- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — As witnesses including five news reporters watched through a window, Kenneth Eugene Smith, who was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1988 murder-for hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, convulsed on a gurney as Alabama carried out the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas.
If you are going to execute someone with nitrogen, would it add that much cost to anesthetize them to sleep first?
I’m not for capital punishment but realize that it’s the system we have. But slowly suffocating someone to death is surely demonstrative of the fact that it’s supposed to be torture.
The most bizarre thing about the entire debate is that most proponents of the death penalty explicitly want it to be a painful experience.
Everything pushed to make they process more effective and humane meets resistance.
They’re self-convinced, against nearly all studies and evidence and expert consensus, that capital punishment is an effective deterrent.
$5 worth of fentanyl would do the job…
Anesthesizing someone is difficult and you need the right drugs. No licensed doctor is allowed nor willing to do it, and no company making the drugs agrees to its use for killing people.
Dude was unconscious almost immediately. His brain was dead but the body takes longer to go. The violent spasms was the unconscious and uninhabited body using the last of its energy, mechanically.
This has been so dramatized it’s disgusting. The execution? Humane. The media around it? Must clearly want more suffering.
Life is not black and white. You can deal in absolutes all you want, that just leaves the rest of us here to make the hard decisions, since your abdication.
Jailing people for life is also inhumane, solitary is torture that can lead to permanent damage. But what alternatives are left with? Society didn’t ask these people to steal, attack, rape or murder. Some people just choose it. So we have to separate them from the rest of us, for the common good.
Fwiw, I don’t favor capital punishment unless guilt is obvious for all to see - beyond a doubt. But if we have to do it, and situationally It’s appropriate (some will say it never is), we should do it as humanely as possible. Not that they necessarily deserve that, but ultimately it’s a reflection of us.
This is all first world problems btw. If the facade falls, we’ll all see people put down with absolute disregard. We have survivors alive today from past atrocity, we aren’t even removed in the slightest. Look up the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields, I had a coworker who escaped after watching his brother chopped apart and his mother gunned down.
Purity in your moralism is a luxury most can’t afford, unfortunately.