Botched Executions Put Lethal Injections Under New Scrutiny 483
carmendrahl writes: "Lethal injections are typically regarded as far more humane methods for execution compared to predecessors such as hanging and firing squads. But the truth about the procedure's humane-ness is unclear. Major medical associations have declared involvement of their member physicians in executions to be unethical, so that means that relatively inexperienced people administer the injections. Mounting supply challenges for the lethal drug cocktails involved are forcing execution teams to change procedures on the fly. This and other problems have contributed to recent crises in Oklahoma and Missouri. As a new story and interactive graphic explains, states are turning to a number of compound cocktails to get around the supply problems."
Use confiscated drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
I still don't understand why the lethal injection isn't just a bunch of heroin that's been confiscated in the latest raid. People OD on heroin without being horribly uncomfortable.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Veterinarians have to euthanize animals comfortably all the time. Why not use the same drug?
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a discussion on this topic on another site I was visiting, about a week ago.
The consensus was that the problem with using nitrogen asphyxiation was that it didn't cause enough suffering.
Re: (Score:2)
If not that, how about the guillotine?
Heads usually stay alive for a few seconds after decapitation because they have not run out of blood.
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bloody.
The hypocrisy is mind boggling. On one hand it should not be too disturbing for the observers, on the other nitrogen is "too easy" as a poster mentioned above [I for one am for the nitrogen; if I ever want to kill myself I'd use it].
The injection is particularly evil IMO. Just imagine being suddenly awake during surgery and noone notices the monitors [for the sake of argument] - you can't move, you can't scream. I cannot imagine worst than this. No matter how badly it hurts, being able to squirm and scream helps. Total madness!
The world is in the hands of the worst part of humanity. We build our system this way......
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:4, Informative)
Decapitation. (Score:4, Interesting)
There were some 'experiments' back in the day with asking the condemned to blink certain codes after their head was removed. Results were inconclusive.
I still think that most executed prisoners have an easier death, pain wise, than normal people, who generally die of a painful heart attack, long cancer, illness, etc...
My vote's for nitrogen asphixiation.
1. No need for injections. Just give them some anti-anxiety medication to swallow.
2. No need for drugs obtained from secret sources in order to protect supply lines. Any welding supply store should do. Heck, they can purchase a machine to produce the necesssary nitrogen, or even carbon monoxide. I'd suggest a couple canisters just to 'keep it simple'.
3. Still doesn't mess up the body.
4. All evidence is that it's a fast, painless, and peaceful death.
Re:Decapitation. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand, a lot of the people who are pro-executions don't want a painless peaceful death; not even when the statistics show that about 1 in 20 people are innocent.
Human's a very good at not dying (Score:3, Insightful)
There aren't a lot of ways to kill a man without significant pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or ignorant.
Now, a better question is why are we still killing people when at least 4% of ppl killed are veri
Re:Human's a very good at not dying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Human's a very good at not dying (Score:4, Insightful)
Except, that is not what a deterrent is.
The question is, how many young women and girls did Ted Bundy not kidnap, rape, torture or kill because he was worried about being executed? I'd say none, but its difficult to say for sure..
Then, you can ask how many young women and girls were not kidnapped, raped, tortured or killed by other people because of the fear that they would be executed for this, as Ted Bundy was, rather than just being imprisoned for life, or a long time.. this one is harder, but I'd say that people who are prone to kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing young women and girls are not really the kind of people who care about the consequences of their actions, or they think they won't get caught anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
The irony is that the US is a nation that can easily kill an armed "suspected terrorist" from half way round the world, with just a touch of a button from a drone, yet still has trouble killing a man strapped to a chair.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You do know that that sort of isolation invariably leads to insanity right? I'm not really sure how "roll-back-able" insanity is.
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
[...]no tv, no internet, no magazines, no books, no human contact at all
That's a pretty severe punishment, but it's roll-back-able - no one's been deprived of life.
