Oh Christ, not another poll about the death penalty. Well, yes. But I want to talk about a specific aspect of it, namely the method of execution itself in the form of lethal injections. Inspired by recent events in Oklahoma (and SlackInc’s thread, but I didn’t want to hijack it).
It’s always seemed to me that the lethal injection, which has the goal of being the most painless way to go, has the whiff of compromise about it. Why even lift a finger trying to make the passing of someone whose very life is worthless more pleasant? Wouldn’t it form a better punishment and more effective deterrent if striving for the most painless pleasant end for these people was dispensed with?
TL;DR - If you’re in favour of the death penalty, do you think the lethal injection is ‘too soft’, for lack of a better term, in some or all cases where someone is awaiting the end on death row.
Added an option if you don’t think anyone should be executed, just for polling purposes. I could list all the variants of possibilities; e.g. if you think someone who shoots someone in a botched robbery should get the injection but someone who goes around murdering kids for kicks should get something harsher, so you’ll have to expand, if you care to.
(I’m opposed to the death penalty in general, so please keep in mind what biases I bring to the discussion.)
I think our attempts to “pretty up” execution are hypocritical and self-serving. If we really think execution is a deterrent to crime, might as well make it even more of a deterrent by drawing and quartering our capital offenders, or maybe boiling them in oil.
As has been pointed out several times on this board today, a single bullet to the base of the skull would be faster, cheaper, and more consistently, instantly lethal than any of our current methods of execution. The only reasons I can think of that we don’t do it are that it’s easier to find someone willing to throw a switch from the next room than pull a trigger from point blank range; and we don’t want to be confused for the Khmer Rouge, or some African warlords, or any of those people who execute people by shooting them in the head.
I don’t oppose the death penalty based on the penalty itself, I oppose it because I doubt our ability to apply it justly. If there is a way to absolutely establish someone’s guilt with all necessary intents and no chance of mitigating circumstances then go ahead and kill them. I suggest trained firing squads, the guillotine, or a carbon monoxide suicide machine if the criminal so desires.
I oppose the death penalty. If we have it, though, we should either decide we want to do it the nicest, easiest way possible (probably nitrogen asphyxiation) or the most brutal way possible (perhaps drawn and quartering). The first if we just decide some people go bad and there is nothing to be done about them and the second for those who believe the death penalty is a deterrent. Of course in that case it should be televised.
I’m in the same boat. I’m generally not in favor of the death penalty, although I think there are rare cases where it is justified. But the efforts to sanitize the process really irritate me for some reason. I’ve been saying for years that they should bring back public hangings.
I other the other, and other. I don’t support the DP, but I do think it should be humane because we’re never completely sure they’re 100% guilty, and its worse to make an innocent suffer needlessly than to inflict more suffering on the guilty.
Because really, what we want is to make sure that the government is at least as monstrous as the person receiving the penalty. :rolleyes:
The specific efforts our country makes to ‘sanitize’ the death penalty are hypocritical, but only because there are methods at least equally painless (shot to the head; long drop hanging) that we eschew because they are, for lack of a better word, icky. The goal should be to make the execution as simple and painless as possible, not to make sure that the state doesn’t feel as if it has blood on its hands. (And why we don’t do nitrogen asphyxiation is a question for the ages.)
Keep in mind I already think the government is at least as monstrous as the person receiving the penalty. Resorting to medieval-style methods would simply make it obvious.
To me, a sentence of life in prison without a chance of parole actually seems worse from a cruelty standpoint than some reasonable form of the death penalty.
I’m not sure I have much of an opinion about lethal injection one way or the other, but any objections would certainly not be based on whether it was soft to the criminal or not. I have no desire to cause unnecessary pain to anyone. The point of the system, as I see it, is to deliver a punishment that will prevent criminals from further harming other people, while causing a minimum of pain to the criminal himself. In that respect, many of the options for the death penalty are worse than old-school methods like shooting someone in the back of the head. (Which, by the way, could be implemented so that someone can trigger it from another, and so that a minimum of damage is caused. Slaughterhouses use a sort of piston to destroy the brain without the kind of additional damage a bullet might cause.)
Anyway, the issue I’d love to see the criminal system get a lot more serious about is making sure that criminals who are released don’t return. I’m much more concerned about that than the death penalty. And perhaps the two opinions are related: if we can’t reform people and we can’t release them, then executing them seems like a less cruel option than confining them for the rest of their lives.
I too am opposed to the death penalty only because I honestly believe a perfect judicial system is impossible, and certain biases and errors are inevitable, meaning that it won’t be applied evenly or fairly, and possibly even perfectly innocent people will be put to death by the State, which is just state sponsored murder, no matter how well intentioned.
However, if I could imagine a perfect judicial system where the death penalty was never misused in anyway, I wouldn’t be opposed to putting certain people to death. I don’t believe it is an effective deterrent at all, but I do think it just cleanly and easily removes people from the planet who don’t need to be here, making it a better place in the aggregate. And in this perfect universe, I wouldn’t have any problem with whatever method they chose to execute these people. Make it as painful and gory as you want, I don’t care. In this perfect world I’m imagining, those folks would always deserve it.
Anyway, if we do have to live with the death penalty, I would say that we should use a better method than the current drug cocktails we use. They are unnecessarily complicated. Nitrogen asphyxiation is a great alternative.
To play devil’s advocate, support of the death penalty does not equate to support of making condemned prisoners suffer. A person could believe that death is a justifiable penalty without believing that pre-mortem suffering is justified.