Arkansas Death penalty...

Firing squad doesn't always work the first time, and the person pulling the trigger has to face the psychological consequences of their actions. People have also survived for too long after hanging, electrocution and lethal injection. Hanging, Drawing and Quartering doesn't seem survivable but I hope we stopped with that in the middle ages.

It does seem like morphine overdose would be the least painful and one of the quickest ways to go. Without the public gallery too.

 

The easiest way would be to strap a facemask to a tank of inert gas like nitrogen. Death by hypoxia would be painless and impossible to botch. But the fact is that the death penalty is vindictive by nature. There is no criminological or economic justification for it, so it is not surprising that a lot of people who support it also support causing pain and suffering to someone in their final moments, as if taking their life wasn't enough.

 

Your term "wrongful" made me think that you thought that there was a miscarriage of justice when following the "rules in place" at the time.

 

One has to consider that these are public institutions.

Simply injecting someone with a random amount of Heroine you confiscated from an inmates backside as he smuggled it in the prison - as you'd expect would be subject to all sorts of legal challenges -

The scientific study of how much heroine to inject would have to be done and proven beyond legal challenge - and again you will come up against the current problem of who would supply the drugs. The drugs to kill people are known. It's just no one will supply them knowing their intended cause.

It's worth noting that electric chairs, gallows and gas chambers have all fall foul of people simply not being willing or qualified to maintain equipment - so safety certificates have expired and equipment has been open to legal challenge as "unsafe"

There was a famous case where one guy - I think he was a sparky - by accident got into servicing electric chairs, and then gallows and then gas chambers - then lethal injection machines because no-one else would do it.

He got quite an expert to the extent where he questioned whether the gas chambers in Auschwitz were physically capabable of gassing that many people. This was his downfall as the jewish community turned on him as he was putting scientific doubt (however dubious and eventually completely discredited) behind the key aspect of the holocaust (this was at a time when the iron curtain was still drawn and getting access to the death camps was far from easy)

In the end they discovered that he wasn't qualified to maintain any of the equipment including the chairs as he apparently only has a qualification bought from some distance learning college - and whether through appropriate due diligence or under pressure from the jewish community he lost his contracts and livelihood.


So in short - right or wrong - the death penalty - itself will meet an untimely end.

Not because its the right thing to do but because unless you want to get gangs of rabid hill billies to stone someone to death or throw them off a tall building - people qualified to get involved simply don't want to be involved. Unless of course you find another Harold Shipman.

 

Pop them in a cage with a pack of hungry dogs North Korean style?

 

Yes, apologies for that. I am partly to blame! And also, I have often wondered the same thing as you. Some states now have inert gas asphyxiation as a reserve method. Apparently that is completely reliable and painless.

 

If your trial was flawed, then you haven't been proven guilty as such. So, under the presumption of innocence until otherwise proven, yes you are. It's also worth noting that one of the Arkansas convicts had his death penalty overturned at a new hearing, but then it was reinstated on a technicality after it was found hewasn't entitled to that new hearing. Horrendous.

 

Whilst I fundamentally disagree with you about the death penalty, I must admit that if it were given to someone like Bellfield or Whiting, I wouldn't be shedding too many tears.

 

Even ones who were clearly convicted in deeply flawed trials?

 

Again, I wasn't commenting on whether the trials are flawed or not. I suppose if you're going to die rightly or wrongly, does it really matter if you suffer five minutes discomfort.

 

Just make them listen repeatedly to Keith Hill post match press conferences and leave a loaded revolver on the table in the cell. The condemned will inevitably reach for it to end the misery.

 

I believe the state has an interest in keeping the method of death somewhat unavailable to the public. As soon as you start using an effective, efficient and clean method of execution you're going to get loads of suicides by people using the same method.

 

For anybody interested in this sort of thing, I recommend a documentary by Werner Herzog "Into the abyss" very harrowing. Also he has a series called "On Death Row" haven't seen it myself but it's on my watch list.


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I'm massively intrigued by your thinking here.

So if the US decide to use firing squad - the whole of the US will suddenly realise the gun they have under their pillow can be used to kill themselves?

Hanging - better not let them buy tow ropes or climbing equipment.

So they use some weird cocktail of drugs just to confuse the hell out of those contemplating suicide.

it's fecking genius that if it's true.

 

Guns are designed to kill things, so obviously the state using the firing squad isn't going to put that idea into anybody's mind, it's already there. If the state used tow ropes and climbing equipment to hang people then yes, absolutely you'd get people copying the method the state used rather than improvising their own. The state method would have to be 99.999% effective, otherwise it wouldn't be allowed. By using a cocktail of difficult to acquire drugs you prevent copycats. Telling people to go get 20mg or whatever of heroin as a state approved method of death would absolutely see people doing the same.

 

12 bore through the face to answer the question of most humane way of doing it. As for the "is it right?" debate then significantly more intelligent people than you or I have not come to a conclusion over the years.

 

Short answer is that the cocktail of drugs used is used because it is the most effective pain free way to do it. You could use other methods but they don't always give pan free deaths, even heroin like you suggest only gives pan free deaths a relatively low majority of the time.


I have no idea how the drugs work or why they use the particular ones they do but the reason is simply that together they form the most effective pain free method.

 

Not true, inert gas asphyxiation is the most effective pain free method. It's 100% effective and entirely painless.

 

It has been proven that has isn't entirely painless. They actually used to use inert gasses for executions but sometimes it was shown to involve suffering which is one of the main reasons it was removed although at least one state has just reintroduced it as an execution method.

Somebody mentioned dignitas but that too has been shown to occasionally involve suffering but obviously that isn't on the brochure.