I don’t know who Bill is, but he’s a dick.
I love this being framed as inhumane as if lethal injection isn’t the most consistently botched method of execution and as if firing squad isn’t by far the most effective and painless. People are shocked by it, and they want to abstract away from the barbarism inherent in the taking of a human life, but no matter the method, the end result is always the same.
Capital punishment shouldn’t exist in my opinion, not because I have any moral issues with it in principle, but because the burden of proof is simply too high to be met by the legal system as it exists now. Given that it does exist, however, I would personally choose firing squad as my way to go ten times out of ten. Better that than the paralytic working, the anesthetic not working, and feeling lava in your veins for the final minutes of your life as you can’t even scream.
I could be wrong but I figured the most humane was was an oxygen displacement gas seeing as how quickly a body goes unconcious without o2.
An opiate overdose would be the most humane and surefire way. It would make the entire process delightful.
Pharmaceutical companies won’t sell the govt drugs for this reason
Is firing squad better than hanging?
My understanding was a well planned hanging is relatively quick and efficient.
Also, ever since I learned that firing squads mix in blanks so the people feel less guilty I feel weird about it.
Trigger warning: this is about to get fairly gruesome; I’ll be going in depth on botched hangings.
But short answer: 100%. Hanging can be botched in a variety of ways. More detailed explanation below.
Tap for spoiler
The ways that it can go wrong tend to be fairly unpleasant as well. The ideal is that you get the perfect height relative to your weight that it breaks your neck, but if that gets messed up, you’re likely going to end up slowly suffocating instead (too short a drop) or having your head literally pulled straight from your body (too long a drop). There are (potentially apocryphal) accounts of people being hanged who weren’t actually heavy enough for it to effectively suffocate them or break the neck, so others would have to get involved and literally grab them by the legs to pull them down to add more weight. If the noose isn’t tight enough, it could come loose and wrap partially around the face instead, leading to a slow strangulation and/or severe lacerations. Skin can be fully or partially degloved as a consequence as well.
All in all, if we’re going for classic execution methods, I’m personally going guillotine.
I appreciate the detailed if morbid answer and agree with your conclusion
Here’s an idea: how about we stop killing people for no good reason?
Yeah! I vote we bring back gladitorial combat!
I would argue that there are good reasons though, and there should be something on the books for those (hopefully rare, recently less so) cases.
Who decides those reasons?
Hit the nail on the head. I’m not proud to admit that I’m absolutely okay with execution purely for the reason of retribution in the face of truly unforgivable acts (I’m talking the Epsteins of the world; beyond any doubt guilty of years of atrocity). I acknowledge that this isn’t justice, it’s vengeance, but my ape brain admittedly doesn’t really view the two separately - a relic of our evolutionary past, I’m sure.
However, I absolutely don’t trust the state to be the one setting the requirements for what meets the definition of unforgivable, and I certainly don’t trust them to do their due diligence, so the whole thing has to go. As it stands, capital punishment isn’t about what you did, so much as it is the state proving to you and everyone else that only they have a monopoly on violence. That they can, if they so choose, end your life and nobody can do anything about it. It’s about proving that they, at the end of the day, own you.
This is well said.
What does the death penalty achieve that life in prison does not?
Saving money probably? Depending on the criminals age, health, potential of being shanked, etc?
Edit: nevermind, quick search reveals death penalty costs significantly more.
Not OP but thought I’d chime in. I became convinced in the past few years to never be on board with the death penalty, but the past year has me on the fence about very rarely applying it. I think that a public execution could serve as a deterrent, reserved only for those who are very plainly guilty of the very worst atrocities. I mean worse than mass shooters. I’m talking decades of willful societal damage. Mussolini level of horrible. If we could’ve gotten to Hitler before he could kill himself, imagine the public, tortured, slow execution, and really ask yourself how many people would dare to wave a Nazi flag or sieg heil after that.
Maybe a few of these in the entire world over a century would be enough to prevent every genocide. I’m open to trying. Life in prison allows people to forget, but recorded gruesome executions are seared into memories.
If the death penalty serves as some kind of deterrent, why is murder more prevalent in States where it is performed?
States that execute people for murder and the highest murder rate per capita by State are almost the same list.
I think there are other, more significant factors that should be addressed first before we allow the government to kill people (a very, very good many of whom were actually innocent).
I’m not on board with the way that it’s currently applied, to be clear. I was just saying that that could be a reasonable thought for an argument for it, and that I thought that it could be valid if rarely and very publicly used for the most extreme couple of cases in a century.
I’m not here to defend the death penalty. But I’m also not gonna try too hard to protect a Hitler from that in order to get him a life sentence which could just be pardoned/commuted by his biggest fans. You’re right that we should be very careful about giving a government the right to murder a person, and that several death sentences have been carried out against people found to have been innocent, but that’s also why I bring up only using it for plainly, obviously guilty monsters like Mussolini or Hitler, and making sure that it’s inhumanely awful for them, and making it as widely visible as possible so that nobody can be unaware of what a miserable consequence you’ll suffer for doing that terrible shit.
