‘Astonishingly cruel’: Alabama seeks to test execution method on death row ‘guinea pig’
theguardian.com
Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
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Execution is cruel, regardless of method.
I'm against the death penalty but if I ever murder a load of people then I'd like to be able able to freely choose death by nitrogen over a life in prison
You know what else is cruel? People killing other people. And the former continuing to live despite their cruelty.
The only rub against execution to me is the risk of executing the innocent. But that is not the concern here. There is no dispute this guy is guilty.
Capital punishment is government sanctioned killing. Outside of war, the government should not have the power to kill anyone.
Let them rot in prison. It's cheaper anyway.
Abolish capital punishment.
Except them rotting in prison is cruel and unusual punishment. No, they get shelter, 3 meals a day, healthcare when they need it, and even recreation.
And I’m anti-war. It’s ok for innocents to fight and kill each other, but not to kill murderers?
The government shouldn't be sanctioning killing. Period.
Other than Japan, the US is the only Western country left with this primitive, revenge-based way of looking at crime and punishment. Yet, the US continues to be the most violent country of them all and the murder capital of the Western world.
Usually, when something doesn't work, we try something else. Time for the US to try something else.
The US is likely more violent due to a combination of corrupt capitalism and lead poisoning.
We do need to try something else, but that something else is in terms of economics, infrastructure, and healthcare, not punishment.
I definitely agree there, especially in healthcare. What an awful mess in the US when you look at how successful other countries are with universal healthcare.
But I will just never accept capital punishment. It's such an awful way to seek revenge. It's especially surprising that conservatives love the concept of government power extending to killing its own citizens. And evangelicals who are commanded by Jesus himself to turn the other cheek and seek forgiveness. I know they are backward on many things, but this seems particularly egregious.
See, you are assuming it’s about revenge. No, it is just acknowledging that what is done is so awful, you have to take the consequence to the next level.
And while I get wanting to call out evangelical hypocrisy, the Bible should have nothing to do with policy. Besides, the most famous supposedly anti-death penalty account was likely added years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_adultery
Yes, I definitely assume it's about revenge, because, to most people, it's about revenge. You might call is "justice." I call it revenge. It's an eye for an eye. It's old testament, and Jesus specifically pointed it out as wrong many times. Not only in the story you mentioned. Yet, here we are.
It is a punishment to fit the crime, as it should be.
When else does Jesus talk specifically about the death penalty? He was talking about getting hit with turn the other cheek. You can’t turn the other cheek when you are dead.
It's society seeking revenge. The dead don't care.
The bible talks about not seeking revenge on so many occasions.
One example:
Romans 12:17-21 NIV
Many other examples. Yet, evangelicals are some of the biggest proponents of this type of government-sanctioned revenge.
That isn’t talking about a secular death penalty, which has prescribed under the pentateuch such as at Numbers 35:16-20. Also, Romans is traditionally believed to be written by Paul and is not a gospel account.
But what does it matter? Policy should not be based on the Bible.
You keep going back to the old testament. That's what Jesus came to rectify.
Paul's letters are definitely seen as the among the most consequential scriptures. But you're right, it doesn't matter. Everyone has their own interpretation anyway.
Also, many of your fellow believers in the death penalty do believe that policy should be based on the bible. Just calling out the hypocrisy.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, my friend
Right, so why is that not a total disqualifier then? Even if the risk is fleeting small, there is no taking it back. If it came out later on, dead is dead. Combining that with the fact that executions are obv a psychological cluster fuck for everyone who deals with it, especially the one executed, and the fact that it takes a lot of resources every trial because it's such an unusually cruel punishment, the arguments for it are dwindling.
Also
Right but we're not voting someone in office who can eliminate all homicides in the United States. Things are different for execution.
We could also talk about how this "well tough shit" opinion always fucks over positive and healthy change, but that's probably the least impactful argument for the folks who still bank on executions as some sort of greater good.
Read the rest of what I said. There is no doubt here. I do think the death penalty should require a higher standard of guilt. But some people, through their actions, simply have forfeited their right to live.
Glad to have it straight from the moral arbiter of the universe, someone who feels they can personally determine, from a safe distance, whether someone has forfeited their life. Otherwise I’d be seriously worried the state was carrying out a horribly immoral practice that regularly results in murder of innocents in order to deliver, at best, the short-lived false victory of vengeance, for the low priceof permanently extinguishing of a human life. Which I’ll remind you doesn’t bring back their victims.
