Like the two murderers who escaped in New York? No danger to the public at all, right?
They tried the killing the prisoner in his sleep with cyanide gas, it didn’t work because the room was not air tight. That is why they built the gas chamber.
Nitrogen seems the wave of the future, but governments move slowly.
Moderator Action
Given the subject matter, it’s not surprising that this thread has strayed outside of the bounds of GQ more than once. I think there’s enough back and forth debate here to justify a move to GD, so let’s try that forum.
Moving thread from General Questions to Great Debates.
They are typically destroyed after serving as evidence at trial. Hard drugs are classified under Federal law; Congress could pass a law permitting their use for Federal and state executions.
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How is that we need to be protected from people who are already in prison?
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Prison and jails house what? 3 million people in the US? And you want to make policy because you are scared of 2 guys? Who weren’t on death row anyway? Really now?
Those guys don’t frighten me. Nor do plane crashes. I base my risk assessment on statistics, not media sensationalism. Then again, I’m an ultra-liberal by US standards. Rational risk assessment is what we do.
At any rate, I think the OP has been answered.
In a pragmatic way, that’s the beauty of the nitrogen method. Rather than having to simultaneously worry about giving the condemned enough cyanide to kill him, as well as prevent leaks that could both prevent a timely death AND be harmful to people outside the chamber, all you have to worry about is displacing enough oxygen in the room so that he falls unconscious and dies of asphyxiation.
Leaks aren’t a problem at all unless your room is so leaky that you’re displacing all the oxygen outside of the designated room as well.
Thank you** SeaDragonTattoo** for answering the question actually asked.
Cite?
Allow me to add a wrinkle or two to the conversation. Some from my experience as an EMT, some from my brother, who is a captain in the Kentucky Prison System.
A medical doctor has to be on-hand at an execution. They are the ones who make the pronouncement as to when the patient dies. It has to be noted on all of the paperwork. Nurses have to be present (at the very least, a paramedic) in order to place the IV line that the drugs are administered through. Most states will not allow anyone raked lower than EMT-A to start an IV (from lowest ranked to highest in my area: First responder, EMT-B, EMT-A, Paramedic, LPN, RN), and if, say, an EMT-B is instructed to start a line on a patient, while a paramedic is off doing something else to the patient, the medic knows that anything outside of the scope of the EMT-Bs practice falls directly on the medic’s shoulders. So if a paramedic is working on a critical patient, and asks me to start a line, if I screw it up, the medic’s certification would be impacted.
You (collectively, no one in particular) may say that it goes against the Oath that doctors and nurses take to administer these drugs, but that’s not necessarily true.
Plus the execution would be really slow and messy if it turns out the dealer had heavily cut his product with baby laxative.
Then you shouldn’t be all that concerned about the church shootings or mass shootings. There are 300 million people in this country and the odds of any of them dying from a racially motivated or mass shooting are infinitesimal and such rarities are certainly not justification for sweeping efforts to ban or heavily regulate gun ownership. More people die every two to three days in this country in car crashes than have been killed in mass shootings over the last ten years.
Oops, wrong thread, wrong subject. My apologies.
Well, if we’re going to go by body count, capital punishment in the U.S. is statistically insignificant - only a few dozen a year - though the economic costs are considerable. Heck, California fought long and hard to get Charles Ng extradited and spent millions trying him, and if he’d fathered a child the night before being sent to death row, that kid would now be prepping for the S.A.T.
Execution by plastic explosive.
Wrap a 5 pound mass of C4 around a football helmet, in 5 separately fused & wired sections. Hook it all to 5 differnt power sources, each capable of detonating all 5 blocks.
One switch.
Instant, utterly painless, & completely certain.
I think the OP has been answered. Prison authorities lack medical skills, notwithstanding Superdude’s caveats. I say the (GD) implications are that we should execute using methods consistent with the executioner’s expertise. Or at least offer condemned prisoners a firing squad option.
I hate it when that happens!
Folding in your previous point, I support air bags because death from auto accidents are a serious problem. Poking around the internet I see that mass shootings might kill about 30 per year and injure 20 on average. Some years it’s a lot more of course. I don’t dismiss such numbers. But one shouldn’t over-emphasize them either. At any rate they are dwarfed by the ~33,000 gun deaths per year.
We could debate cruel, but it is certainly unusual.
Why? Americans like football.
This may be an obvious nitpick, but you’re also talking about the difference between giving an injection into a muscle, vs starting an IV, which is considerably trickier.
AMA Code of Medical Ethics/Opinion 2.06 - Capital Punishment
Official American Nurse’s Association Position Statements/Nurses’ Role in Capital Punishment
Of course you could test the drugs beforehand to see how pure/effective they would be.
George Will said that football combines two of the worst features of American society: violence and committee meetings.
Imagine the gingerly reluctance to go forward for readjustment when the fucker doesn’t go off.