No. No it cannot be rolled back. What you are describing is probably among the most severe and permanently damaging forms of torture known to man. The human mind is not evolved to maintain stability without outside contact. I'd rather die than spend a decade (or 2 or 3 or 4) locked in a box the way you describe. I'm actually horrified that you think it's an acceptable form of justice.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Imprisonment has three purposes:
- rehabilitation
NO. People have the right to believe whatever they want to believe. If you believe that using or selling drugs should be legal, no amount of prison time should ever be used in a "well if you confess to believing X we'll go easy on you". This is the shit that the catholic church did to Galileo. We don't need to be repeating it, no matter how holy you think US law might be.
- protection of society
NO. The only person responsible for your protection is you. No jury should ever feel like "well he might not be guilty, but I'm goin
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
Europeans see the death penalty as barbaric. Which, given our fellow executors [static-economist.com], is accurate. Companies who make drugs obviously don't care about criminals dying versus the profit they'd make directly, they just don't want to face an outrcry from their European customers by being associated with that.
In the same way, liberals opposed to the death penalty aren't really concerned with stealing red state power. It's more that we don't want to be associated with people who insist that beheading is justice.
Re: (Score:3)
...or your basic "Exit Bag" system, with a colorant or odorant to safeguard against the administering staff being harmed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I still don't understand why the lethal injection isn't just a bunch of heroin that's been confiscated in the latest raid. People OD on heroin without being horribly uncomfortable.
Not fast enough. Throw in a little carbon monoxide.
Re: (Score:3)
Because the association with drugs might serve to bring the legitimacy of the institution of death penalty into question. Like all institutions, it too is primarily concerned with its own continuation, and does whatever it takes to ensure a steady stream of victims. Not out of any malice, mind you, but simply because it can't exi
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't have a justice system, we have a revenge system. It continues because we will always want revenge on those that damage us, society. We already know we're murdering people, these people "deserve" to be murdered.
Re: (Score:3)
Someone should just get these people a whole pile of video games.
Re: (Score:2)
Just inject it directly into the heart. Like those adrenaline syringes.
If they have a heart problem and it explodes, then success! Either way, it works.
Re: (Score:3)
I got an idea.
Use volunteers from convicted murderers to kill people.
That way, no one has to suffer from psychological effects except the already deranged who chose to do that.
Sounds perfect to me.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
if the inmate has a tolerance to heroin from long periods of addiction/abuse, it won't be effective.
That tolerance only occurs when using it continually. It decreases after periods of not using heroin. That's why many addicts OD after being clean for a while. They think they can use as much as the always did. But it can take months to build up that tolerance. Since most, if not all death row inmates are locked up of years, if not decades before they are executed, tolerance to heroine is not going to be an issue.
Re:Use confiscated drugs (Score:5, Funny)
Then just give them more. There's a lethal dose of heroin for everyone.
With the possible exception of Keith Richards.
Frosty (Score:5, Insightful)
If people don't want to die a a horrid painful death they should choose their parents better - that way they'd be able to afford a better lawyer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Frosty (Score:5, Informative)
You assume all the people put to death are actually guilty of the crime. This is certainly not true. Also, as the GP implied, plenty of people who are guilty of the crime don't get put to death. When was the last time you heard of a wealthy well-connected person sentenced to death?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So... what's an acceptable error rate? If "only" 10% of the people we kill are innocent, is that OK?
It is well established that innocent people have been killed and that innocent people who are on death row are regularly found out and released.
So... how many innocent people are you comfortable in killing?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So... what's an acceptable error rate? If "only" 10% of the people we kill are innocent, is that OK?
If you think it's anywhere near 10%, you are deluding yourself. But as I said, even one is too many. Most of the cases we know about occurred in the days before the current level of sophistication of CSI, what with DNA and other techniques.
I agree with you that the Death Penalty is morally wrong, but suggesting huge numbers of the many people on Death Row are innocent is unrealistic and detrimental you your argument.
Re:Frosty (Score:4, Insightful)
Per the Constitution, the acceptable error rate is 0% false positives and any amount of false negatives.
However, the issue here is that the error rate applies to the conviction, not the punishment. People who oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it kills innocent people are making the implicit claim that it's somehow not just as bad for those innocent people to rot in prison forever, which is a horrifically barbaric ideology in and of itself.
Re:Frosty (Score:5, Interesting)
Except... Numerous studies have shown that the death penalty has no effect on crime so no consequences for not killing people.
