Since we know Arizona lawmakers are sticklers in fighting the War On Drugs™, I’m sure Sheriff Arpaio will be turning himself in by the close of business tomorrow, right?
With marijuana legalization & civil rights, these right-wing governed states cite Federal Law - nope. Nuh huh, won’t buck the Federal Gubment. We’re Patriots.
Yet these right-wing, Republican state governments claim ‘States’-Rights’ when caught red-handed, illegally importing non-FDA approved drugs to continue their executions, among many, many, other examples.
It’s called pro-life logic.
Yup, true. Damn true.
Yuck…
Hello,
Humans are endlessly creative and brings of limitless potential. I am thoroughly surprised that the AZ State Dept. of Corrections has been unable to come up with a better solution, such as some cocktail of drugs that cause death, or perhaps one of the narcotic compounds that Arizonans regularly overdose on and expire from. For that matter, it is unclear to me why prisoners have to be killed using drugs.
In the past, we have hanged, shot and electrocuted prisoners to end their lives, and these are certainly effective forms of execution. While they may be considered a trifle less humane than hooking up an IV with a lethal drug dose to a convict, it seems a gratuitously politically correct to kill someone.
There is also the deterrent factor to consider: If the means of execution for Arizonans was something horrifically painful then perhaps they would have second thoughts about committing capital crimes.
And, on the plus side, since Arizonans do believe in capital punishment, they would probably have no shortage of executioners waiting in droves to sign up for the opportunity to kill each other legally in full force and compliance of applicable state law.
Consider it my Modest Proposal for solving Arizona’s inability to effectively execute it’s convicted felons.
Okay, I know there’s a bunch of anti-death penalty folks here, and not to argue that point, but-
IF we are going to execute people, why can’t we just do it with a bullet in the head?
Because to be perfectly honest, it sounds like a much less awful way to go than any of the conventional means. Hanging, gas, and electrocution are basically torture, and injection somehow sounds worse. At least a bullet is immediate and honest about what we’re doing.
My take is because death penalty supporters are concerned that if executions are that gruesome / graphic, it will lose public support. The faux-clinical aspect of lethal injection is seen as less violent. The other argument for lethal injection was that most of the other available methods were at the very least suspect as cruel and unusual punishment. IIRC, one of the western states (Utah maybe?) had firing squad as a legal means of execution until relatively recently, but got rid of it as soon as someone actually requested it.
You’d think a big slug of opiates, or just have them breath pure nitrogen. But no, all these crazy, unproven, screwy methods.
I’m anti-death penalty, but I’d say as long as we’re going to be officially killing people, and pretending it’s a deterrent, we might as well make it as undesirable as possible. Maybe… death by bot-fly infestation. Or death by glacially slow steamroller.
Hell, death by bomb. Why not? It can’t be that painful if you’re rigged up to hug say 20 pounds of C4. There wouldn’t be much left of you.
It’s outrageous we have the death penalty at all, but it would seem everyone’s taking special efforts to make it seem like a pleasant, state-administered nap. That makes it attractive. It’d do more good to enforce the gruesome consequences on the voters who clearly don’t understand what they’re asking for. Make them sick. Make them regret seeing it.
Doesn’t North Korea do execution by artillery?
The American Association of Neurological Surgeons suggests that gunshot head wounds are fatal only about 90% of the time. Do you shoot again for the other 10%? How many shots are allowed? What type of bullets and how many do you prepare? What will the body look like afterwards when it’s shown at a funeral? What happens if your executioner gets cold feet after the first shot?
The injection isn’t so much a good execution method as much as it is one that seeks to reduce the complexity and visibility of the death penalty. At that, it’s pretty successful… unfortunately.
I thought that the Brits were the experts at that?
http://www.executedtoday.com/2011/06/13/1857-blown-from-cannons-sepoy-rebellion/
I’d be quite surprised if there weren’t already people in the prisons able to supply enough heroin to kill someone.
I think you over estimate the human race. Public gruesome death has often been entertainment for the masses, including Americans in the recent past, and to some extent even today.
If you were serious about getting good results from ‘firing squad’, the sensible thing to do would be to mechanize the process.
Gun rests of various flavors, from basic stands that just provide a bit of stability up to full rigs that allow you to test whatever ballistically dubious contraption from a safe distance, are common items; and conceptually trivial enough that anyone moderately handy with welding could knock a customized stand together in an afternoon.
You’d just set up as many guns as deemed necessary for a reliable kill, with all trajectories intersecting at a known point; and then put the victim’s head at that point. Triggering could be handled by solenoids, with a single button-presser, 12 button pressers with only some of the buttons live; or any other obfuscation arrangement.
I’m not sure why you’d do that sort of Rube Goldberg nonsense when nitrogen, carbon monoxide, or the techniques used by vets on animals we actually love and care about are all available; but getting reliable, repeatable, and virtually instant destruction of basically all the neural network from the brainstem up would not be much of an engineering challenge.
As always, though, we seem stuck on idiotic and horribly unreliable approaches that are designed to look all ‘medical’ while being doable without the cooperation of anyone who actually knows anything about medicine(even setting a needle) and without disappointing people who really resent the ban on cruel and unusual punishment too much. Neither actual medically informed techniques nor gruesome-but-effective seem to be on the table.
Perhaps so. Still, it’s a lot easier to not think about the fact that being a taxpaying American means that you support the death penalty, if people basically are anesthetized to death.
Remember about a year ago when Kentucky really screwed up bad, and the guy was struggling to breathe and in a lot of pain for like 4 hours? Remember all the public outrage? I think that could happen again.
Plus, unlike deputy Cletus, the junkies probably know how to find a vein.
I can’t believe nobody has brought up the obvious solution:
