A. Because it was chosen with the sensibilities of the observer primarily in mind.
If appearance is what you are after, lethal injection seems perfect. One of the drugs usually given is a paralytic, which renders the inmate unable to show pain. “The modern death chamber has come to resemble a hospital room,” Sarat writes — the condemned prisoner is strapped to a gurney as an emergency medical patient would be, and the execution is carried out by medical personnel. The complications — obesity, vein obscurity — are medical complications. Oklahoma was the first state to install lethal injection as a technology of execution, and the legislators pushing the initiative spent significant time courting the state’s medical association, which refused to participate. “The legitimacy of capital punishment depends upon the ability to say that what we are doing as a state is different and better than those we condemn,” Sarat told me.
(Via Hot Air Headlines)
I support the death penalty*. I want to have that option in place, for when it’s necessary. But if you deem it necessary to kill a human being, you do it fast and you do it clean. I know people who argue that the guillotine (which is, indeed, both fast and clean**) should be used, and I think I agree with them… and not least because I think a lot of folks don’t really like to confront the literally visceral implications of executions. That the resulting images might prove fodder for the anti-death penalty movement doesn’t bother me: I don’t want it to be too easy to kill a man, frankly.
Moe Lane
*I don’t expect anybody else to, and I don’t think poorly of anybody who does not.
**’Clean’ in the sense that ‘there is no ambiguity to a decapitation.’ In terms of blood it’s very, very messy.
I would argue for electrocution under anesthesia. No pain, no mess, no argument about “death drugs”.
I would support a menu of options that the condemed can choose from. hanging, firing squad, etc. Myself, I would drink hemlock. It has a certain class about it.
Me, firing squad. This way my last words could be: “Aim true.”
That also gives you the opportunity to bravely refuse the blindfold. That’s always a nice touch.
If Oklahoma must execute people, then it ought to be done unambiguously, publicly, and in daylight. Waiting until after midnight to admit a select group to watch doctors pump drugs into a man’s system gives the entire affair a cowardly tinge, as if the people involved weren’t sure whether what they were doing would survive scrutiny.
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That’s my long-winded way of saying, hanging used to be good enough for my state.
The easy fix for that is for “certificates of execution” to specify “from noon on Tuesday until noon on Wednesday”, rather than the current “on Tuesday” approach.
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In short, it’s done at midnight not to hide it but to allow maximum time to overcome any last-minute legal/political minutiae that may crop up.
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A better change may be to just make them open-ended.
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Mew
Well, certain of the Indian tribes used shooting. They considered imprisonment cruel and unusual, and used a mix of capital punishment, and IIRC, lashings.
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Then there is, as you say, Parker, Maldoon, et al.
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This is your cultural heritage.
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Anyone who has a problem with it is a racist.
You’d need some kind of buffer for that Jeff, as I recall the major problem with hemlock is the human bodies tendency to regurgitate it out. You’d need an additive to keep it down long enough to do the job. I also believe there are convulsions involved after it’s ingested. There are much quicker ways to go that aren’t as unpleasant.
I wouldn’t be against some amount of personal unpleasantness in the service of a good theatrical death. Pain is temporary after all.
I rather like the guillotine for its’ reliable expedience, hanging *properly* is equally acceptable and for the same reasons – sever the spine and it’s over quickly. Painlessly? Perhaps not…
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As for lethal injection, I am still convinced we’re going about it the wrong way .. pump the condemned full of opiates.
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Mew
Only thought of this after I’d posted the queue. IIRC, people can become habituated to opiates, and they are used recreationally. So there would be at least a little room for variation of efficacy, and this is a situation where we would want to minimize variation.
“A dose suitable to kill 100 men” seems like a good standard.
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Mew
(remember, the secondary goal is to dispose of the contents of the evidence locker .. pumping future corpses so full of morphine that the smoke from the crematory is mind-altering does not appear, to this cat, to be a problem …)
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Mew
A friend of mine had an excellent solution for this using California’s gas chambers. Instead of poisonous gasses, just flush the chamber with N2 gas. Odorless, colorless, and they just fall asleep, but don’t wake up.
Well .. if you know why you’re in the chamber you might tend to .. get frisky .. just to give a show to the audience.
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That said, again, sedate the individual first, then roll ’em into the chamber on a gurney, remove the oxygen, and .. wait.
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Mew
That’s an interesting point. The most highly paid person in an operating room is generally the anesthesiologist since it takes special training and skill to not kill a person with anesthesia. Why not just put a person under and twirl a valve. Done and done.
Just count backwards from 10. You’ll be on the banks of the Jordan before you get to 1.
Because the anti-death-penalty crowd would proceed to go after manufacturers of anesthetics and then certifications…
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Mew
I don’t know, they don’t go after the licenses of doctors who perform injections now (at least not that I’ve heard). The anti-death-penalty crowd (of which I would say I am a member) is a bit different than your normal leftist group and uses different tactics. I would guess those with the most passion about it tend to skew more conservative.
I think a lot of leftist claim to be against it, since that’s the morally superior stand if you don’t think about it too deeply. They don’t really go after it hammer and tongs like they do gay rights or abortion, however. I think that deep down, they really don’t mind the killing, especially if its a white guy. They just want the moral superiority of saying that this thing that never touches their lives is bad.