So... best to join the rest of the civilized countries in the world and abolish the death penalty.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't accept killing innocent people.
I don't even accept the idea of killing guilty people.
To me, killing is just a brutal revenge. I think killing a guilty person is actually the easy way out for the guilty. I think it is a much more severe punishment to have a guilty person rot in jail for the rest of their life without the possibility of release.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
You should never wear someone else's tinfoil hat. It is unique the to wearer, and has adapted itself to your own personal brainwaves.
If you use someone else's tinfoil hat, the government mind control beams will be able to triangulate you, and will be used to inform the aliens. They'll then just have to do a little recalibration, and your thoughts will be in the clear.
You have to make your own tinfoil hat.
At least, that's what I hear. ;-)
Re:Frosty (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they didn't. A not-insignificant number of death row inmates aren't even guilty.
And the point about wealth and having a better lawyer is quite valid too.
Personally, I'm not against the idea of the death penalty, but I can't support it in practice knowing that we kill the innocent sometimes along with the guilty.
Re: (Score:2)
A not-insignificant number of death row inmates aren't even guilty.
Define "not-insignificant number"? Of course one is too many. However, to suggest that the number is "large" is misleading. Probably not even a few percent, maybe less than 1 percent. Still too many, but suggesting huge numbers does your argument no favors.
Re:Frosty (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Probably not even a few percent
A few percent is a HUGE number in this context.
For example, that means if you select an executed prisoner at random, the odds he was innocent is several times HIGHER than the odds he shares your birthday. (0.027%) Its HIGHER than the odds he shares your 'birth-week'. (1.9%)
A recent peer reviewed study puts the innocence rate at LEAST 4% as a conservative. If we executed one inmate a week (which is fairly close to actuality), we'd kill at least 2 innocents every year on average
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Frosty (Score:4, Insightful)
If people don't want to die a a horrid painful death they should choose their parents better
If people don't want to die a horrid painful death, they should avoid being born in the first place. What do you think most of us have to look forward to in the last couple years of our lives?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
IAAL (several hundred FL criminal defense cases including felony jury trials, etc)
It has almost nothing to do with the quality of lawyering involved. A significant portion of criminal defense cases have essentially pre-ordained outcomes due to the weight of evidence against the accused.
Lawyers are really only useful in the few close cases- ie, ones where evidence supporting reasonable doubt can be found. A lot of the big cases in the media (OJ Simpson, Casey Anthony, Zimmerman) were actually extremely weak
Re: (Score:3)
Well, we're a Christian Nation, aren't we? Shouldn't we respect life, forgive and what not?"
Well, according to progressives, we're not...
You aren't, because there's no such thing. There's no mention of a concept of a Christian Nation in the Bible, the collective is a "church". The Old Testament has a nation (of a sort) which is Israel but they aren't bound by the political structure centering around the judges and later, kings, but around a common identity based on Abraham as the recipient of God's covenantal promises - promises which extended explicitly to Abraham's physical descendants, which is the common identity of Israel.
As for whet
Stupid question (Score:2)
Why not use the gas we euthanize dogs and cats with?
PS: I'm probably against the death penalty but it just seems an easy method to remove this objection to it, and use something that is not going to be hard to supply. And I'm sure some death-penalty supporters are also much more concerned with cat and dogs suffering so this is probably pretty humane.
Re:Stupid question (Score:5, Informative)
Because if you use those drugs for executions, the (European) manufacturers of them then get prohibited from selling them to the USA and you no longer have them for medical uses.
Re: (Score:2)
Dogs and cats are usually put down with intravenous injections (so says wikipedia).
Re: (Score:3)
As someone who recently had to put my cat to sleep because of cancer, the vet told me they were using an overdose of barbiturates, not gas.
I felt my best bud of 12 years go limp in my hands within a second or two of the injection and he was gone a second or two later.
Maybe my vet was different, but I've known other vets who do the same.
Re:Stupid question (Score:5, Informative)
Phenobarbitol (barbiturate) is what they use to kill people. The only manufacturer is in Europe and refuses to sell it to the US to kill people. Hence, the secrecy, mad scramble and botched executions.
