Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Fact: when we sentence people to death we get it wrong one time in three
Fact: executing someone is more expensive than keeping them in prison for life
Ah, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s lots of inexpensive, humane ways to dispatch a human. How methods like electrocution and lethal cocktail injection were decided on is difficult to understand. Nitrogen, though, is probably the nicest way it could be done. Relatively cheap too, and with zero chance of failure.
The expense is in achieving that blistering 70% correctness rate, not in the way the condemned are killed.
It’s not the method that’s expensive, it’s the appeals process, supposedly to stop innocent people from being executed. And even with all of the appeals, innocent people have still been executed.
Human medical experimentation on prisoners is cruel and unusual in and of itself. However well you personally think execution by nitrogen would go (and I doubt you’d volunteer), people on death row have a right to know we’re not trying novel execution methods on them. Maybe if what we’re doing doesn’t actually benefit anyone more than prison would and is considered so barbaric that European manufacturers won’t supply us with the drugs we need to do it, we should stop.
The mania for execution led Arizona to refurbish its gas chamber and reverse-engineer a Zyklon B equivalent.* That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. How about you?
*https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents
There’s no experiment necessary in proving nitrogen as a silent and painless killer. Scuba divers have done all of the experiments for us, mostly by accident.
Imprisonment is barbaric.
If someone has done something so bad that they should be locked up for life then they should be dispatched not kept as some kind of morbid pet of the state. If you murdered a bunch of people (mass killing of serial style) you need not waste any more of our air. If you rape you should be killed too. If you’ve gotten yourself on death row fuck your rights.
If you imprison an innocent, they can be freed. Execution takes away that possibility. And we have absolutely, provably, executed innocent people. I hope that never happens to you, but if life were a play, it would certainly make for some dramatic irony.
If you kept an innocent man imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life then you were a thousand times more cruel than had you executed him. I would prefer death over rotting in prison hoping to find the last shred of decency in the american judicial system that had already imprisoned me. All of your arguments are romantic and foolish.
Romantic? Ffs…
Would you accept giving someone a choice between life in prison and death?
If you think prison’s worse than death for an innocent person, feel free to ask people who were exonerated after decades in prison if they’d rather have been killed.