I did not know that- nor that South Carolina did firing squads.
Well, apparently in the case of South Carolina, I am wrong.
An inmate put to death last month in South Carolina’s second firing squad execution was conscious and likely in extreme pain for up to a minute after the bullets missed their target and failed to quickly stop his heart, according to a pathologist hired by the inmate’s attorneys.
An autopsy photo of Mikal Mahdi’s torso showed only two distinct wounds from the three prison employees who volunteered for the firing squad and had live ammunition in the April 11 execution, according to the pathologist’s report. It was filed Thursday with a letter to the state Supreme Court titled “notice of botched execution.”
I remember that, when Utah executed Gary Gilmore by firing squad in the 1970s (the first execution in the U.S. in some years, IIRC), the firing squad consisted of six or seven men, one of whom (chosen randomly and anonymously) was given a rifle which was loaded with a blank. The thinking was that way, no one member of the firing squad could be certain that he had fired the killing shot.
But @DrDeth is making the opposite claim, of all the guns but one has blanks. He then admitted that at least in one case that wasn’t true, and I would like to know if it was ever true.
But some electric chairs require multiple people each pulling a switch simultaneously, but only one is actually wired. And similar to start the machine that delivers lethal injection. The good doctor may be thinking of that.
Some?
Requires, as opposed to once required back in the '50s?
Maybe I’m missing something, but your link references a single electric chair at the now closed West Virginia Penitentiary that operated from 1951 to 1959.
^This^ The “gentle” methods of execution are for we the living. I don’t like capital punishment but given that we do practice it, make it as violent and bloody as possible, commensurate with not torturing the victim. A bullet in the back of the head would do nicely. Except for a few ghouls it might make most folks less likely to apply the penalty in the first place.
That would be a living hell. Just waiting to die. Unable to speak with others, unless it’s “Yes sir” to a prison officer. Especially punitive if the accused was convicted as a young person.
That’s a hell on earth. Life with only one hour out a day, to throw a basketball at a hoop with no opponents (in a caged enclosure), maybe have a shower, nobody to talk with, nobody on your side—oh, your lawyers are constantly appealing all the time, but they get shot down every time. That’s hell. Death would be a release. But you’re not getting death. Keep on living and rot here.
That’s how civilized countries do it. The death penalty is too easy. Civilized countries let them rot. ADX Colorado is a perfect example of how to do it. Death is a release; ADX Colorado is a living hell, to be tolerated until the inmate’s life expires naturally.
Although Pike survived the execution attempt, according to the latest CNN report she’s being hospitalized in critical condition. Pike had said that she did not fear death, she only feared “prolonged, painful, traumatic death”. The latter appears to be just what she got due to barbaric laws and incompetent staff. What a total shit-show.
The fact that firing squads involve this bizarre ceremonial ritual of firing into the chest, at distance, with at least one rifle not actually being loaded with a ball round for the pretense of deniability, which any experienced shooter would detect in a heartbeat… it’s not designed to take a life instantly and unceremoniously. That’s no flaw in the bullet or the rifle or the marksman. The reasons we do this aren’t technical in nature.
As mentioned above, a captive bolt to the brainstem is indisputably effective and humane. In the time I wrote this post, probably a dozen head of cattle were executed in just this way, dropped like a sack of potatoes with no fuss. But we don’t do things that way because, collectively, what we want is a ritual that permits suffering but without anyone’s hand actually performing any visible violence.
If we’re willing to be honest about what we’re doing and why, and we eliminate the implied requirement for suffering and spectacle, then the problem is easy to solve in any variety of ways.
What I could never understand: Vets have been euthanizing mammals and other animals for decades, safely and ethically, including big dogs and even bigger animals like horses and cattle. Why don’t the executors use the same drug(s) for the death penalty, in the applicable dose for a human?
The whole issue, IMO, stems from a misguided notion that there is a humane way to end a life. There are supposed to be quick ways and there are supposed to be bloodless ways. Those are for the people watching and participating.
I think you can either be punitive or humane but those streams don’t cross.
I just keep coming back to the victim’s mother. Make no mistake, I oppose the death penalty in all its forms, but I do have some empathy for the survivors of the victim (of the underlying crime).
Not only because someone they cared about died (and quite often in a particularly heinous way), but because they have so often been raised in a society that tells them the only way that they can have justice is with a kind of blood vengeance. Not a fair trial that upholds the rights of all and ends with the guilt party (if there is one) receiving a fair sentence that at least respects basic human dignity, but death. They, and many of us at one time or another, are as much victims of the state and of society’s brainwashing as they are of the actual murderer.
So to come up with that kind of expectation, having to wait decades (their daughter’s life and a half and then some) to finally receive what they have been assured “justice” is, and then to see execution botched, and to now have to read headline after headline, story after story in which their daughter’s murderer is now discussed as the victim…
…I just can’t imagine. It just goes to show that we should oppose the death penalty as much for how it has the capacity to twist, warp, and degrade the victim’s survivors as anything else. I would still believe that to be the case if the execution had not been botched, but this case really highlights the savagery done to the victim’s survivors by cresting this system where they believe they have to wait decades to receive justice that in reality (a) should have come when the trial ended in the guilty party receiving a sentence that respects their human dignity and been upheld over the years by a state that cares for all the people within it or else (b) can simply never come.
I couldn’t find any examples in US. I was curious myself because I had always heard the same version as @DrDeth – only one live round. It seems to be a common inversion based on web search results.
But it seems utterly implausible, right? Only a single real bullet (unless it’s fired point blank and into the head, China-style) means you’re going to regularly have people surviving their “execution” because even expert shots can miss their mark, particularly when they are under the bizarre and unnatural “volley fire” conditions of a firing squad. That is, they don’t get to take their time and fire when they are ready, but must fire when they are told whether they are ready or not, and if they delay may be briefly perturbed by the firing of other rifles right next to them, blanks or not.
It’s one of those cases where you’re told a “fact” from authority and so you automatically take it for truth. I was a kid when I first heard that and firing squads were already a thing of the past.
All this bit about closure and victims and families is a silly red herring. An unpredictable and counterproductive emotional soap opera wrongly grafted onto a legitimate and sober legal system.
In all criminal law, the injured party is the State, not any particular person. You have offended against society as a whole by doing X. And society as a whole will exact its punishment / retribution from you. Be that a monetary fine, months or years from your life in prison, or your very life itself by execution.
The people collectively elect legislatures and somehow select judges to first codify and then enforce the standards of that society. Individuals aren’t involved except as part of the collective whole.