Posted on 03/19/2015 1:11:10 PM PDT by Kaslin
FOR A NATION that almost never puts murderers to death — there were 14,196 homicides in 2013, but only 39 executions — Americans spend an awful lot of time debating whether and how to do it.
The Utah legislature last week passed a bill reinstating the firing squad to execute death row inmates, as a back-up in case lethal-injection drugs aren't available. It was in Utah five years ago that the last death by firing squad in the United States took place, when Ronnie Lee Gardner paid with his life for the courthouse murder of attorney Michael Burdell in 1985. Utah's governor hasn't said yet if he will sign the bill into law — but his isn't the only state grappling with the question of how capital punishment should be carried out.
In Wyoming, a proposal to restore the firing squad won initial approval earlier this year, though the state's legislative session expired before the law could be finalized. The Alabama House voted last week torevive the electric chair if lethal injection becomes untenable; in 2014, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a comparable measure passed overwhelmingly by lawmakers in Nashville. And in Oklahoma, the House and Senate have approved a return to the gas chamber, using inert nitrogen gas to induce death painlessly.
This quest for substitutes to lethal injection is the result of a determined campaign by death-penalty opponents to keep pharmaceutical companies from selling the drugs used in executions to state prison systems. But it's one thing, it turns out, to impede the use of a specific method of executing murderers — even a method that had widely been regarded as the most humane alternative to electrocution or hanging. It's something quite different, something much more difficult, to overturn the longstanding American consensus that in the most terrible cases of murder, killers should pay with their lives.
Until a few years ago, lethal injection had gained broad acceptance as the safest, least brutal means of putting a murderer to death. Of the 1,403 executions carried out in the United States since 1976, more than 85 percent were by this method. The standard injection protocol used sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, powerful barbiturates frequently used to put down suffering animals and in cases of assisted suicide.
But the last American manufacturer of the drug halted production in 2011, and a European embargo on exporting the needed drugs for use in executions made it impossible to get the drugs from overseas. Some states, forced to improvise as their inventory dwindled, turned to unnamed compounding pharmacies, or they formulated new and largely untested lethal-injection protocols. In some instances, such as the bungled execution of Oklahoma murderer-rapist Clayton Lockett last year, the results have been gruesome and disturbing.
Perversely, death-penalty foes have succeeded only in making lethal injections less safe. "In pushing for outright abolition of capital punishment, we have undermined the countervailing effort to make it as clean and painless as possible," acknowledged Boer Deng and Dahlia Lithwick in an essay in Slate shortly after the Lockett fiasco. The upshot: "What was, until pretty recently, a fairly standard national method of lethal injection has been driven underground and into the dark by efforts in both the United States and Europe to end capital punishment altogether."
If anything, the prospects for lethal injection are even dimmer now. Ohio has postponed all executions for the rest of the year, in order to give authorities time to find new drugs. Pennsylvania and South Carolina have depleted their supplies of pentobarbital, the primary lethal-injection drug. Even Texas, the state with the most experience in administering the death penalty, is about to run dry.
But while lethal injection may become unworkable, strong support for the death penalty endures.
Behind the legislation in Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma and other states to authorize other execution methods as alternatives to lethal injection is not a primitive hankering to kill, but a civilized commitment to justice. However unfashionable it may be in some precincts to say so, most Americans intuitively understand that the death penalty is not only lawful but enlightened. Everyone knows that few murderers will ever face execution. But that no murderer should ever face execution? That would be intolerable.
Society's attitude toward evil is revealed in how it penalizes those who commit evil. For greater crime there must be greater punishment; with the very worst punishment, death, reserved for the very worst crime: cruel and premeditated murder. There are some offenses so monstrous that those who perpetrate them forfeit their right to live. Justice requires a death penalty, even if we must debate how best to carry it out.
Since taking your own life is a sin, my idea is to create a death row cell where the inmate can take his own life. It would look like this.
The cell looks like an ordinary death row cell. However on the wall there is a “push to fire bullet” mechanism, not unlike those break glass to activate alarm devices. There are two hand prints on the wall and two foot prints on the floor.
In order to activate the firing mechanism, a five point circuit needs to be made. The feet go in the foot print, the hands go in the hand print and the final connection is the head touching the activation button. This is the only way the bullet can be fired into the brain. It’s all biometric so only the convict can activate it.
It’s cheap, it’s quick and it is emotionally painful to the convict. Having to sit there day after day looking at this device would drive someone mad. A fitting end.
It is used in dentistry for pain.
They could start with a low dose and keep increasing it until the criminal is dead. Let it run an additional 15 minutes to make sure.
There for sure would be no pain.
fools. Lethal injection is for the Obamacared
Got a 25 word-or-less synopsis?
I think an industrial water cutter guillotine would be just about foolproof.
Got titanium neck vertebrae?
Slice!
* thunk *
No problem.
The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.
A little more than 25 words but I’m positive you can handle it! Cheers!
Industrial Strength Wood Chipper?
Interesting. Thanks.
That’s horrible.
I like it.
Also known as snoo-snoo.
The whole purpose of the guillotine was quick humane execution. Maybe we should try that.
"Idcirco eum cum universis complicibus, fautoribusque suis, judicio Dei omnipotentis Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, et beati Petri principis Apostolorum, et omnium Sanctorum, necnon et mediocritatis nostrae auctoritate, et potestate ligandi et solvendi in coelo et in terra nobis divinitus collata, a pretiosi Corporis et Sanguinis Domini perceptione, et a societate omnium Christianorum separamus, et a liminibus sanctae matris Ecclesiae in coelo et in terra excludimus, et excommunicatum et anathematizatum esse decernimus; et damnatum cum diabolo, et angelis ejus, et omnibus reprobis in ignem aeternum judicamus; donec a diaboli laqueis resipiscat, et ad emendationem, et poenitentiam redeat, et Ecclesiae Dei, quam laesit, satisfaciat, tradentes eum satanae in interitum carnis, ut spiritus ejus salvus fiat in die judicii."
Except for Timothy McVeigh.
At his trial in 1997, a Denver jury found him guilty of conspiracy and murder, and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in 2001. Someone was in a big hurry to get rid of him?
That just might explain Obama and his weird style of negative leadership.
It might. IMO, it explains the entire Left.
Notice the three bullet holes in the wooden planks behind the chair.
I hadn’t heard about the nitrogen gas chamber. Pretty effective, and the pantywaists can’t cut off access to nitrogen, since close to 80% of the atmosphere is made up of it.
I worked for a chemical manufacturer a number of years ago. A line worker fell into a part of a chemical reactor that was practically 100% nitrogen (it kept the reaction from igniting). He was unconscious in a minute or so. Another employee went in to rescue him and managed to get him out to other workers. Unfortunately, while they were tending to the original worker, the rescuer passed out and died without ever making a sound. He just fell asleep and died.
He was in a big hurry, he waived all appeals and demanded execution rather than spend years on death row at a supermax. I think certain legalities might have been expedited considering the crime involved. His wish was granted.
Nitrogen Asphyxiation
Strap the condemned down, put on a brain wave monitor and a breathing mask. Put 1.1 atmospheres into the mask of 99% pure nitrogen (welding gas). Wait till the brain waves go flat.
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