Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to News@lemmy.world – 708 points –
Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in nitrogen gas execution: Updates
independent.co.uk

“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”

Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.

Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.

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I want to preface this by saying I am against the death penalty.

The argument

The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it.

really falls apart when you consider all the other things the state is allowed to do that would be otherwise illegal. The simplest comparison is imprisonment but there are dozens of others.

Exactly, the government has a monopoly on a lot of things, among them violence and as an extent of that monopoly also incarceration.

I can see how some people have a hard time grasping that. I mean most of us would like to have no violence at all, so allowing some that power can seem strange. But how about traffic laws?

You can't get in your car and go 200km/h down the road, which I sometimes would like to, but I hope we all can see how everyone doing 200, where 80 is more appropriate, would be a problem. So we're ok with police/fire/rescue being the only ones allowed to break the speed limits and running red lights, right? It's the same thing.

We've got specially trained people, who have been given strict guidelines for doing stuff ordinary citizens can't do, because the society need something done that can't be done without these powers ... and who have oversight (hopefully), so these powers aren't abused.

How'd you make your comment in bold font?

Does your text box not have a little "B" above it? If not **text** will make it bold. Surrounding the text with a single * will make it italics.