The government should never be allowed to put its own citizens to death. The government is not infallible. The government has put innocent people to death.
Boomer humor. Government did something imperfect or not to MY personal standards therefore the whole thing is shit. Hahahahhahahahahaha aren't I funny?
Subjecting human beings to inhumane torture by consistently failing to kill them is so far below anybody's standards for a death sentence that the mere action itself should be illegal.
Not sure about death row, but many prisons have a commissary where you can buy junk food with personal funds either brought in with you from the outside or transferred from friends and family outside. Some people don't get fat -until- they go to prison.
I believe that photograph is from 1999 when he got arrested. He was sentenced to death in 2000, so that's over 20 years waiting. And yes, obesity is becoming a problem inside prisons too (prisonlegalnews.org).
This attempt had nothing to do with the failures of lethal injection. They tried to fill a room with 0% oxygen and it failed spectacularly causing suffering and trauma, but not death.
They failed specifically because they didn’t try to fill the room with nitrogen. The dude was insistent that a priest be allowed to stay in physical contact with him for the duration of his execution. So they couldn’t fill the entire room, because the priest was in the room with him.
Instead, they tried using a gas mask so only he would suffocate. The issue was that the mask failed (or wasn’t designed properly, or wasn’t used properly,) and oxygen was allowed to get into the mask for an extended period of time; His attempted execution lasted for way longer than it should have, because he was still able to get oxygen.
I'd always heard the sentence 'hung by the neck until dead' was taken literally: If you survived the drop, you're just gonna be hanging there longer. The result is the same.
The law/sentence was actually changed after a Scottish woman survived being hanged resulting in this specific wording. There was a time when people did survive and were freed.
I think there was a case somewhere that the prisoner was sentenced to death, and was executed ina fashion that didn't quite work.
But technically he did die for a minute or two before his heart restarted, and he sued to be released from prison because he technically served his sentence.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like it. I misremembered a few details, he "died" from natural causes in prison, not execution. The court ruled "Schreiber is either alive, in which case he must remain in prison, or he is dead, in which case this appeal is moot."
Yeah, I'm pretty sure* they took a method that was supposed to give a clean painless death and deliberately implemented it in a way that would cause agony.
Edit: after further reading about this, there are other possible mechanisms that could have lead to that first one being in agony, so it is possible that the nitrogen asphyxiation method was approached and implemented in good faith while still causing agony. Though I'd say continuing to use it despite how the first one went does bring that good faith into question plus the possibility of good faith doesn't imply it wasn't in bad faith, but I no longer stand by that "pretty sure" I originally stated above.
Inert gas hypoxia is painless if done right. This is Alabama though, so I wouldn't trust them to even use the right kind of gas, much less administer it correctly.
My understanding is that the problem with the gas mask is not oxygen, but rather it's so small that CO2 builds up, so the prisoner feels that they are suffocating.
A problem that has been solved for respirators meant for breathing, including in space when you don't want to just expel the air to the surrounding environment. If it's ok to expel it to the environment, the technology is as simple as a rubber flap over a hole in the mask.
Though reading more about it, there are mechanisms that could still cause distress even if the mask is designed to expel CO2 properly, including CO2 poisoning because the body's ability to expel it can be compromised by the lack of oxygen. And it's possible that executionees experience inert gas asphyxiation differently from accidental victims because they are aware of what's happening while accidental victims might pass out without ever realizing they were dying, which can affect the way the body uses resources.
The norm in the US -- lethal injection -- is apparently to essentially knock someone out, then stop their heart. I don't imagine that one feels anything.
In most states, the intravenous injection is a series of drugs given in a set sequence, designed to first induce unconsciousness followed by death through paralysis of respiratory muscles and/or by cardiac arrest through depolarization of cardiac muscle cells. The execution of the condemned in most states involves three separate injections (in sequential order):
Sodium thiopental or pentobarbital: ultra-short-action barbiturate, an anesthetic agent used at a high dose that renders the person unconscious in less than 30 seconds. Depression of respiratory activity is one of the characteristic actions of this drug. Consequently, the lethal-injection doses, as described in the Sodium Thiopental section below, will—even in the absence of the following two drugs—cause death due to lack of breathing, as happens with overdoses of opioids.
Pancuronium bromide: non-depolarizing muscle relaxant, which causes complete, fast, and sustained paralysis of the striated skeletal muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.
Potassium chloride: a potassium salt, which increases the blood and cardiac concentration of potassium to stop the heart via an abnormal heartbeat and thus cause death by cardiac arrest.
The companies that make the drugs used to perform lethal injection have refused to participate in the death penalty any longer which is why other forms are being explored.
I fully support drug companies not wanting their medications to be used to kill people. On the other hand, we give our dogs and cats painless deaths with their drugs and, if we're going to be killing people, they deserve the same dignity.
The drug companies didn't exactly decide to step away from the death penalty fully on their own initiative. They were threatened with criminal prosecutions in Europe for abetting executions in the United States.
There are a few states that differ. Last time I looked it up, one state still permitted the condemned to request hanging, but it looks like they stopped that, probably because it was a pain to do. I recall reading that the last one that was done, the state had to dig around in old records to figure out how the heck you compute drop length for a given weight and such.
In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:
Lethal injection in all states as primary method, in South Carolina as secondary method or unless the drugs to use it are unavailable
Nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama
Electrocution in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina (primary method)
Gas chamber in California and Missouri
In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, gas chamber in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional.
