Originally published at: South Carolina legislators approve execution by firing squad | Boing Boing
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I’m nor sure which is more depressing, that the state is determined to commit premeditated murder or that they’re exploring torture to accomplish it.
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I’m all for ending state-sponsored murder, but this is a really dumb reason to do it.
“Why would South Carolina move toward the firing squad when they also do that in North Korea?” State Representative Justin Bamberg, a Democrat, said in an interview on Thursday.
North Koreans also eat kimchi (yum!), maybe South Carolina should ban that, too.
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Remind me NOT to double park in Charleston please.
If the right wing death cult could turn the Earth backwards they would do it in a heart beat.
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And we don’t even have Superman around to get it turning the other way again.
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It sounds strange to say it, but I think firing squad is probably the most “humane” out of the three (firing squad, electric chair, and lethal injection).
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Sure, get hit by a speeding bullet, guts explode, writhe in pain, bleed out and slowly die if the shot isn’t a kill shot. Sounds humane. /s
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Seriously. Doesn’t the lethal injection include anesthesia?
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Same week that an executed man was exonerated by DNA evidence.
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Again, witness the performative cruelty of the Republican Party. They want to be seen as angry and violent.
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it’s the most honest
guns is how people kill each other these days
a firing squad is not pretending to be something else, like a medical procedure
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I’m fundamentally against all forms of capital punishment for lots of different reasons, but there have been MANY botched attempts at lethal injection that definitely qualify as torture, so honestly I don’t know if the firing squad is really much worse. At least it’s not pretending to be anything other than what it clearly is: the state committing a violent and bloody act of murder. The thing with lethal injection that upsets me most is that it’s so sanitized and almost presented as a medical procedure or act of mercy, so it’s easier for society to think of it as something other than what it is.
ETA: @smulder beat me to the point and made it more succinctly.
If it weren’t for not wanting to offend the sensibilities of the public, probably one of the most fool-proof, “humane” forms of execution would be to use a mechanism to simultaneously fire several redundant shotgun blasts at the the condemned person’s head at close range. Certainly more instantaneous and less likely to fail than a traditional firing squad. The reason that we don’t execute people that way has nothing to do with mercy for the condemned, and everything to do with how pro-death-penalty-people want to view themselves as being better than murderers.
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I consider it one of the world’s great ironies that prisoners get the injection site on their arms swabbed and sterilized before lethal drugs are injected.
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Maybe we’ll get to see them use it on some capitol insurrectionists.
It’s traditional, after all.
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Having been shot, I must disagree with that, and point out that even witnessing a shooting produces PTSD in a human. Killing a human to right any wrong is repugnant ignorant process, and it has never deterred crime, ever.
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It’s been getting botched a lot lately.
There’s not many qualified medical professionals who are willing to execute people, and the pharma companies are loath to sell the drugs for purposes of execution.
I think I’d probably rather get shot in the head with a rifle than chance lethal injection by the clowns running that program in TX and OK.
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And the electric chair, which they’re also chomping at the bit to bring back.
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That they make people choose between these three horrible options…that’s the cruel and unusual punishment, right there.
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