As others have said, capital punishment states wish to perform a brutal act - killing someone - without appearing to cause pain and suffering, trying to make it appear as a clinical procedure, and avoiding having an individual identified as the executioner. I don’t understand it. If state sponsored killing is not cruel and unusual, I’m not sure that the specific manner of doing so makes it terribly more or less so. Hang 'em high!
Street drugs are typically illegal - so they are not an option for a legal entity. Others may be legal but patented - so still not available. Purchasing a drug from a manufacturer that is not willing to sell for execution purposes is also illegal.
You will find it essentially impossible to find any medical practitioner or allied professional willing to perform an execution.
As has been described above, but to summarise the problem. Humans are not alike. Internally there are some significant variations in the way metabolic processes are controlled or react. What works one way for 95% of the populace may do something quite different in the remaining 5%. Just look at how people react to alcohol. You get sleepy drunks, violent drunks, amorous drunks, and so on. No different with other drugs. Just picking up some random street drug is not going to guarantee any sort of success in how it works. Combinations of drugs are similarly not guaranteed to work the same way each time. It is this variation in response where the problem starts. As noted above, anaesthesiologists are trained to manage this problem. It is where they earn their money - 99% of the time patients are simple and respond well. 1% of the time things go bad, and quickly, and you need serious understanding about what is going on to manage it.
Whereas there may be some level of political support for a death penalty, there is essentially zero support from the medical professions in actually being an agent of death. So any state that desires to use medical means to kill people finds itself shut out of any mainstream medical personnel or technology. Given the state is bound to obey the law, it can’t slide out of things by illegal means.
The process of anesthetic first, drugs to kill next, is essentially how lethal injection is done. Part of the problem, to the extent that there is one, is that anti-DP folks exaggerate and/or misrepresent. Every time a convict twitches, that means he was struggling and conscious. If he emits a death rattle, that is a scream of agony.
Chutzpah is killing your parents and then asking for mercy because you are an orphan. It is also doing everything you can to prevent humane execution, and then complaining because execution isn’t humane. If we used nitrogen, the same people would make the same complaints.
Executing someone painlessly is not difficult. It has been made difficult by those who oppose the DP even when it is painless.
Regards,
Shodan
Okay, well why not just give them pills, if a nurse won’t do it? Surely there are pills they could themselves concoct to painlessly end a life. Government scientist puts together a couple of widely available chemicals. It still doesn’t seem ‘impossible’ to achieve to me.
As has been said one of the easiest and painless ways in using gas other than oxygen like nitrogen. The subject continues to breath the gas so doesn’t have any feeling of not being able to breath so has no distress.
Here’s a 49min programme from the UK with a former Conservative MP Michael Portillo (no bleeding heart Liberal) who supports the DP looking for the best way. You see him going near to death at the end using this method and he suffers no ill effects other than becoming non-responsive.
It's an interesting docu if you have the time. Also interesting is some of the people who disagree with the method, basically it's too clean and painless for them. I'll stop now as this is GQ.My brother used to date the daughter of one of the doctors from Huntsville who the Texas Dept. of Corrections would call in to confirm that prisoners were dead / sign the death certificate / whatever.
According to the daughter, he apparently got no end of shit from the AMA and other doctors for even doing that much involved with executions.
I’m against the death penalty, but wouldn’t it be simple enough to put cyanide into a liquid, put it in a syringe and into the mouth of a person strapped to a gurney? Or if you have to, give them some laughing gas first.
Every time I read this thread title I wonder how something can be “painlessly difficult”.
Look, if they really wanted a foolproof painless method they’d bring back the guillotine. You absolutely cannot fuck that one up. But they also want this illusion of niceness. They don’t want to see anything ugly.
The way they used to be conducted was a drug to put the prisoner to sleep, a drug to stop breathing and a drug to stop the heart. Generally botched lethal injections occur because of a blocked line, or difficulty in injecting the drugs into a vein. Prison employees are generally inexperienced and many prisoners have degraded veins due to drug use.
Physicians have refused to participate in ensuring executions are not botched or designing new painless methods. Many states switched to a one drug protocol where the only drug administered is an anesthetic that also stops breathing. However, since the particular drug started being used its manufacturer stop making it. Now states are starting to use another drug that is used in animal euthanasia. Oklahoma has now made nitrogen an option if the proper drugs can not be obtained.
Most methods used in the US were probably close to painless but messy for the witnesses and prison personnel and that is why lethal injection became the preferred method.
