It’s just your temperate mindset speaking; you can never understand the tropical mind! 
Okay, I’ll prove myself more barbaric (pragmatic?) than the other posters. Here’s what I’d go for:
You have the trial as always, striving to make it as fair and meticulous as reasonable so you’ve got the right perpetrator.
After conviction, perp gets a really thorough medical evaluation, identifying which bits can be used medically to save/improve the lives of other people. (Hmm. His liver is shot, he’s a long term smokers, and there’s worrying changes in his pancreas, but the kidneys are passable, his heart is okay, nothing wrong with his corneas, his bone marrow seems fine, his skin is fine for as least short-term transitional use,…on and on for as many parts as we can use.
So then you kill him in whatever reasonably humane manner that won’t have negative effects on the useful bits – that captive bolt thing sounds fine to me. At least, I assume we’ll never want to tranplant the brain of someone who’d decided to be a serial killer or whatever. Bang! Prisoner is declared dead, and then the recovery teams move in and salvage all the bits that can be used medically.
The prisoner offended society, and now he gets to finally do what he can to offset that offense.
Organ banking for the win.
Larry Niven pictured a future where capital punishment was being disassembled for parts. The convict was sedated into unconsciousness and placed into a robotic device that first chilled them to nearly frozen temperatures, then executed them by extracting their heart first. The brain was cremated and the only component trated as remains for burial or whatnot. The rest was systematically disassembed and preserved for transplantation.
The side effect, and the reason it was even interesting as a science fiction concept, was the effect on society: allotransplantation had been perfected, and was pretty much the only way to treat most diseases and illnesses, as well as serving to extend life, so transplant stock was scarce. Not even execution of capital criminals could keep up. So society very democratically voted to make more and more crimes capital. In one of the short stories about the transllantation crisis, the POV character was about to be executed for serial red-light running.
(Most individuals who end up on death row - “the worst of the worst” - have lived lives of dissipation so that their organs are unsalvageable)
Playing Army in a neighborhood of kids, firing squads were a common feature of my childhood. Our parents frowned on this, of course, but accepted it as preferable to mock-hanging. Other than that, my personal experience with it are second-hand:
My former father in law’s father had fought in one of the Balkan Wars. He’d recalled how enemy prisoners had been stood but-to-butt and shot through with a single bullet.
Our painting instructor had fled Estonia after the war, during which his father had been put in line to be shot each time the ground had changed hands between the Russians and the Germans and back again. It must have been an inherited trait, since he himself ably navigated the academic politics of the department.
I think a lot of people believe they’ll feel that way, but the reality would usually be very different. A penitentiary nurse called Calista H. (an alias) recounted an execution by lethal injection he had to orchestrate. State law said the warden had to select a private citizen to actually inject the three drugs into the IV. H. trained this citizen. He also drove the executioner away from the penitentiary:
Now this citizen was someone who was strong and definitely a complete believer in capital punishment. He broke down and cried for quite a little while. I consoled him as best I could. There wasn’t much to say except “I understand” and “That’s okay.”
(Heron, Echo, ed. Tending Lives: Nurses on the Medical Front. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998.)
That strikes me as still being true; even with reliable firearms, the guillotine better removes human error. Build the guillotine tall enough, sharpen the blade to any reasonable degree, and lubricate the track, and you get a severing blow every time. Clean your rifle and take a proper stance, you can still miss the heart.
Which makes me wonder. Three or four rifles aimed at one’s head have a better chance at a quick death than aimed at one’s heart, but the result’s a lot messier. Have firing squads ever intentionally aimed for the head?
A doctor, a lawyer and an engineer are sentenced to the guillotine. The doctor is set to go first. He is asked for any last words and he expresses his love for his family. He is put in the device and the blade drops and stops inches from his neck. The judge says that it’s god’s will and he gets a reprieve. Next it’s the lawyer’s turn. His last words are repenting before God. He is put in the machine and the same thing happens. The judge is astounded because that’s never happened before but the lawyer gets a reprieve as well. The engineer is asked his last words and he says, “if you idiots would just adjust that latch and add a little lubrication your machine wouldn’t fail”.
Maximillian paid gold coins to his Mexican firing squad to spare his face. They took the money but didn’t comply. The embalmer’s artistry was required.
