Why not public stoning? A method from antiquity - like the morals of a large swath of the US public. It’s even mentioned in the bible! Then all those bloodthirsty biblethumping death penalty supporters could participate in the spectacle.
When the inmate pleads for his life, cries, calls for his mommy, snot running, blood flowing, death spasms, blood frothing gasps for air - if they’re so eager to kill someone show them the gruesome reality. Let them do the work. Perhaps then one or the other will reconsider.
It’s hilarious to find forum members that oppose the death penalty, not because it’s a fundamentally barbaric atavism, serving no functional purpose, but rather because they don’t trust the government to kill the right people. I suppose that’s a very Boing Boing thing to believe.
Also, arguing over which method of execution would be more humane is grotesque.
It’s possible to believe both, you know. I realize the media don’t go much for the whole “complex thinking about complex things” angle, but we can do better.
Of course. However, worrying about the latter, rather than the former, is what I find absurdly amusing. The American justice system is broken, but even if it is ever fixed, the death penalty will remain immoral.
Hey Walter, don’t know if you live in America, but here’s basically why I think people feel the need to explain that errors are made in execution or that the cost of execution is prohibitive (even though they may just believe it is inherently wrong as an act):
America does have a population within it that are bloodthirsty and self-righteous enough to believe that the state has the right to take lives. It’s those people the arguments about errors and cost are made to - because they simply don’t care about the lives of the prisoners. They care more about vengeance and anger. Logic doesn’t sit well with them, so it’s an effort to discuss the topic on terms they’ll understand - cost is a major issue for conservatives, many of whom do support the death penalty. In addition, the Tea Party, which supports the death penalty, opposes government control for errors it might make.
It’s similar to a woman who defends access to birth control because it has uses other than simply preventing unintended birth, and it’s between a woman and her doctor just why it is she’s using any medication. (The Tea Party marched with signs “Keep Your Government Out of My Medicare” - a government-run program.) The argument is secondary, but it’s aimed at people who, for dogmatic reasons, won’t ever accept a woman’s right to control her own body. That’s another common thing you’ll see in today’s America.
The death penalty is wrong. No reservations, no exceptions.
But given that my notion remains a minority opinion in my part of central USA, I must continue to be baffled and enraged by this strange notion of a “humane” execution which seems to actually be “leaves a good looking corpse.”
It does truly seem that the part of the population who support capital punishment also relish the barbaric ceremony surrounding the event. The weird fascination of the last meal, the walk to the death chamber, the drawing back of the curtain…
It’s as if they never left the middle ages.
A humane killing, for someone not choosing euthanasia, would be “never saw it coming, and it was over before it could neurologically register as pain or fear.” And it would be utterly agnostic as to the condition of the body that remained after the execution.
Did I mention I am opposed to the death penalty, unconditionally?
I am, in fact, American. The point (if it can even be called that) is that while I find posters on Boing Boing to be reasonably progressive, I also find it disturbing to see on these forums the same kind of rhetoric used by conspiracy theorists and other conservative nutjobs. It always bothers me to see the government regarded as the primary evil, rather than as the executor for special interests.
Surely the invisible hand of Adam Smith can solve this for us…
How hard can it be to cook up some Pentobarbital or Sodium Thiopental? I remember reading a step-by-step synthesis starting from urea and malonic acid in school chemistry textbook from the mid 1950’s; e.g. times were that we’d expect our aspiring school children to be able to synthesise barbiturates as part of their practical exams to graduate highschool.
Since the purpose of capitalism is to get fat on the misery of others, my new plan: a) Move to the USA, b) open a pharmacy to supply the US prison services with all their nasty lethal drugs synthesised on American soil, thus negating the European embargoes; c) charge $20-30K a shot for the drugs, thus dealing with the low demand, and live wealthily ever after.
I think this graphic is the best one I’ve seen on this subject. From 1972 to 1976, the Supreme Court put a national moratorium on executions, because they found that capital punishment was “being imposed in an unconstitutional manner.” (cruel and unusual punishment) Since that moratorium, two major restrictions have been added to pursuit of the death penalty. Since 2002, a person with an IQ below 70 is typically not a candidate (although some borderline cases have been argued each way). Also, as of 2005, anyone who committed a crime under the age of 18 is not a candidate.
The moratorium was broken in 1977, with a death by firing squad - and it took several years for deaths by lethal injection to take hold (in 1984 there were 21 deaths nationally). Even with a “clean” method on hand, people were slow to kill, and no other means of state killing has been able to continue in volume. Our last peak of killing was in 1999, when 98 inmates were killed.
