Posted on 02/13/2015 9:19:24 PM PST by Olog-hai
A hotly contested proposal that resurrects Utah’s use of firing squads to carry out executions narrowly passed a key vote Friday in the state’s Legislature after three missing lawmakers were summoned to break a tie vote.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 39-34 Friday morning to approve the measure, sending it to an uncertain fate in the state’s GOP-controlled Senate. Leaders in that chamber have thus far declined to say if they’ll support it, and Utah’s Republican Gov. Gary Herbert won’t say if he’ll sign it. […]
(Rep. Paul) Ray argues that a team of trained marksmen is faster and more humane than the drawn-out deaths that have occurred in botched lethal injections. His bill would call for a firing squad if Utah cannot get lethal injection drugs 30 days before an execution. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
don’t commit capital murder in Utah!!!
“Carbon monoxide is completely painless. It bonds with red blood cells like CO2 does, but does not unbond. You just get sleepy.”
“Worked on the Jews”. That’s what would stop that.
A firing squad is fast and humane.
A given method of execution might be cruel but is it unusual? Unusual by what standard? The manner in which many murders are committed are so varied it hard to conceive of commonly used methods of execution being classified as unusual.
In the words of Senore’ Gilmore,
“let’s do it”.
...and it WAS NOT botched. The killer started kicking and screaming while still on the saline solution - they hadn’t even given him the drugs yet. It was a STUNT.
It's so good, that when I worked in a lab which used liquid nitrogen for flash cooling of an environmental chamber, we had to be VERY careful to ventilate and refill with good air before anyone went in there to pull out equipment. There's stories of people walking into such an atmosphere, taking a deep breath and collapsing, unconscious.
Sounds like a better way to do it.
Injection is done the way it is done to protect the delicate sensibilities of the observers, not the condemned person. There is no way to know if the person being executed feels anything or suffers at all. Putting him to sleep is done so the family and victim’s family won’t have to see any suffering.
So they can call it “humane.”
The firing squad is pretty straightforward. No one has any illusions about what’s happening. Any pain felt is brief. Hard to botch that.
I strongly encourage states to have a firing squad on the books as an “optional” means of execution. Importantly, judges and juries should not have a say in the means of execution, just that a murderer should be executed. It should be left up to the state *how* to execute.
The means of a firing squad are much harder to appeal. It cannot be described as “cruel or unusual”, because both the police and military legally kill people with guns. Nor can any third party intervene to prevent the execution by interfering with the provision of means, such as happens with lethal injection. Firing squads are conducted with ubiquitous means, and any LEO is competent to carry it out.
The bottom line is that an execution can take 20 years to bring about. Just having a firing squad as an option might reduce that to 15 or even 10 years.
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