 28 nights of what later became known as, The Katyn Massacre, was Vasily Blokhin, and a brief explanation of his methods and the procedure is listed at the cited wiki entry. He ended up personally shooting 7,000 or so people in the back of the head, mostly with a .25 ACP pistol.
You could give them the donut before hand, as their last meal. No need to worry about expensive steak and lobster dinners.
is that still a thing? I mean snacks during / after donation?
Besides still being a thing (I also did a double-red a couple weeks ago) at some point in the last 10 to 15 years they started doing “donor rewards”. Being old enough to remember when the only benefit of donating blood was a couple snacks and a feeling of charity, the “donor rewards” thing kinda weirds me out and I’ve yet to cash any of mine in.
I have to admit that your proposal exceeds my tolerance for mess. I was patting myself on the back for preferring the guillotine over lethal injection (if the convict wanted it) but death via squash gives me the heebie jeebies. So I guess I can’t discount the messiness criteria entirely.
Agree with LSLGuy that the death penalty is, “an unholy mess of conflicting base and high desires on the part of the state and the citizens.”
My carve-out for the death penalty involves cases where the convict poses an ongoing direct and actual threat to the public. I have in mind the execution of dictators such as Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania. This only happens when the state is weak (eg during revolution). And even in these cases, there’s the risk of creating martyrs, not to mention escalating retaliation.
It’s been done. Of course it has.
Do NOT follow this wikilink. The hover-over may be plenty. Or too much depending on your sensitivities.
Can’t believe I missed this wonderful thread on the first go-round.
Or classic cinema.
Have you any interesting “professional” suggestions? You always bring a novel perspective to these sorts of problems.
if we truly wanted death to be humane we would knock people unconscious before executing them. It doesn’t matter how you are executed once unconscious, it is technically humane. You can cut me into 1000 pieces, if I’m unconscious I won’t notice.
The electric chair looks brutal but it is supposedly very humane. The electricity knocks you unconscious in less than 1/100 of a second, which means you are unconscious before your brain can process the pain signals.
But we want a form of execution that lets the person be conscious until the end and that also doesn’t look brutal to the outside (a well done electrocution or well place bullet to the head is very humane despite looking very inhumane).
And they’re pretty enthusiastic about distributing them. I’m an intermittent faster, and when I donate on non-eating days I almost have to get physical with the volunteers to get out without some kind of snack.
Huh. When I donate, I’m ignored once I’m done–I’m 100% I could stride out without even waiting a few minutes if I wanted to.
Ask most prisoners if they’d prefer the death penalty or ‘rotting in prison for life’, where they are in fact alive, and life rarely means life.
As I work with them every single weekday, I do ask prisoners this, including lifers. Fortunately my state does not have the death penalty. I’ve observed that most long-timers do manage to build a life for themselves where they do find some satisfaction and meaning, IF they have some social/coping skills and IF they’re not contained in a supermax or extremely rigid maximum facility.
Right now they’re very stressed due to covid restrictions, as there’s been loss of recreation, hobby, visitors, certain job categories, etc.
Even so, the vast majority choose life. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
If you want something more humane than the current system, how about reforming the prisons so the people in them don’t rot?
And if we did executions by exsanguination, we wouldn’t be able to use the blood. Have you ever actually donated? They don’t want anyone who’s ever used injected drugs, they don’t want any man who’s had sex with another man, and they don’t want anyone who’s ever been imprisoned (presumably because of the very high correlation with those other two things).
Just make their cells reasonably airtight and quietly replace the air with pure nitrogen while they’re asleep.
Don’t tell them the precise day this is happening, either. Just let them know their last appeal failed, set some computer to randomly send in the gas sometime over the next two weeks, and once it has collect the body.
What the purpose of making it a random date?
I could see a court ruling that to be cruel and/or unusual.
To confound the sense of ramping panic. If you don’t know when it’s happening they can’t count the seconds.
I freely concede that a proper psychologist might tell me that I’m full of shit and that telling them the precise second of their impending death will help them go quietly to sleep the night before and pass in complete peace. What can I say - I’ve never been about to be executed before, so my thoughts on the matter might be mistaken.
I still think that killing them in their sleep via nitrogen asphyxiation is about as humane as we can possibly get.