At the risk of coming across as authoritarian when I am really not…I’ve never understood the “drug companies won’t sell it” argument. IF execution is in the public interest (certainly debatable), why doesn’t the state compel the drug companies to sell it the drugs? The government (and, by extension, most Americans) has no problem compelling me to pay taxes, and using those taxes to do all sorts of things I find morally objectionable, even killing (drone strikes, for example) because it’s claimed to be in the public interest. The (local) government had no problem changing the parking rules and forcing me to move my boat because it deemed real estate prices (which boat parking was perceived to threaten) a pulic interest. I occasionally have to endure gov’t compulsion that’s not in MY interest and to which I object – what makes the drug manufacturers so special the same principle does not apply to them?
It’s not. A single .38 round to the base of the skull, right where the spine comes in, would turn them off like a lightswitch. They wouldn’t even know they were dead. And it’s a helluva lot cheaper, too.
Captive bolt gun, a-la “No Country for Old Men”. Safer (for everyone else), less messy, and probably cheaper over the long haul.
Seriously though; I was reading that several states are considering a switch to nitrogen asphyxiation, since it’s painless and the condemned don’t even know it’s happening.
Of course, that sort of begs the question of if they can do it like that, why don’t they just rig up the death row cells to be air-tight, and on someone’s execution day, don’t tell them- just increase the nitrogen percentage. They’d never know it happened- no freakouts, no execution-theater, or anything like that.
The problem is one of progressive’s own creation; bleeding heart liberals who are desperate to save criminal scum make mountains out of every molehill in the execution process. The reason the government can’t use the safe and effective drugs veterinarians use to put down animals is because public pressure campaigns instituted against manufacturers of those drugs (of course, by death penalty opponents) have prevented those drugs from being sold to governments that use the death penalty. This then forces the government to use marginally less effective drugs, and of course progressives are happy to complain about a problem that they themselves created.
The real issue is that the debate is on false pretenses. Criminals didn’t give their victims painless deaths, and so the state has no obligation to do so either. But the debate has been co-opted by one side who argue about whether the drugs are perfectly painless, when we really should be discussing whether murderers and traitors deserve comfortable deaths at all.
Is it really impossible to fail? I have vague recollections of botched executions. But they’re just that, vague recollections so if someone can tell us more, it’d be nice.
Also, yes, the execution has to be gore-less to be acceptable to most people, especially now that decapitation is associated with Islamic terrorists and Mexican cartels.
Execution-theater or decorum is part of it. The judicial system is big on procedure, especially for issues like that.
Is there a reason that carbon monoxide hasn’t been used (to my knowledge)? Seems like it would be easy and offer the same advantages as nitrogen.
This is why I think Jack Kevorkian was a hero.
I know he wasn’t involved with state-administered death penalties. He was providing people a way to end their lives in a painless, humane way.
We should all have that right if we find ourselves in a situation where a reversal of a medical condition is impossible, and you don’t want to have to suffer your way to the bitter, brutal end.
I watched a video of one of his patients ending his life, and it looked pretty painless to me. The man went to sleep.
If we as a society agree that we are ok with ending a human life, there are many quick and painless ways to do it, many of which have already been mentioned in this thread.
Why is this thread still in General Questions?
For that matter, doesn’t the FBI have a chemistry lab and the technical know-how to manufacture all the drugs they want and then sell to the states?
Damn libruls, it’s always their fault we can’t have anything nice.
Commander Blokhin certainly found it so, Although it got kinda messy…
The major-general used a Walther .25 though.
I can think of absolutely no reason for states to use anything but N2 asphyxiation. Even the most “aggressive” states have moved away from the idea that an execution has to be nasty, in and of itself - no matter how many proponents of violent, painful, “messy” executions there might be, in and out of prisons.
The arguments against each specific method come from anti-DP arguments, no matter how carefully they’re concealed (and they often aren’t). It’s the same kind of tactics used against abortion and guns: can’t outlaw the central thing, so make it impossible through building walls around it.
If we’re going to execute people, and there’s a consensus that it be fast, painless and effective, and that the gory methods of the past are inappropriate… I invite any and all arguments against strapping the vic into a comfortable chair, with whatever ambience is deemed appropriate (me, I’d post crime-scene photos across all of their arc of vision), and slowly fill the chamber with N2.
Cheap, simple, impossible to screw up with a modicum of engineering care, and absolutely no way to block through stupid legal shenanigans. And absolutely effective.