Really, executions ought to be flagrantly disgusting, in order that we might reflect on whether it should be employed in the first place. And we would be able to make note of whom we would rather not sit next to.
I think you mean “discomfort.” “Discomfiture” means “embarrassment.”
He’s a human being.
If he’s reformed, I see no reason why he shouldn’t be free to get on with his life like the rest of us.
If you support the death penalty, all you lack to be a murderer yourself is opportunity.
People talk about “humane” execution, but they seem to be much more concerned with what an execution looks like than whether there is actual suffering. There are very easy ways to kill with little or no suffering. Several simultaneous high-caliber gunshots to the brain. (Yet firing squads seem to insist on firing at the chest instead.) A pound of high explosives wrapped around the head. Vaporization by a thousand-pound bomb.
Being choked out by a martial artist (blood choke) seems to be pretty painless. They could just do something like that with some apparatus, and not let go. Or kill them in some other way once they’re out.
Or we could behave like civilized people and not kill them at all, and instead show them love and compassion as we try to help them understand why what they did was wrong so that, when they do, they can get on with their lives just like the rest of us.
On that theory, anyone who likes eating meat but won’t go and slaughter their own cow or shoot their own deer either is obligated to become a vegan or starve, right?
They wouldn’t be so expensive if snowflakes weren’t gumming up the works with stays and writs and lawsuits.
The best execution method is to incarcerate them humanely until they die of old age.
Remind me to explain the concept of dark humor to you sometime.
There’s also an obsession with the idea that new and shiny technology is necessarily better than what was done before. Like there’s some kind of innate belief that capital punishment is kind of barbarous, but we can escape that by mechanizing it properly. If the condemned is surrounded by all kinds of magical machines whirring and doing some of the work, we must be better than all that flawed stuff in the history books. Even before the electric chair, I think there was a state that invented some Rube Goldberg machine to jerk the rope up and fling the condemned into the air rather than letting gravity do the work.
The hangman in Ontario tried that, as described in the wiki article for Capital Punishment in Canada:
Note that, consistent with your thesis, it was automatically assumed that the new system of flinging someone by the neck into the air was “more merciful” than dropping them down a trapdoor. :rolleyes:
Wouldn’t that be true though? ISTM that the quicker it’s over the more merciful, and if this system placed greater force on someone’s neck and therefore broke it faster, it would be more merciful.
Don’t get me wrong I’m no supporter of either capital punishment or “new and shiny is better” but this particular example seems to me - on the face of it - to work.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I have had the dubious distinction of being in a death chamber.
It was in Fremantle Prison, in Australia. I was a tourist, and I took the tour of the decommissioned prison. The tour included the death chamber. It had the gibbet, the noose, and the trapdoor. Below the trapdoor was about twenty feet of empty space. It was explained to us that the placing of the noose on the side of the head and “the drop” was what mattered; done properly, it would break the condemned’s neck, ensuring a quick and speedy death.
As it was explained, hanging according to the correct protocol seemed more humane than anything else. Quick and painless–if there must be capital punishment (which I abhor) in various jurisdictions, then in the name of humanity, can we not go back to tried and true methods?
Liquid nitrogen is N2; specifically, it’s N2sub[/sub]. Back to Chem 101 with you!
Congratulations, you just reinvented the garrote.
It takes a lot of calculations ( and ‘luck’ ) to do the hanging right. Weight, drop, will the rope stretch, how muscular the neck is and so on…
Black-Jack Ketchum is one of many who got too much rope, and got his head ripped off. If the rope is too short person strangles slowly, unless hangman grabs around the legs of the condemned and breaks the neck ( and tries not to rip the head off… )
And Gordon Stewart Northcott fainted just when the trapdoor was opened, so the rope was already tight when he fell and calculations went off the window. It took him eleven minutes to strangle to death.
People today unfamiliar with hangings might not get the significance of this W.C. Field’s line:
Utah is the only state besides Nevada to have ever used the firing squad, although executions of this type are authorized in Oklahoma for prisoners who successfully challenge the constitutionality of lethal injection and electrocution.
Start with Looney Tunes cartoons. Chock full of good examples. 
How about death by “this time, we didn’t forget the gravy!”