Your premise is flawed, because the death penalty is not the only route to preventing more innocent deaths and the practice does not, as a whole, benefit society. It’s costly and wasteful.
I’d have to look it up, and for the purposes of a casual conversation it’s not worth the time suck, but I believe that overall it is more costly to do the years and years of legal battles than to simply lock someone up forever.
Secondly, because only one was proven innocent after death hardly means that only one innocent has died. Al lthe rest of the cases haven’t been checked, have they? Of course not. And given that The Innocence Project has led to the exoneration of 202 (!) men so far who were innocent, it is logical to assume that many others have actually died over the years.
I’ve had mild nitrogen narcosis while handling liquid nitrogen. It was slightly pleasant and relaxing, and almost a little euphoric. As it wore off there weren’t any unpleasant sensations (like there would have been with carbon monoxide). It sure would be easy to be lulled into ignoring the signs and succumbing.
I’ve wondered if it wouldn’t provide better euthanasia for pets. A visit to the vet’s office and an intravenous puncture, perhaps with a little shaving, is often very traumatic to cats and dogs. It’s usually entirely worse than people go through during medical insertion of an IV, I guess because the pet doesn’t have much ability to treat the experience as only an uncomfortable necessity. Hell, they’re scared to death of vacuum cleaners…
So we torture him to death, and it turns out he was innocent and we just tortured an innocent man to death ? Making a bad situation that much worse ?
And at the same time, we employ people who are willing to do such things ? That’ll reduce the murder rate all right - the worst, most sadistic murderers will be the ones we have on the government payroll. Why arrest Jeffrey Dahmer when you can employ him, huh ? We’ll just define away murder by saying it’s not murder when we do it.
I hope you aren’t serious here. Building a torture robot and setting them on people is just as bad, if not worse, than torturing someone with ones own hands. Seriously, do you think anything positive will be accomplished with a criminal justice system that tortures people? Will it make our country a better place?
I like this idea. Maybe make it a gladiatorial combat. The human would eventually lose, of course, but his skill would determine how much longer he had.
Keeping people locked in cages is cruel and inhumane. Maybe they should just abolish prisons, too.
So whether a person is found guilty of a crime depends, not on the facts of the case and the evidence, but whether or not the state is going to kill him? You’re comfortable with the idea that enacting the death penalty makes it harder to get a conviction, so more murderers will be acquitted?
What bothers me about the complaint (and it is a legitimate one) that capital punishment may kill innocent persons is that it seems to ignore that there is good reason to believe that there are more protections for the falsely accused in a capital case than if they’re only being sentenced to life in prison. From a moral standpoint I do not see a difference between executing someone after 15 years of appeals for a crime they didn’t commit and keeping the same innocent person in jail until s/he dies of old age.
While there are some groups that do work either on an ad hoc basis, or as part of a larger campaign to police the justice system, to re-examine evidence in life-means-life sentencing cases (The Innocence Project comes to mind as one.) most of that effort is being put forth to re-examine the cases of those on death row. It is my belief that if one were convicted of a crime one didn’t commit there is a greater chance for the injustice to be discovered in the case of a capital sentence than for merely a sentence of life in prison. At the very least, here in the US it is my understanding that every capital conviction is automatically appealed, a level of protect that doesn’t apply to so-called normal cases.
To my mind, any complaint that references things like the one in seven ‘error’ rate for capital cases, should also look at the recent study done for non-capital cases suggesting an even higher error rate there. One part of the study seems to have claimed that an innocent person actually appearing before a jury had a 37% chance of being found guilty, anyways.
At which point, I think the question should be, at what point is it acceptable for any innocent person to be punished for crimes they didn’t commit? Regardless of the punishment involved.
The main reason I’d wanted to post to this thread, originally, was to offer some counter examples to Siam Sam’s claim of instant lethality and painlessness for the guillotine. First is the rather noted account of the execution of Lavoisier, where a friend was to count the number of eyeblinks that the severed head could complete; other accounts of responsive heads from the victims of the Guillotine include that of Catherine Corday, and the account here from Wikipedia’s article on the guillotine. Second would be Cecil’s own columnson the subject. (Please note that the second linked column includes a rare admission of error on Cecil’s position in the first column.)