Bring back the firing squad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cheap, effective, quick ("humane"), and we don't need to rely on other nations to produce the materials.
Too messy. Someone has to clean that up...
One word. (Score:2)
Lots of alternatives.. (Score:4, Informative)
Guillotine, Hanging, Firing Squad and the Electric Chair.
You could also take standard drugs like Sodium Thiopental that are used in countries that allow euthanasia [wikipedia.org]
Sodium thiopental is used intravenously for the purposes of euthanasia. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, where active euthanasia is allowed by law, the standard protocol recommends sodium thiopental as the ideal agent to induce coma, followed by pancuronium bromide.
Intravenous administration is the most reliable and rapid way to accomplish euthanasia. A coma is first induced by intravenous administration of 20 mg/kg thiopental sodium (Nesdonal) in a small volume (10 ml physiological saline). Then, a triple dose of a non-depolarizing skeletal muscle relaxant is given, such as 20 mg pancuronium bromide (Pavulon) or 20 mg vecuronium bromide (Norcuron). The muscle relaxant should be given intravenously to ensure optimal availability but pancuronium bromide may be administered intramuscular at an increased dosage level of 40 mg.
It's also cheap too. [igenericdrugs.com]
Lots of alternatives.. (Score:3, Informative)
Export of Sodium Thiopental and similar drugs to countries that allow executions are banned throughout the EU. That's why the USA is now looking for shitty homegrown replacements.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
While it may be possible to build a reliable and humane electric chair, the history of actual electric chair executions is not that a humane pain-free execution process.
Re: (Score:3)
It boggles my mind how anyone can think the electric chair is, or even could be, in any way humane.
Apart from anything else the victim takes time to die, partly from it boiling their blood and brain enough that their eyes can literally pop out of their sockets.
The only reason the electric chair made it at all is because it was Thomas Edison who was pushing it heavily for his own political and business gain, and another way to promote DC over AC. None of his actual reasons have anything to do with efficient
Re: (Score:3)
Except we can't get sodium thiopental in the US. We don't make it, and the EU won't sell it to us because we use it for executions.
Re: (Score:2)
Two words.. Canadian Pharmacy.. Naw, the whole EU ban on it and the only US company, Hospira, stopped in 2011 means that the easy way isn't so easy. I smell a commercial opportunity here. Would it be unethical to try and use kickstarter for seed funding? ;-)
We would like to ramp up production of Sodium Thiopental to develop the onshore capability for killing our prisoners on death row. This means we'll be manufacturing it here in the good old USA and hiring American workers (except for the Janitorial staff). For this we're targeting
an initial funding of $20 million to set up the lab and limited production facilities.
I could sell it to the states and make a fortune!
I'll choose ... (Score:5, Funny)
Nitrogen asphyxiation, if you must execute (Score:5, Interesting)
- It's completely painless and humane; one's physiology doesn't notice the lack of oxygen so the person just goes to sleep and then dies. People who were revived from asphyxia like this reported they had no idea until they woke up
- It's practically free of charge as nitrogen is 80% of our atmosphere; there will never be a shortage of it
- Because it's universally available and free worldwide it can't be banned or restricted
- It's much safer (ie nitrogen leaks are harmless assuming the area is ventilated.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I meant by third parties... this all started because the EU companies that produce the former lethal injection cocktail were banned under the EU constitution from selling pharma for executions. Rather difficult to cut off the supply of nitrogen like this!
Re: (Score:2)
Governments even ban numbers!
Nitrogen (Score:3)
Car/engine running idle in an enclosed space... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that suicide by car exhaust is effective these days. Modern cars don't emit the amount of carbon monoxide that older cars did.
However, I have wondered why execution by carbon monoxide poisoning isn't used. Perhaps there are too many people who would be offended by the concept of a gas chamber?
Re: (Score:2)
However, I have wondered why execution by carbon monoxide poisoning isn't used. Perhaps there are too many people who would be offended by the concept of a gas chamber?
I think you've hit on something here. People don't want a "mess", so fireing squads and the electric chair and hanging (the head might pop off) are out, execute if you must, but let's not "offend" our senses...
