First execution using nitrogen

[Jenry]

Alabama has executed a man using nitrogen flowing through a mask for the first time. Warning - distressing detail in the article.
how is this allowed to happen in this day and age? It’s inhumane.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68085513.amp

This makes interesting reading

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/lethal-injection-and-physicians-state-law-vs-medical-ethics

That makes it almost worse - that they have untrained people carrying out what are essentially medical procedures.

Don't they need a doctor to certify death? And indeed wouldn't they have to have called medics to the previous failed execution?

Yeah, it's fucked up.

What he did was monstrous but that doesn't excuse being left in limbfo on death row for over 30 YEARS (longer than I've been alive?!), and then prod multiple times until they get a line

Then that failing and them using this method that took over a quarter of an hour

That's is unacceptable and isn't just or a logical act. This is suppose to be a logical and sensible justice system. Not a revenge killing

Too right I would want anyone who caused my family death to experience pain and suffering. But such people shouldn't be making legal decisions, obviously

Frankly, no.

But that doesn't mean I think he should have been gassed.

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to sit in your cell knowing that at 8 am tomorrow morning you will be taken and killed, and despite the fact that every instinct is screaming at you to try to survive there is nothing you can do about it? Do you think that would be horrible?

How about if you were innocent?

The death penalty is nothing more than state sanctioned murder.

I imagine the kind of people who willingly carry out the death penalty are the same kinds of people who beat up their wives and abuse their children. Because no decent individual would willingly put someone to death. No matter how much they disapproved of what they’d done.

I read an article once about those who were essentially forced to carry out death sentences as part of their role, and how that affected their mental health.

So if someone’s mental health isn’t affected by their being willing and able to gas someone to death and to watch them die then they are just as much cold blooded murderers as the person they’re murdering. Except they’ll never be brought to justice.

It comes to something when Saudi Arabia have a less barbaric death penalty than the US. I mean decapitation is no less unacceptable, but at least it’s quic.

30+ years on death row? You think that is some sort of privilege?

the woman he killed didn’t get a humane death though, did she?

America has a long history of botched hanging too. Won't go into detail here as too upsetting.

If any one of us had to do that to another human being who could? Yet the state defends the right to do this and do it publicly.

There is also the issue that those facing the death penalty are disproportionately the the poorest in society. Is that right?

My main objection to the death penalty is that the state having power to kill those it seems deserving of it is disturbing. We don't have to look far back in history to see the gross misuse of this kind of power.

If Governors & Judges that upheld death sentences had to perform or even just be present at executions capital punishment would end immediately. It’s not sympathy for the executed that makes it wrong it’s sympathy for the executioners and all who bear witness. Which is all of us.

I like to think I'm better than the murderer though.

Does that justify the state giving someone else an even more inhumane death? Should we just go back to using the torture chamber? How about a bit of hanging, drawing and quartering?

Or shall we acknowledge that civilisation and humanity should have moved on?

Well obviously.

But that's not much of an argument in favour of the death penalty unless your main objective is revenge?

I would pull the lever and smile while I did so, but then I'm sang froid.

Nothing to be proud of.

the woman he killed didn’t get a humane death though, did she? and? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

The man was convicted and sentenced for her murder. He essentially got a life sentence and then the death penalty. Because let’s not pretend that sentencing someone to death means they’re taken off to the death chamber and executed, they first have to spend twenty plus years in isolation.

What a disgusting human being you are. You’re no better than a murderer.

I thought the methods used in the US were explicitly chosen so that the person is conscious and knows they're dying? It's intended to be punitive not 'humane'.

Yes. Research by the Equal Justice Initiative shows that 95% of convicts lon death row in the United States come from underprivileged backgrounds. Their court-appointed lawyers often don’t have the means to expedite the DNA or ballistics tests that could unravel the prosecution’s case. Similar statistics apply in other countries with the death penalty.

Ditto race. From Wikipedia:

The relationship between race and capital punishment in the United States has been studied extensively. As of 2014, 42 percent of those on death row in the United States were Black. As of October 2002, there were 12 executions of White defendants where the murder victim was Black, however, there were 178 executed defendants who were Black with a White murder victim. Since then, the number of white defendants executed where the murder victim was black has increased to just 21 (less than 1.36 percent of all executions), whereas the number of Black defendants executed where the murder victim was White has increased to 299 (nearly 19.4 percent of all executions). 54 percent of people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the United States are black.

Well said. Let 'em have a taste of how their victims felt!!

Hanging isn't great for the audience witnesses.

Has anyone else seen Shepherds and butchers?

Hanging can also be botched. You need someone who knows what they are doing.

Would you still be smiling when the individual was subsequently acquitted?
Would you still be cold blooded if the individual wrongly accused was you?

Deleted on second thoughts.

The arguments in support of the death penalty are always so purile and a bit tabloid...