Why are all the methods of capital punishment so.......weird?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve always thought that many the common modes of carrying out the death penalty were very convoluted and downright bizarre, as if someone had been trying to think of an imaginative and krazy way to kill someone.

Let’s see…we’ll make a CHAIR with restraints all over it, and then make them sit in it and put electrodes all over their body, and put a little hat on their head, and then we’ll ELECTROCUTE THEM!!!

Or…we’ll wrap a rope around his neck, and then drop him through a trapdoor!

Or…restrain him in a chair inside of a locked room and then fill the room with poison gas!

The only execution methods that seem rational to me are lethal injection and firing squad. Lethal injection is just a simple medical procedure, and firing squad is likewise a simple military-esque procedure, although I’ve always found the whole ceremonious “squad” part of it with the blanks and everything to be very convoluted.

If I were in charge of the country, I’d just make execution by bullet the default capital punishment. Our soldiers do it in war, why can’t we do it as an execution? One man, not a squad.

How did these other methods (specifically the electric chair, which seems like something a fictional mad scientist would come up with) get established? And why was hanging ever a widespread method when it was just as easy to cut off someone’s head?

2

My WAG on hanging is that it’s publicly viewable, so rulers can make an example of somebody. Public executions were quite the social event for much of western history, and they served to strengthen the authority’s perceived power.

The others are maybe because of cost? That’s my guess.

3

You forgot:

Let’s put him in a chair in an air-tight room and press a button that causes two chemicals to mix together and release DEADLY POISON!

[sub](ETA: Oops, you didn’t forget that, somehow I missed it in your OP.)[/sub]

Most methods of execution are designed to appease the conscience of the society carrying it out – firing squads are messy and not guaranteed to be painless; hanging often fails to kill immediately, etc. It was expected that proper electrocution would provide a quick and painless death (as opposed to the then common method of hanging) but that proved to not always be the case. And the smoking corpse is kind of gruesome.

4

[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
I’ve always thought that many the common modes of carrying out the death penalty were very convoluted and downright bizarre, as if someone had been trying to think of an imaginative and krazy way to kill someone.

Let’s see…we’ll make a CHAIR with restraints all over it, and then make them sit in it and put electrodes all over their body, and put a little hat on their head, and then we’ll ELECTROCUTE THEM!!!

Or…we’ll wrap a rope around his neck, and then drop him through a trapdoor!

Or…restrain him in a chair inside of a locked room and then fill the room with poison gas!

The only execution methods that seem rational to me are lethal injection and firing squad. Lethal injection is just a simple medical procedure, and firing squad is likewise a simple military-esque procedure, although I’ve always found the whole ceremonious “squad” part of it with the blanks and everything to be very convoluted.

If I were in charge of the country, I’d just make execution by bullet the default capital punishment. Our soldiers do it in war, why can’t we do it as an execution? One man, not a squad.

How did these other methods (specifically the electric chair, which seems like something a fictional mad scientist would come up with) get established? And why was hanging ever a widespread method when it was just as easy to cut off someone’s head?
[/QUOTE]

I’m assuming that we are talking modern day (last 200 years) where we are trying to establish a quick and painless method of execution and not just a creative torture device. Hanging was used for years, but required complex calculations that could leave a man to strangle to death if it wasn’t done properly.

I’m not an expert, but the electric chair and the gas chamber were designed to be more humane than hanging, as both of these were considered “modern” and cause instant death (which didn’t always happen).

Then, when horror stories came from botched gas chambers and electric chairs, states moved to lethal injection as the humane execution (which is currently under attack)

I guess the original objection to beheading was that it was very messy and not always humane (miss that swing a couple of inches and have the prisoner flopping around). Same thing with a firing squad; you get a situation where the squad doesn’t get a kill shot on the first try and it is tremendous suffering.

5

I recommend to the o.p. that he watch the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.. It’s not a comprehensive documentary on execution methods, but it is a very interesting exploration of how my Leucher became an established expert and authority in the field of execution, despite any medical or physiology training…that is, before his complete crazy about supporting Holocaust Denial came out and state officials started dropping him like a bad penny. It’s one of the creepiest movies I’ve ever seen (Leuchter objected to existing electrocution equipment because “it cooks the meat too much”), but very much worth watching.

It’s really pretty hard to kill someone completelly painlessly and in a way that isn’t gory or otherwise esthetically unappealing, and the fact that the medical profession won’t (or rather, ethically can’t) cooperate means that amateurs tend to crowd the field. Plus, it is still the nominal position of most death penalty advocates that it is supposesd to be a deterrent to crime (even though it demonstratably is not) and so one doesn’t want to make it too painless, and yet paradoxically not too brutal for civilized use, which is sort of like asking for your hard-boiled egg easy over. No wonder incompetents and blunderers crowd the field.