Surprised they haven't made in a profit center (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm surprised the state of Oklahoma hasn't tried to make carrying out death sentences a profit center. There's no shortage of people in that state who wouldn't actually pay to be on a firing squad. And plenty of them would pay even more to get to do it up close and personal with a handgun.
They could even open it up to the residents of Texas and add in an out of state surcharge for the privilege.
as george carlin once said (Score:2)
Only by idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'barbaric' methods, by contrast, don't look all nice and clean and medical; but they also don't involve deputy Cletus playing amateur phlebotomist with a dodgy, failure-prone, three-step injection process (compare to, say, how we put domestic animals to sleep, if you want to see somebody who knows their stuff handle a lethal injection...), they involve a lot of gore; potentially some peripheral nervous activity causing creepy corpse twitch; but they depend either on simple mechanical principles(as with the guillotine) or skills that prison staff likely have in more than adequate amounts (as with firing squads).
Personally, I'm not against the notion of capital punishment in principle; but the way we do it in the US is like a grimly parodic example of what not to do, and how not to do it. Despite the availability of trivially better procedures, we insist on using a variety of ass-backwards Mad-Libs protocols with a history of unreliability and no obvious merits. Our irrational, emotionally misguided, approach carries over to the selection of victims as well: (even aside from the documented cases where the whole trial was a frame-up, with gross prosecutorial, judicial, and sometimes even defense attorney, misconduct) we execute largely on the basis of emotional salience, rather than actual danger. Kill somebody, up close and personal, nice and gruesome? Potential death penalty in jurisdictions that conduct it. Kill a large number of people, by some polite, white-collar, epidemiological chicanery? Probably just a civil matter, you might even get to settle without admitting wrongdoing.
Nobody likes violent criminals, and they are notably unsympathetic characters; but (precisely for those reasons) their influence tends to be self-limiting. The really dangerous ones are smart enough to make it to a position of power and influence, where the rewards are better and the penalties oh so much smaller. If we were serious about rationally applying capital punishment, it'd be a lot easier to be taken out and shot for various flavors of fraud and corruption, rather than effectively impossible, as now.
This is not that hard (Score:2)
I have never understood why killing someone cleanly is so complicated to get right in the modern era. The French solved this problem back in 1792, and it worked fairly well up until they finally decided that having the government kill people was inherently problematic. The USA being a country that loves its guns so much, it's almost incomprehensible that there hasn't been a freaking research paper on the optimal angle for a shotgun under the chin. We have all manner of chemical designed to render someone
Why is it so hard? (Score:2)
It seems like it should be easy with either one drug or two at most.
There seems to be dozens of drugs used for anesthesia that should work for a single drug. When I've had surgery it seems like "count backwards from 10" gets me to about 8.5 before I'm out. And at that point they could just inject enough after that to kill you.
Even if they had to use two drugs, again there's plenty that would make you unconscious and they could inject nasty stuff to finish you off.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, but if you use those for executions, the European companies that make them won't be allowed to sell them to the USA, period, so you won't have them for surgeries either.
I dont understand (Score:2)
Disclaimer: Im against the death penalty.
But I don't understand why its so hard to kill someone. Making someone unconscious for major surgery seems to be a solved problem. Once someone is unconscious, and paralysed, how hard is it to kill them?
If you are unconscious, no oxygen will kill you in a few minutes without pain. Even if you are concious, from what I understand its CO2 in the lungs that causes pain.. just filling a room with helium should probably kill you without you feeling much pain in a few minu
Re: (Score:2)
Making someone unconscious for major surgery seems to be a solved problem.
Using the drugs (sodium thiopental, propofol, etc.) used for that purpose for killing people without getting said drugs embargoed is an unsolved problem.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess its just a marketing problem, they need drugs that make the person not move so no one feels bad. And at the end the person looks like they died naturally.
500g of c4 on someone's head would do the job and be completely painless, and cost almost nothing.
I'm guessing that its hard to get drugs that don't cause convulsions or toxic side effects Or at least they only are made by companies who dont want to be known for killing people. Because getting drugs to kill someone doesn't seem so hard.