It may be that nitrogen asphyxiation would be painless, without the need for medical assistance which currently is problematical for lethal injection. I do think that the idea of using nitrogen for a lethal agent because it won’t poison the organs is a dangerous one. First off, many people who end up on death row are career criminals who are not the sort one would look for organ transplant material - drug abuse, Hepatitis infections, and other health considerations may remove a large fraction of those people from the potential pool of organ donors. More importantly, while I’m not adamantaly opposed to capital punishment, I don’t want to start creating any of the sort of incentives that Der Trihs has suggested already exist for keeping prison populations high.
First of all, the OP does not bring into question whether or not we should have capital punishment. Instead the question was assuming we have capital punishment, is N2 aphixiation a more humane way to execute than lethal injection.
Second, the straw man of executing an innocent person is completely irrelevant to the discussion. Even proponants of the death penalty believe that any innocent death is unacceptable, but I view that as a flaw in the system and not the death penalty itself. If you want to disagree and say that no system can guaranty an innocent person can never be executed then fine - but that is not the discussion of THIS thread.
Third, the point was not that we should torture the prisoner needlessly, but rather the incongruity behind the sadistic nature of their crimes and the compassion of a society to even discuss more humane ways of execution. The mere fact that we DON’T seek to torture these monster a la “eye for an eye” is a point in society’s favor - the real question is how far are we expected to take that compassion.
As a hijack, is it our humanity that works against the death penalty being a deterrant? What if we did torture people to death? Would it have a significant impact on violent crimes?
That’s hardly an indication of pain. Just of consciousness. And it didn’t last long either, did it? Assuming it’s true; I thought that was just an Urban Legend?
Taking a look over at Snopes.com’s messageboard there seems to be a good bit of detection going on (with reference to the latter Straight Dope article, too), claiming that the earliest confirmed mention of the Lavoisier story is from the 1990s, maybe the 1980s. But the account of Languille’s execution still stands.
As for the painlessness issue - I agree that blinking cannot be assumed to be an indication of pain, but given how prevalent phantom pain is in amputees I’m going to assume that any consciousness after decapitation has the potential to be terribly painful for some individuals.
It’s certainly nothing major like losing a whole arm or even hand, but I lost a good portion of one finger long ago in Texas. (Damned Texas again.) It was crushed off when a door slammed on my hand in high wind. Crushed, not sliced, but it happened so fast, I did not feel any pain at the moment. Nor have I felt any phantom pain, but again this was not all that major, just up to the knuckle.
But the swiftness of the act of guillotining I believe precludes any chance of pain. And any terror would be over before they knew it. No, I really advocate the guillotine.
And while I’m not doubting your personal experience, I’m also going to say that reports of phantom pain, while not universal, remain so prevalent that I don’t think your experience is going to be necessarily predictive for anyone else.
Again, that’s what gets me. Why can’t they? Why can’t they concoct a drug cocktail that will put you OUT. Heroin, whatever. I see no need for accusations that the executionee is actually aware and suffering. Why can’t they do this?
Sure, one can say that they just don’t care, but it’s technically possible. Someone should be able to get it through.
They have; it’s called lethal injection. People undergo major surgery every day with an equivalent level of sedation.
The objections to lethal injection are not (in my experience) founded on an actual fear of causing pain. That’s just the latest objection raised by those for whom no method of execution is humane enough. If you could come up with some way of killing the sonofabitch with a blow job, they are not going to say, “OK, good enough - go ahead and off the bastard”. They will find something else.
It’s like the defense attorneys coming up with yet another reason why the accused is not guilty, despite the mountains of evidence. If you prove every bit of the case beyond the shadow of a doubt, they will just go to work and claim something else. It’s what they are paid to do.
They don’t always object to the execution because they think the accused is innocent. They claim the accused is innocent because they object to the execution. Same here - no level of evidence is good enough.