In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; gas chamber in Wyoming).
Apparently Vermont technically still has electrocution on the books for treason.
All 26 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. As of 2021, South Carolina is the only autonomous region in the United States of America to authorize its 1912 Electric Chair as the primary method of execution, citing inability to procure the drugs necessary for lethal injection. Vermont's remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.
However, given that very few people in the US have ever been convicted of treason at all -- despite people liking to claim that something is "treason", it's actually an extremely narrowly-defined crime -- much less under Vermont state law, that's probably largely academic.
Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as "only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, "adhering to the enemies" of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court. Fewer than 30 people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.
Death sentences for treason under the Constitution have been carried out in only two instances: the executions of Taos Revolt insurgents in 1847, and that of William Bruce Mumford during the Civil War.
Constitutionally, U.S. citizens who live in a state owe allegiance to at least two government entities: the United States of America and their state of legal residence. They can therefore potentially commit treason against either, or against both. At least 14 people have been charged with treason against various states; at least six were convicted, five of whom were executed. Only two prosecutions for treason against a state were ever carried out in the U.S.: one against Thomas Dorr and the other after John Brown's conspiracy. It has often been discussed, both legally and in matter of policy, if states should punish treason.
Neither of those was in Vermont -- one was in Rhode Island and the other Virginia, and the only instance of the two in which a death sentence was applied was in Virginia, after the John Brown uprising.
The problem with that is dosages. First drug knocks you out, second drug paralyzes you, third drug stops your heart.
But if you fuck up the dosages, the first drug wears off while the second drug is still in effect. So you are awake but paralyzed and can't move, so nobody knows you are awake. That leaves you conscious while your heart dies which is quite painful.
Regardless of the method of execution, imagine knowing the exact date and time of your death and knowing nothing you could do would stop it. That is torture, plain and simple. It should be in violation of the eighth amendment.
Consider Japan, who does it differently. Death row inmates in Japan are not told their execution dates, as they had issues with people committing suicide before they could be executed. So now they only find out with just a few hours of notice when they're going to be executed. You could be sitting in your cell, ten years into your sentence, enjoying an otherwise ordinary, quiet day in prison, only to be told that it's time to die, whether you're ready for it or not, the equipment and staff are already prepared and there's no time left to argue your case.
Honestly, I don't know which one is "better". They're both cruel in their own ways.
It's been ruled that a punishment needs to be BOTH cruel AND unusual, to qualify as a violation. One or the other is fine, as long as it's not both. Scalping someone for petty theft would be okay as long as most-everyone convicted got scalped.
In this specific case, I wouldn't call it usual and it certainly is cruel.
I would also argue that, since it is not applied evenly in any way and that only a minority of people get the death penalty, even though some people who don't get it have committed worse crimes, it is always unusual. Usual is prison for some length of time, possibly life.
I would also add that SCOTUS found it both cruel and unusual at one point.
But also, apparently all of the available methods of execution barely work at all because of gross incompetence of the people who create the systems. That's the more important issue, here, imo. The state clearly isn't capable of serving a death sentence, nor do I expect they ever will be, so they shouldn't even have the right.
I'm a consequentialist with aversion to suffering, so I think there are some very rare cases where it would be warranted if reform were considered truly impossible or would cause more suffering than it is worth, such as older or insane accused with very solid evidence convictions by a jury of peers.
Hard choices exist in this world, people sometimes have to choose what they can protect.
I'm really not understanding your argument. What does this 'suffering' have to be worth? And if an elderly or mentally ill person suffers in prison, that sounds like we should make prison a less horrible place, not euthanize people we feel deserve it.
I'm operating in the very real world assumptions that the restrictions of freedom of a large class of people will never so easily be made "a less horrible place." This is far moreso true for chronic mental illness care. I don't have a plan for any of that, and it doesn't appear as though you do, either, so instead a simple solution is to only give a death sentence under very specific and hard to establish conditions agreed upon by a majority of people.
The plan is caring for mentally ill people with psychiatric supervision, possibly medication and/or therapy, something our prison system doesn't offer, not killing them. You're doing the "I shot the dog because he was untrainable and killed chickens" Kristi Noem defense, except for killing people.
Psychiatric Supervision, Medication, and Therapy don't necessarily eliminate all suffering, and certainly have no guarantee of reform or a cure. Kristi Noem had a perfectly fine young animal capable of training by qualified owners of which many were likely available in her area, she instead chose to kill her dog. This is a great example of how outcomes with excess suffering are always worse and that many people are too mentally incompetent to weigh their options. If her dog were judged by a jury, it would have been acquitted.
A judge and jury of peers adhering to very strict legal definitions and sentencing guidelines written by a democratically elected congress, because after thousands of years that's the best system we've ever developed to reduce harm and promote equality and wellbeing for the majority of people. It's not one person deciding the fate of another, it's all of us deciding the fate of individuals for the benefit of us all.
So people who have no actual expert knowledge of mental health or mental health treatment? And you want this congress to be responsible for deciding who lives and who dies?
So you think Doctors should be allowed to decide who lives and who dies? I'm going to be honest, I have absolutely no idea how many doctors are on an average jury bench, but they're pretty commonly used as character witness testimony.
You seem to imply that I'm defending the actions of the state of Alabama when I've only ever been critical of them in this entire discussion.
You've made it very clear that you think differently than I do, and you started this conversation by asking me to explain my thoughts which I did very clearly. Perhaps you're projecting the confusion you feel.
