Question about lethal injection

[Leafy3]

Grim subject, I know, but why is it seemingly so hard for prisons in the states to get it right? It's clearly an unpleasant way to go...Why don't they put the person under a general anaesthetic first?

We euthanise animals quickly & painlessly, why don't they (can't they?) use the same drugs on humans?

I think it's pretty much accepted that Pierrepoint was the culmination of a process of refining hanging to achieve the broken neck and alleged instant death at will.

People who have studied the subject will know that the executioner had to "fudge" the drop that the table of drops would give as peoples necks and weights aren't always consistent.

Personally my objection to the death penalty is that the concept itself is barbaric. So I don't really care how humane the method is, nor how perfect the conviction.

It's interesting that so many posters have said that state sanctioned murder is abhorrent. How many of you would vote in favour of the Assisted Dying Bill? In the UK, doctors can withdraw or withhold life support, including turning off life support machines, without family consent. Isn't that state sanctioned murder? How many posters thought Archie Batterbee's mother was right to have wanted the life support to remain?

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not a fan of the death penalty, but I would vote in favour of the Assisted Dying Bill, and I don't know enough about medical science to know if it was correct or not to turn off Archie Battersbee's life support (but I did feel terribly sorry for his parents). I am linking all these factors to show that deciding life and death is a tricky business. It's very difficult to be adamantly for or against state sanctioned murder, in every situation.

SMALLER MEN! Not Smeller me. Wtf auto-correct🤣

allowing nature to take it's course when someone has an unsurvivable illness and the burden of treatment outweighs the benefit is NOT the same as executing someone. And neither are the same as physician assisted dying. HTH.

In certain cases yes I could support it. I would propose you could avoid the miscarriages of justice by not having a death penalty. Because you seem to be ignoring the fact that I haven’t actually said there should be one!!

I'm baffled - you want to know about the USA death penalty and in particular, the means by which the sentences are carried out, yet you have chosen to ask all these questions on a UK-based forum. Why?

I don't think assisted dying counts as murder, no. For a start, the legislation that is currently under consideration focuses only on assisted suicide. I don't think that's the same thing. Plus, responding to someone's expressed wish to die is very different from taking their life as a punishment

As for doctors switching off life support machines, I believe that they are guided by what they consider to be in the best interests of the patient. Sometimes this might conflict with what family members want. But in any case, they aren't actually killing people as such... they are simply removing the artificial support that is preventing them from dying.

I think administering or withholding treatment on compassionate grounds, because you genuinely believe that that's in their best interests (or because they believe it is in their own best interests and you believe that they have the capacity to make that decision) is very different from taking someone's life to punish them.

Lethal injection in the United States involves a series of drugs administered intravenously to induce death. The process typically involves a sedative, a paralytic agent, and potassium chloride.

It is incorrect and disingenuous to claim that sedation isn’t used, but I’d imagine that you know that as the purpose of the thread seems to be goady. Especially, as someone above mentioned, asking on a British forum.

A quick Google search indicates that only around 20-30 inmates are put to death each year in the entire United States, many of which were sentenced 20 years prior. Most were done by lethal injection. Some states allow inmates to choose other methods of execution. So few are done that it seems they schedule them once they have the medications needed. Otherwise they just sit in prison indefinitely. From what I can see most of the people that are given a “death sentence” seem to just die in prison of natural causes because they utilize it so seldomly.

If you had a specific issue or case in mind, it should be linked in the OP.

(hears the words "Forum police, get the forum police" to the tune of The Moves "Fire Brigade" 😂)

He was 100% sure that they had and in his job he would have reviewed all the paperwork from both the trial and all the appeals. It was someone who had committed a pretty horrific murder too so reviewing those files would have been pretty awful - although he'd also had his fair share of war crime reviews as he spoke fluent German.

He was 100% sure that they had and in his job he would have reviewed all the paperwork from both the trial and all the appeals.

So the same as Timothy Evans then ?

Or Andrew Malkinson ?

Or Peter Sullivan ?

Or the Guildford four ?

Or the Birmingham six ?

Or Stephan Kiszko ?

I don't know why you are attacking me for reporting a conversation that I thought might be useful in the context of this discussion. I was pretty clear that the person I spoke to was someone from an older generation who did believe in the death penalty. I don't and never have done (and have studied it as a topic from the days of Ancient Greece onwards and have never seen any justification for it). I wish I hadn't posted now.

To be honest if someone is being executed then they've done something really heinous that involves hurting someone else so who gives a shit if they feel a bit of pain before they're dying. Probably going to get flamed for that bit I'm not about to be upset for a murdering scumbag who didn't give a shit about his victims pain🤷

Very funny. But why has someone come on to a parenting forum (of all places) to ask probing questions about the death penalty in a foreign country and wanting to know all the details of what happens when the procedure goes wrong?

It just seems rather odd to pick Mumsnet to ask those questions, wouldn't you agree?

No not teally

mumsnet has so many threads. That’s what makes it a good place to come,NOT just boring parenting stuff

always has been

But what if they are innocent ?

I'd imagine it's a very rare thing for an innocent person to be executed.

I wasn't attacking you. This is merely the cut and thrust of debate.

However, my point was that too many people have been found innocent after everyone (who mattered) was 100% convinced of their guilt.

If we have anything these past 100 years, it should be that no justice system is perfect. And to be very very wary of any country who claims theirs is.

Once you accept that fact of life, you are left having to explain why it's OK to execute the odd innocent person.

Now, if someone says "well, one or two won't matter as long as it saves lives", at least they are being honest about their morality.

We don't have the death penalty in this country. Get rid of guns and then you may see a difference.

I imagine Mrs Evans was right proper cheered up by that.

But my point is that I have never said that I agreed with the death penalty so I really don't know why you were responding aggressively to me (a bullet point list is really not a polite way to debate) when all I had done was report a conversation.

That's why they stopped the death penalty in this country. Man is not God thou shall not kill Americans will 🔥in hell.

Well they probably shouldn’t go around raping and murdering and beating up people in the first place.

That's how the country was born through murder, rape and slavery. They have a lot of unlearning to do.

I put the figures above. Since 1992, 20 innocent people have been executed, with 200 people found to be innocent after death sentence but before it was carried out. That's a high number. The number executed would have been higher if it wasn't for all the delays in the system. The US trying to speed things up will undoubtedly lead to more innocents being murdered.