Would the captured runaway slaves have not been beaten if they’d escaped without assistance?
I think there are two main reasons, one bad and one good – the bad reason is just politics and optics: the idea that an injection is somehow less barbaric and violent, and more civilized, than a bullet to the brain. The good reason is that someone has to do be the executioner: I think that it’s very likely that shooting multiple people in the back of the head would be far, far more damaging to one’s psyche than injecting multiple people with drugs.
Many wouldn’t have attempted escape had they not known of the Underground Railroad.
But therefore it is neither cruel nor unusual.
Regards,
Shodan
But it is inhumane. Cruelty implies a motive, and there was no motive for suffering here. But it was inhumane all the same.
We’re a highly consumerist yet not especially educated society, and market research (aka “elections”) shows that our larger customer demographic wants capital punishment.
Lethal injection wasn’t designed to be less painful and messy for the condemned, it was designed to be less messy and painful for the administrators and witnesses.
So, in our never-ending quest to bring you the product you want in the format that best suits you, we are all exited about our impending roll-out of nitrogen hypoxia chambers as the Next Big Thing.
What’s the fuss? We are a barbaric people. We do enhanced interrogations when simple questioning would do, we bomb weddings on a somewhat regular basis, we imprison a higher percent of our population than any other nation in history, we worship wealth and humiliate the poor. We engage in preemptive wars on grounds that are lies and stupid lies at that. We legalize and allow and encourage or legislators to be bribed and bought, calling it speech. We waste our law enforcement efforts on marijuana, which is basically the same as people getting drunk. We are a nasty, stupid, venal people.
When one stupid old coot blathers in private his stupid, hateful prejudices, we congratulate ourselves that we are better than him. (Hint: we aren’t.)
Well you should have seen our ancestors! We’re the height of compassion compared to those bastards.
The constitution explicitly lists the death penalty as an acceptable punishment, so one would expect to need an amendment explicitly outlawing it to make it unconstitutional. The fact of the matter is, though, keeping the death penalty as an option in the US enjoys much more than 50% support. In fact, I don’t think a US presidential candidate opposed to the death penalty would be electable, yet.
But it isn’t about actually killing someone painlessly. It’s about making it look like he’s being killed painlessly, in a neat, sanitized pseudo-medical way that looks as little like killing as possible. Shooting someone in the head with a big bullet is bloody, doesn’t look at all neat & clinical, and in general looks like exactly what it is: killing someone. And we don’t want that.
Yes, agreed. As those terms are used in the Eighth Amendment, the death penalty is not cruel or unusual.
But it’s barbaric. Thus the title of my OP, and the final two sentences thereof.
I am arguing that it should be stopped not by judicial decree, but by legislative or executive action, because it’s fucking barbaric. And because we, the people, are the ultimate source of sovereign power in this country, the shame of such barbarism done in our names, with our sovereign power, lies on our heads.
I’m a bit confused about the point you are making. If I follow your logic, every time a person is put to death by the state and it goes perfectly—peaceful, no struggling—is that then an argument in favor of the death penalty?
Perhaps you were just being to cute by half by trying to use “barbarity” twice. Now, I do understand that you are both against the death penalty generally and find this particular attempt to be barbaric. But when arguing the former, a specific incident really doesn’t come into it, does it?
You call out a great many practices, and I don’t share your opinions on most of them.
So this country can continue debating how we should best handle wealth, or the poor.
But are you saying that these issues must be resolved before we can address the death penalty? Or can we say that while we don’t agree about wealth and the poor, we certainly agree that killing people who are already imprisoned for their crimes is a barbaric and horrible thing for a state to do?
Well said.
No, I’m saying that this kind of ghastly exercise highlights the barbarity: that even when we supposedly have crafted a sterile, “humane” method of killing imprisoned human beings, we have no real guarantee that it will work as advertised, and its failure tears down the gauzy curtain we have attempted to use to shroud the harsh reality.
Agreeing with Bricker and Budget Player Cadet and Frank… the second coming will soon be upon us. Thank god magellan01 still has his marbles about him.
I find this particularly ironic from a person advocating murder to fulfill their ideological crusade.
When have I ever advocated murder?
Too true. If you have ancestors, my ancestors made their lives (and those of some of my other ancestors) a living hell at some point. They didn’t wait until they had something to punish you for, it was how they made ends meet. Let’s be glad we’ve spent at least a century or so trying to spruce up our image.
That said, I was surprised that Bricker opened this thread, but I do agree. I’m generally against the death penalty because it’s irreconcilable in the case of error, and it’s inherently going to have violent aspects to it. To borrow a term from my industry, living things just aren’t designed to be shut down gracefully.
Even then, I understand that I’m in the minority. I evangelize about the subject when I think I will make headway, but that’s a slow process. If the state is going to kill people while that work is done, it should be in the most painless way possible.
To that end : From the recent news on stowaways in airplane landing gear, I understand a slow death from oxygen deprivation and gradual hypothermia is a relatively painless way to go. The drugs used to put me out for a medical procedure were old enough to be available as a generic, and should be able to keep the person sedated long enough to keep them from undue stress.
Is this method unacceptable because of drug availability, problems identifying when the person is dead, or some other reason I haven’t guessed yet?
Executive action? How would that be constitutional? I guess the prez could commute all death penalties for federal crimes, but could he do so for state sentences? Or, are you thinking all 50 governors would follow suit?
We are, unfortunately, a long, long way from eliminating this at the ballot box nation wide. Fortunately, there are quite a few states that have taken that step, but even in Lefty-Lefty California, it’s still on the books.
It’s interesting that this botched execution is what might help the issue get some traction again. The most horrible part, in my view, is that it’s applied in a discriminatory way, and a significant number of death penalty convictions are wrong.