OK, USA has the death penalty. Good or bad that's another story. Meanwhile, just use a firing squad. Efficient and humane.
If I had to pick a method, this would probably be my choice.
The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
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Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#12"practicing engineering without a license." is a new one to me, didn't realise they had that in the U.S.
In the UK you can call yourself an engineer and nobody is going to charge you for that. However, if you want to do any serious engineering then you do need a few letters after your name for some professions. I am glad Isambard Kingdom Brunel and other 'engineers' were able to work without having to be qualified in some official way.
I don't see this chair or any of the other U.S. methods as being particularly humane. There is a lack of instant-ness which then becomes 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Firing squad places burden on the firing squad, even if results are instant and therefore not 'cruel and unusual'. How come blunt force trauma and a 'dead man's switch' hasn't been tried? Evil-wrong-doer is given a switch that he/she can let go of 'when they are ready', then extremely heavy object and the magic of gravity could solve the matter of instant resolution.
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#13All this complication around methods of execution baffles me. Why don’t we use a massive dose of fentanyl or some other opioid? I’ve got to be missing something, because that seems like a simple, one-step process that doesn’t risk the pain of paralytics and potassium chloride. I think the death penalty is a useless relic, but if we’re going to do it, why make it so bizarre?
I'd say use carbon monoxide. No taste or odor, no sense of suffocation, just a quiet loss of consciousness and then death.
There are symptoms. It's only a nice, calm death if you're sleeping - so you'd want to do the usual suicide technique of sleeping pills + carbon monoxide.
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#14All this complication around methods of execution baffles me. Why don’t we use a massive dose of fentanyl or some other opioid? I’ve got to be missing something, because that seems like a simple, one-step process that doesn’t risk the pain of paralytics and potassium chloride. I think the death penalty is a useless relic, but if we’re going to do it, why make it so bizarre?
I'd say use carbon monoxide. No taste or odor, no sense of suffocation, just a quiet loss of consciousness and then death.
Nitrogen gas appears to be what states* are looking into [1] [2].
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
[2] http://time.com/3749879/nitrogen-gas-execution-oklahoma-leth...
*Edit: Changed "statesn" to "states".
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#15All this complication around methods of execution baffles me. Why don’t we use a massive dose of fentanyl or some other opioid? I’ve got to be missing something, because that seems like a simple, one-step process that doesn’t risk the pain of paralytics and potassium chloride. I think the death penalty is a useless relic, but if we’re going to do it, why make it so bizarre?
That would require either the state finding a legal source of fentanyl that is willing to sell them the drug for that purpose (challenging, given most pharma companies refuse due to some mix of principles and not wanting their product to be associated with death) or the state contracting with black market suppliers. Given the state imprisons low level illicit drug suppliers, I'm guessing the hypocrisy of granting leg…
It's not just principles that causes the issue for pharma companies (although the principles are, I think, real and truly held by the senior executives of those companies) - the EU has also banned export of any drugs for use in executions which makes it legally problematic for them too.
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#16Regardless of one's view on the death penalty, I've always found allowing people to view an execution to be incredibly disturbing.
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#17Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#18All this complication around methods of execution baffles me. Why don’t we use a massive dose of fentanyl or some other opioid? I’ve got to be missing something, because that seems like a simple, one-step process that doesn’t risk the pain of paralytics and potassium chloride. I think the death penalty is a useless relic, but if we’re going to do it, why make it so bizarre?
The whole point of death penalties is to kill someone gruesomely as a warning to everyone else. Electric chairs do that, opioids not so much.
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#19Death penalty is barbaric but these methods are just cruel. Why not use preferred methods for euthanasia, like exit bag? It's fast, painless and cheap.
No one ever mentions it, but the answer is simple. There are a siginficant number of people who don't want executions to be painless.
Re: The Electric Chair That Might Soon Be Used in Tennessee
#20Death penalty is barbaric but these methods are just cruel. Why not use preferred methods for euthanasia, like exit bag? It's fast, painless and cheap.
Cruel methods are used because the intent is to terminally punish, not to merely kill.