FWIW, I suspect the guillotine is probably the most painless (claims about the continued consciousness of severed heads aside) but of course can be quite messy, and then there’s the whole association with the brutality of the French Revolution, though that seems to have been overshadowed in public consciousness by the mass genocides of the 20th Century.

Stranger

6

IIRC, Thomas Edison promoted the electric chair in order to show how dangerous alternating current was, compared to DC. Unfortunately for him, people were actually impressed with how well it worked, and decided to use AC for the transmission of electricity into every home on the power grid (in the US). This is kind of unfortunate, because DC transmits much better over longer distances than AC. It seems like it would have been easier to design electronics, too, since most American electronics have an AC to DC converter as part of the plug.

ETA: Ahh, here’s the wiki page. It’s a pretty good read.

7

[QUOTE=Santo Rugger]
IIRC, Thomas Edison promoted the electric chair in order to show how dangerous alternating current was, compared to DC. Unfortunately for him, people were actually impressed with how well it worked, and decided to use AC for the transmission of electricity into every home on the power grid (in the US). This is kind of unfortunate, because DC transmits much better over longer distances than AC. It seems like it would have been easier to design electronics, too, since most American electronics have an AC to DC converter as part of the plug.

ETA: Ahh, here’s the wiki page. It’s a pretty good read.

[/QUOTE]

I was under the impression that AC was much more efficient for transmission over long distances. From your cite:

I always thought a humongous shot of super pure heroin would be a very humane way of execution. Even if you screw up, the victim is just in for a very euphoric couple of hours. I don’t think it would take much expertise to administer it, indeed you could just hire a couple of junkies to be executioners. I kept on reading about people dying with a needle in their arms when some form of super pure heroin started showing up in New York City.

8

[QUOTE=Santo Rugger]
since most American electronics have an AC to DC converter as part of the plug.
[/QUOTE]

What? No they don’t.

Getting back to the OP, I have often wondered why they don’t use carbon monoxide I am told it is quick and painless. Person goes to sleep and never wakes up.

9

[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
Lethal injection is just a simple medical procedure,
[/QUOTE]

Simple? :eek:

I think not.

Reliably inducing quick, painless death via IV drugs is rather complex, actually.

And since no bona fide licensed health professional will involve him/herself in carrying out this procedure for ethical reasons/fear of losing the license to practice, that complicates it even more.

10

You must admit though, we no longer indulge in some the wackier execution methods…
…a quick but interesting read…

11

[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
I was under the impression that AC was much more efficient for transmission over long distances. <snip>
[/QUOTE]

Thanks, Darryl, you’re right. I think I was conflating the UK’s electrical distribution system, that uses twice the voltage and a slightly slower frequency.

[QUOTE=Rick]
What? No they don’t.
[/QUOTE]

Don’t most that don’t have motors, though? My laptop, video game systems, etc., and don’t TVs and such have them on the inside?

12

[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
I was under the impression that AC was much more efficient for transmission over long distances.
[/quote]
Only at extremely high voltages, which then require step-down transformers. At the time of Edison and his promotion of AC power transmission (which was on a very localized grid) high voltage transmission simply wasn’t an option, and DC transmission at somewhere around 12-60 volts was very inefficient. The other problem with long-distance or distributed grid transmission is synchronizing the frequency; an out of synch frequency will cause energy waste. Future transmission grids will almost certianly be HVDC with local conversion to AC.

[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
I always thought a humongous shot of super pure heroin would be a very humane way of execution. Even if you screw up, the victim is just in for a very euphoric couple of hours. I don’t think it would take much expertise to administer it, indeed you could just hire a couple of junkies to be executioners. I kept on reading about people dying with a needle in their arms when some form of super pure heroin started showing up in New York City.
[/QUOTE]
sigh I’ve seen someone dead of a heroin overdose, and it’s neither easy nor humane. As Qadgop the Mercotan notes, physicians or other licensed medical personnel cannot attend to this operation, and so even supposedly simple things are often botched.

Stranger

13

It makes a little sense when you realize that executions (really the execution of a death warrant, like the execution of a writ of injunction or the execution of a writ of attachment) was designed to be a spectator sport for the edification of the great unwashed and to intimidate people of similar inclination. Thus, the bodies of pirates were coated with tar and hung up for display at the mouth of the Thames where they could be seen by passing ships to remind the possibly disaffected members of the crew that taking over the ship and going raiding might just have some unpleasant consequences. The hanging, drawing and quartering of convicted traitors and the later display of severed heads and select hunks of the body at city gates served as a reminder that disloyalty was frowned on. In the old days military death sentences were administered with the condemned’s regiment in attendance, all drawn up in formation so that everyone had a good view (see Kipling’s The Hanging of Danny Deever).