I am allowed moral opinion, same as you.
I know, me pointing out that the pompous way you phrased your opinion made it sound like you thought you were expounding on universal truths isn’t going to stop you. It wasn’t intended to. Maybe if you don’t want pushback next time, avoid the phrase “have forfeited their right to live.”
Stating my own opinion is “pompous.” Whatever.
I told you the specific language that sounded pompous, so if you could stop playing the victim, that’d be great.
Then why aren't you advocating for executing those that execute killers? After all, they kill people. But I'm going to assume that you think those killers are okay.
Executions are generally set up so no one person is responsible for the person’s death. And they generally volunteer.
How are they different from a war veteran that killed somebody during war?
Okay. Why not kill all those who might be the killer? If not, why allow the spreading of the responsibility? If two guys beat someone up and kill them, would you be as lenient, considering we don't know which one actually killed them?
In war often there is no choice (at least if you're defending - I don't condone wars of aggression). With death row inmates we do have a choice! You understand the difference, right?
As I said elsewhere, because they are doing their duty. We empower people to do otherwise illegal things all the time. If some random guy demanded your tax records and wanted a percentage of your income, they would the charged with theft. When an IRS auditor does it, it isn’t illegal.
So you are ok sending the innocent to die, but refuse to condemn the guilty? I am sorry, I do not like the other choice. When someone kills someone else and we can prove it beyond any doubt, that murderer should not get to be housed, fed, and cared for for life. I get that it may even cost more, but that’s where I’d rather spend money.
So people killing people is okay if the right people kill the right people?
No, defending yourself is different from "sending the innocent to die". If the choice is to die peacefully or to die fighting, the latter is the better option, since you might not die.
Where did I say anything about not condemning the guilty? Is killing other people the only way to satisfy your dismay for them, even if you'll kill innocent people this way?
Then why do states with the death penalty keep killing innocent people, even though this is supposedly already the standard? You're the one who wants innocent people to die.
Dude, it’s like you don’t even read my posts.
Dude, that's like, totally your opinion, dude.
I didn’t say it was anything more.
Doesn't 'people killing other people' include the state killing people? I don't see how vengeance for a murder solves anything.
No
Why doesn't it include that?
Because they are carrying out a judgement. We don’t toss prison guards in jail for false imprisonment. We don’t send IRS agents to jail for theft.
Lots of people carry out a judgment when they kill someone. They just don't get to do it legally.
Oh, so it sounds like you do see the difference.
No. It's killing people either way.
Do they survive in either? Did they die of some natural disaster or disease? No. They were killed. I don't even know why you think this is arguable unless you don't know what 'killed' means.
No, as you said, one follows the legal system, the other does not.
That has nothing to do with what I said in the first place. Whether it's legal or not, someone killed that person. Again, I'm not sure why you're disputing the fact that someone killed them. Do you really think 'killed' doesn't apply if it's legal? 'Killed' is not a legal term. You know that, right?
Murder is. And executioners are not committing murder.
Please show where I said the word murder in this discussion. Quote me please.
Opinion 👆.
Fact: it's necessary to remove certain people who are prone to violence and incapable of rehabilitation. If you have such a problem with execution, then volunteer your time, money, and home to accommodate a violent psychopath with you forever.
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
Wait why is it more expensive?
https://ejusa.org/resource/wasteful-inefficient/
The long appeals process we use to try to not execute the innocent costs a lot. It would be cheaper to just imprison them.
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.
Shitty take. There are more than two options here, and suggesting otherwise is using an either-or fallacy as a bad way to try to win an argument.
Opinion 👆.
Fact: punishments can be reversed, if the punished stays alive. Any percentage of unjust executions is irredeemable. Also, there is a lot of evidence that abolishing the death penalty either does not affect the crime rate, or it has a positive effect (see link below).
More opinion: executions have no place in a society that highly values human rights because killing people is the exact opposite of humane. If you think prisoners are monsters and you could never end up in there, watch a documentary about it. If you see what some ppl went through, you know how easy anyone can end up there.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT50/015/2008/en/
That's as silly a comment as "if you think Native Americans were wronged, give your house to one," something else I've heard people say. Societal wrongs are not solved by individuals.
Somehow all the countries that don't allow capital punishment find ways to deal with extremely violent people and don't have murderers running amok.
Russia be like...
Kinda funny that you label the comment you replied to as opinion and then proceeded to dress your own (shitty) opinion up as fact.
Also opinion 👆