The 2010 firing squad in Utah left a line of holes in the back wall in reverse order of the rifles that had shot them: proof that they’d neatly converged on the victim’s heart. But after Maximillian, Mexico would see many, many more firing squads during its revolution and the Cristero War, hastily arranged affairs against mud brick walls that shredded the victims. Mexico ceased capital punishment when the dust settled.
Sweden retained the axe long after the guillotine was available. One of the last victims was notorious murderess Anna Mansdotter in 1890. The executioner sought freedom from inhibition through drink before he could chop off a woman’s head, and botched the job. “The blade stroke her right under her ears, cleaved her tungue and went through her mouth, leaving her chin with the body.” Sweden switched to the guillotine in 1906, and last used it in 1910.
The state of Wisconsin had recourse to hang an Irishman three years into statehood, but lacked expertise on the matter. Hundreds of good citizens watched him wriggle and strangle for twenty minutes, then resolved to do away with capital punishment for good.
Just a few times when the act was too ugly, and the reaction was to abolish capital punishment rather than sanitize it. Probably exceptions to the rule. More common are people like the Earl of Warwick in the play Saint Joan, who engineers Joan’s trial and sentencing to the stake. When his assistant come back in distress from watching her burn, Warwick says “do what I do: don’t watch.”
^ Like.
I admit that there are people who ‘need killing’; but the thought of making someone dead repels me. [Full disclosure: I’d do it to save my own life or the life of another. Or a cat.] When it’s done as a ‘procedure’, it’s doubly disturbing. That’s why I said I thought the people wanting vengeance should ‘throw the switch’/‘pull the trigger’/depress the plunger. They should know what killing a person means. Some will be happy to do it. Others will have second thoughts.
How is that a botched job? Sounds like she ended up dead right away as intended. I doubt she got up and danced around pointing at her still attached chin.
My grandfather was one of the emotionally toughest men I ever knew. He was in WWII. For decades, when asked, he would say he was a cook in the Army. When he passed, I helped my grandmother with his stuff. At the very back of a closet, we found a box full of letters that he wrote my grandmother during the war, but never sent. They were all “from such-and-such-place-in-France” and were almost all dated before D-Day. To his dying day, he would not tell any specific stories about the war other than going to England. His explanation of the Luger and SS dagger he had was “I traded for them”. And this was war against an almost unimaginable evil.
As stated above, I believe in the death penalty for extreme cases, but I always think about Grandad when some blowhard in a bar talks about ‘volunteering’ to be the guy who pulls the switch/trigger, etc. Could I do if called? I’d like to think so, based on my belief that it’s sometimes justified. Do I think there wouldn’t be consequences to my mental state? No, I do not.
IIRC, it was considered the mark of a competent executioner if they could take the head off in one swing instead of having to hack at it. Anne Boleyn was supposedly executed with a freshly sharpened sword instead of an axe for that specific reason.
Either way, compared to our modern “lethal” injection, lopping someone’s head off as described is very non-botched. They died as quickly as one can die.
And by a headsman imported from Calais for the purpose.
Mary, Queen of Scots took three chops and probably survived the first one.
I’m not talking about multiple hacks to get the job done. Effectively lopping ones head off, whether through the neck or mid-head, is going to be very effective.
I’m against killing people either way. But if barbarians like the US are going to do it, do it quickly.
How could he be in France before D-Day?
We have an injunction on this message board to attack the post, not the poster. It’s a curious thing, in some cases. Like yours.
You obviously live inside an invisible line wherein the State doesn’t kill its members, and assume that grants you the right to look down on anyone who lives inside another invisible line where the state does. And it pleases you to post accordingly. This is no more than a lucky accident of birth for you, as it is an unlucky accident of birth for a murderer here. But it’s not any high ground you yourself have ascended.
Have you ever killed anyone? Has anyone you’ve known killed anyone? Has anybody you’ve known been killed? (I myself haven’t the former though have the two latter, and am sure it’s just an accident of birth)
Has anyone you’ve loved killed anyone? Has anyone you’ve loved been killed?
Please tell us all, and instead of being a by-turns a tough-guy and sanctimonious poster that the mods allow, be a someone who has something to say.
The OSS was in France by 1943, just sayin’.