Conservatives can be guilty of the same thing of course. The tricky part about the death penalty is its one of those things where your personal feelings and the position dictated by your moral code may be at odds leadnig to what you say and what you feel being differnt things.
When someone does something heinous, it gets your anger up and you want to see blood. This is just your feelings. Your moral setting should be closer to wishing him a life long enough to find redemption, however long that takes (80 more years? then give it to him). The rightous position would be to wish you could accept death in his place to give him that chance. The tricky part is making sure your personal feelings are submissive to your moral setting.
Now I’ve written enough to quality as a rant, and a rambling one at that. I try not to do those. Rambling interent rants are so…trite. My appologies.
We are not as far apart as you may believe, Jeff.
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Factor out the cost of the legal brangling, and .. the cost of warehousing someone until natural causes shuffles them off is far more than a peaceful death breathing nitrogen.. but it is unrealistic to assert away the legal cost.
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I have no particular problem with warehousing instead of a death sentence, provided there is an amount of required labor involved .. I do believe people should – to the extent of their abilities – work in order to get fed.
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Mew
Part of the issue with warehousing is security. The political factor is a major weakness.
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As shown by Obama, if you sentence someone who will kill again given a chance to life in prison, the political situation may change in 5, 10, or 20 years to one that could put them back on the street.
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The joke answer to the legal costs issue is that the lawyers have been colluding to defraud the public.
I’m certainly prepared to say that there are some who deserve death. However, the big objection for *me* (can’t speak for anyone else here, obviously) is that there is too much leeway given to prosecutors, and we’re not currently doing enough to make sure that the maximum punishment is being applied fairly, and not out of a sense that a prosecutor has to look tough.
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I’ve been falsely accused of a crime before, and it opened my eyes to just how easily things can go very wrong for a defendant. My case ended early in the process, when the evidence failed to support the accuser in any way… but I have only the honesty of the investigating officer to thank for not putting me behind bars for several days, at least.
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When we decide to hold prosecutors responsible for abuses committed by their side, then I’ll consider advocating for something as permanent as death. Until then, life with no parole is as far as I’m willing to go.
If the lawyers cannot be trusted with their professional responsibilities due to laxity or malformation of professional ethics, your medicine strikes me as too weak, and using the wrong mechanism.
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Alternative one is ‘lawyers out of law’. If lawyers are that ethically bankrupt, maybe ignorant layman would be preferable. Legislate that Lawyers, Judges, and maybe legislators can /not/ have a law degree, have passed the bar, or ever been a member of a bar association or professional organization. Probably would need to also limit credit hours at lawschool, and various other possible work arounds.
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Alternative two is simply not using lawyers as a means of resolving problems. Lawyers are far from the only means of settling disputes. If the law is made unduly cumbersome to wring out the most billable hours, there are other choices. ‘If I die, I forgive you, if I live, I will kill you.’
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If the lawyers are packing the prisons, and making them more costly, so that habitual criminals will be released to generate more business, then helping them further close off the capital option might be just playing into their hands.
There’s lots of ways to do it. Why not use a gas chamber and nitrous oxide. It’s a sedative, causes unconsciousness within a few seconds, is painless and will cause death if you breath pure N2O without any accompanying oxygen. It’s available from non-medical sources (food service suppliers — it’s used to make whipped cream), so the medical community would not have to get involved.
What’s really going on is that people are playing a game of denial where they make executions look like some sort of medical procedure. It’s not. It should not look like a medical procedure. Dressing up executioners as doctors debases the medical profession and it should be stopped.
I think the medical profession might be debased enough in other ways that lethal injection hardly counts. That said, I do prefer other means of execution, partly for that reason.
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It was against Roman law to kill a Vestal virgin inside the city, or to take them outside. So, when one was unchaste, they would seal her in a buried room with food and drink.
Go back to hanging. Its quick, its easy, and its clean, and unlike beheading it doesn’t mutilate the body.
What is more I can’t feel any sympathy for a man who beat, shot, and then buried a woman alive. The fact he wasn’t flayed alive is a mercy imo.
I’ve two problems with the latter bit. One, flaying alive takes a lot of work on behalf of the state. I think working too hard at it is beneath the state’s dignity. Two, I think removing the skin while alive and alert is most appropriate for another offense entirely.
My first issue with the guillotine is that it evokes The Terror, and that perhaps we might not want to do that.
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My second is that it is more efficient than we would be likely to make use of. I don’t know that we run through enough convicts fast enough to best figure out how to make a quality machine these days. Even if we can do it without experimental subjects, I just dunno about whether we are running executions at a rate worth the R&D.
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My third issue is that I’m not on the design team, I’m not producing any, and I’m certainly not going to get a contract to sell them anytime soon.
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Part of the case for lethal injection is that most of the tech, as in equipment, supplies and procedures, could be borrowed from other fields not specifically tied to capital punishment. That meant that one would not have to do the work funding and defending the production of the overhead. From the supply side, there’s not enough work to support the whole of one’s business, and enough people will come after one’s other business that it probably doesn’t pay to diversify into anything capital punishment specific. Between those restrictions, and those imposed by witness requirements, lethal injection looks pretty feasible.
Firing squad. The equipment is easier to borrow, and you could even get volunteers to do it for free.
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Of course, best practices with hanging were well documented, and still easily available. Also, rope is cheap and not limited in application.