I have seen an admission ticket to the last public hanging in my home county. It took place in the 1920s in the space between the court house and the jail. The condemned was brought back to the county where he was convicted for the event and the sheriff issued attendance tickets to public officials and interested citizens. The presiding judge, the county attorney and ( for the love of Pete) the defense counsel were all expected to attend the festivities.

All of this was done, not because it was quick and efficient, but rather to serve as an example, to scare the bejesus out of souls who might follow a similar path. In those simpler times it was seen as a first class deterrent. The more attention catching the condemned’s dispatch into oblivion, the bigger the spectacle and the better the deterrence. Historically it is only recently that Western sensitivities have encouraged the doing to death of criminals in private in a mock science fair demonstration or medical procedure.

In the supposedly barbarous East the favored method is a public beheading or a public bullet in the back of the head. I suppose that is marginally more palatable that having the culprit’s brains beaten out with a large dull ax. I read somewhere that it took three blows to separate Charles I’s head from his torso. The Scottish lords who followed his lineal descendent in the ‘45 did not do much better.

14

Historic means of execution were deliberately brutal to demonstrate the significance of the transgression’s consequence.

Modern efforts have attempted to bring civility to the process of execution.

But death–particularly a scheduled death–is itself weird, and it does not seem we have been very successful in managing to create gentle and civilized modes of exit. Let us hope for a day when the condemned can quietly self-administer an effective potion at a time chosen by them, and drift softly away unemcumbered by complicated and messy machinations.

15

[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
I was under the impression that AC was much more efficient for transmission over long distances.
[/QUOTE]
DC is most efficient for transmission over any distance. The thing is that the way you are efficient is to transmit at very high voltages with low current. This is true for both DC and AC. However most uses of electricity need relatively low voltages around 1 to 250V depending on what you are doing. The reason we have AC power distribution is that it is cheap and easy to convert AC voltages from high to low. Until recently there were no good ways to do this with DC.

16

I am pretty sure the idea that one or some members of a firing squad have blanks is a myth. To my knowledge it is straight forward, they point the guns and pull the triggers.

17

[QUOTE=askeptic]
I am pretty sure the idea that one or some members of a firing squad have blanks is a myth. To my knowledge it is straight forward, they point the guns and pull the triggers.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah; the notion that this would leave the members of the squad unsure of who fired the killing shot is absurd - there’s practically no recoil from shooting a blank cartridge.
Wikipedia says:

But it doesn’t seem to cite any sources for that. The psychological angle is interesting, but still I think the difference between a real rifle round and a blank would be so remarkable as to leave no doubt.

18

The cold, calculated execution of a fellow soldier, particularly if its not an enemy but a comrade convicted of a capital crime, is not something that even battle-hardened men would be the least bit comfortable with. Its totally different from killing in combat. I wouldn’t doubt that, when the moment finally came to actually pull the trigger, the amount of recoil felt would be the last thing they’d be aware of.

As far as a humane method of execution, they should just use a gaseous form of general anesthetic instead of the intravenous one they use in lethal injection. That’s where all the problems always occur. They can’t find a vein (cons are often long time IV drug users), they don’t administer the anesthetic correctly or for long enough before the IV switches to the “kill juice”, which supposedly is incredibly painful when conscience.

Instead, once they’re strapped to the gurney you ask, “Any last words?”, the con says, “Go f*** yourself” and you gently strap on the mask and after a few painless seconds they’re in dreamy land, guaranteed (cases of anesthetic awareness are very rare). Then you just switch to “kill gas” of somekind instead. Nothing like being strapped into a chair in a big echoing gas chamber, hearing the pellets drop, and trying to hold your breath. Not to mention that there are reports that even cyanide poisoning (while awake) can be extremely painful, briefly anyway.

19

[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Instead, once they’re strapped to the gurney you ask, “Any last words?”, the con says, “Go f*** yourself” and you gently strap on the mask and after a few painless seconds they’re in dreamy land, guaranteed (cases of anesthetic awareness are very rare). Then you just switch to “kill gas” of somekind instead.
[/QUOTE]
Even this is more elaborate than it needs to be. Assuming capital punishment must be done, pure nitrogen (or some other inert gas) will render a person painlessly unconscious, then kill them.

20

[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
Simple? :eek:

I think not.

Reliably inducing quick, painless death via IV drugs is rather complex, actually.

And since no bona fide licensed health professional will involve him/herself in carrying out this procedure for ethical reasons/fear of losing the license to practice, that complicates it even more.
[/QUOTE]

I would have to disagree here. The Dr Death’s- we have one in Australia seem to be able to devise simple procedures where the patient only has to flick a switch or such and gets a lethal injection. Surely that could be applied to execution as well- where another person flicks the switch?