Re: (Score:3)
This has become a problem because doctors are generally refusing to involve themselves in the process. From what I have heard from professionals, it can be difficult to properly insert a needle into a person. It becomes easier with practice, but the people administering this are only doing this a few times per year so there is little experience with the technique. Plus some drug companies are refusing to provide the tried and true cocktails, so states are having to find different drugs, again with little
keep it simple. (Score:2)
Greater complexity = much greater chance to screw up.
I don't get why execution has been made this complex.
We need to do away with the whole special death row areas, telling victims months ahead when they are goona get executed, the green mile walk, and multiple different hard-to-get injections conducted in stages by multiple different people.
Whats wrong with an unexpected trip to a disguised room and a quick bullet (or 6 to be sure) to the head? Ideally when the victim isn't even slightly expecting
Stop messing around (Score:5, Insightful)
If we're going to do executions, then the whole "pain-free" premise should go right out the door. We're killing the criminal in retaliation for a crime. Why does it need to be so painless? I mean, don't torture the criminal by starvation or dehydration or anything like that. But hanging, guillotine, firing squad, etc. are all effective means. You could even give some local to ease the pain on some of these methods.
Otherwise, all you're really doing is admitting that execution isn't right, but trying to get away with it anyway.
Re:Stop messing around (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you've hit on the point of lethal injection. The real appeal of the elaborate pseudo-medical procedure is that it masks the nature of what is being done to the condemned, makes it seem nicer than it really is.
If being humane toward the condemned were the highest priority, firing squad or guillotine would be the best choices among the traditional execution methods. In fact, and ironically, the traditional method of *extrajudicial* execution would be most reliably humane: a shot in the back of the head.
The reason we don't use these methods is that they're embarrassingly messy, and leave an ugly residue. We'd prefer to have a nicely intact body as if the condemned died peacefully, but in fact the catastrophic destruction of the condemned bodies is what makes the uglier methods more humane. Instant oblivion is is clearly preferable to an elaborately drawn out psuedo-medical procedure, especially an untried one carried out by inexperienced hands.
The reason we carry out lethal injections isn't humane, it's political.
Sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard on the radio just this morning that due to the supply difficulties, Tennessee is passing/has passed a law to bring back the electric chair. Now that's humane!
Capital punishment is largely about one thing. One thing that politicians tend to do very well to keep their constituents in line. Fear-mongering. See.. I am tough on those rapin, theiving, murderin (insert carefully chosen group that panders to your audience here).
Re: (Score:3)
Should state-run prisons be entirely abandoned?
Yes [wikipedia.org]. Do you have any other questions which answer themselves?
I don't understand what is so difficult about it (Score:2)
I'll set aside, for a moment, that capital punishment is barbaric and should not exist in a society that wishes to call itself free and humane.
But what is so difficult about performing an execution properly without subjecting the executee to unconscionable suffering? If an anesthesiologist can induce a patient into a temporary coma with perfect precision, so that the patient will feel no pain and be without consciousness during a surgical procedure, why the hell can't a prisoner be put into exactly the sam
Wrong conversation (Score:2)
old sparky comes back (Score:2)
http://www.foxnews.com/politic... [foxnews.com]
there's some dishonesty at the base of this (Score:2)
Execution is not humane, no matter how you do it. If you cannot accept that, then you should oppose execution. Conversely, if you support execution, you should accept that it is cruel no matter how it is done.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Hear hear. We know the effects of nitrogen asphyxiation from those who have been pulled to safety before suffering permanent damage - you pass out in under a minute, probably without ever realizing there's a problem, and die a few minutes later. You don't even need a gas chamber, an anesthesia mask and a cut-rate tank of nitrogen get the job done fine.
My only theory as to why it's not used is that it's not violent enough. After all one of the major purposes of a criminal justice system is to slake the vi
Re: (Score:2)
Too messy. The pro-capital-punishment side has been losing steam for about the last 20 years. Desanitizing the process would likely accelerate that and lead to its abolition.
Re: (Score:3)
What I don't get is this talk about a "more humane" way of killing people. Some might be more gruesome than others, but I find none of them to be 'humane' in the least, simply because I don't consider willfully killing someone to be 'humane'.
But that's just MHO.
Re:What is wrong the the Soviet & China style (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)