But I also understand the hypocrisy of “it’s wrong to kill people, so we’ve decided to kill you, and that’s totally different because we decided that we have the power to legitimately decide that.” I don’t know the right answer, but it’s clear to me that there are too many monsters among us, so I’m spitballing whether there’s something that could’ve been done differently to have prevented this.
You’ve acknowledged that a reactionary government can get into power and pardon people.
You must also see that the same reactionary government can more easily execute its critics if we allow the institution of capital punishment. And for what? A “deterrent” that seems to have inverse effectiveness?
Fair point. Maybe only through international means then? Abolish the death penalty except through the ICC? Maximum once per decade, but not always used. Like a Nobel prize for war crimes.
Just stop executing people.
How else are you supposed to get rid of undesirables? /s
Just block hexbear and .ml!
So here is some info about hangings vs guillotine.
The only thing I can say about injections are that it’s botched all the time.
Firing squad seems stupid. Ricochet bullets are a possibility . And it promotes violence and aggression in law enforcement individuals.
So. Some medical info
Death by guillotine is actually incredibly ethical and humane.
In fact, in modern animal research, rats that are used in research and then killed are done so via a guillotine.
A friend was a pharmacologist researcher and told me that they gave them a little ketamine so they were out of it then cut their heads off. It’s quick. They die within a few seconds.
Contrary to popular belief. Breaking the neck or even cutting it through does not result in instant death. Only paralysis. Though severed head is faster death. (Fastest death is obliteration of brain stem).
Many of the nerves that control the face actually run down into the neck and enter the spine there. So cutting off the head, at the base of the skull, also paralyzes the face.
It’s sort of how people think that since fish can’t scream they don’t feel pain.
Just cause the severed head can’t scream and the face cant move, Don’t mean it’s dead. I suspect that’s why so many think breaking someone’s neck or cutting off their head is “instant” death. It’s definitely “certain death” but it’s not instant.
It takes a little bit of time for oxygen to be deprived from the brain enough to cause unconscious and then death.
Breaking the neck or severing the head isn’t immediate death. Someone with a broken neck (even if it causes face nerves to be severed) may stay alive/conscience up to a minute or two. Just paralyzed. Knowing they can’t breathe. Knowing death is coming.
Terrifying.
So the gallows it is for the traitors.
I think we can agree only some of them deserve the guillotine. Only a few. Hanging honestly seems appropriate for most criminals who have done a crime worthy of execution.
Personally, I do not support the death penalty because mistakes are made in the judicial system. And the death penalty can absolutely be abused to get rid of people who are innocent or have information that those in power dont want out.
Additionally, my lust for justice thinks death is not justice. A life time of having ones freedoms stripped away seems more appropriate for criminals.
Did you post this before you had finished?
Edit…never mind , op has edited and finished the post.
Yes. I accidentally submitted before finishing and then I got distracted while editing. Sorry for the confusion
He’s just got slow internet, he’s still typing
Whenever I read about the inavailability of lethal injection drugs it reassures me that my anxiety over dying from general anesthesia must by way overblown.
I’m generally against execution due to the chance it could be applied to an innocent person, but if it’s going to be a thing, why the fuck can’t it be asphyxiation by nitrogen? The most painless and peaceful way to sleep yourself to death is RIGHT THERE. The body doesn’t even consciously know that it’s dying. The person just blacks out and that’s it.
Source: Project Hail Mary
Edit: okay, so I actually clicked and read the first paragraph of the article and nitrogen hypoxia is the additional method. Yay! I guess…
Edit2:
“And for nitrogen hypoxia, we would be asking the executioners to administer a method to humans that we do not even use to euthanize animals anymore due to the distress it causes them to process.
“The exposure to euthanize a pig would need to be longer than seven minutes. How long would they have to safely wait and watch for the gas exposure to definitively kill a human?” LaCoursier asked.
I feel like biomedical monitoring of the heart and brain waves could definitively determine when brain death has set in. Perhaps maybe providing counseling to the executioner helping them understand that nitrogen gas hypoxia, even if it takes longer, is the gentlest way to go, could maybe help with the trauma of being an executioner?
Alabama executed someone with nitrogen in 2024 (I know other states have as well, but this was the first one I remember reading about), it doesn’t seem as quick and painless as one is lead to believe in writing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68085513
A witness told the BBC that Smith thrashed violently on the gurney and the execution took around 25 minutes. … “I’ve been to four previous executions and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” Lee Hedgepeth told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
Huh, guess I’m wrong. Dangit sci-fi books, you lied to me. I always thought that’s why nitrogen-rich environments were so insidiously dangerous as opposed to CO2-flooded ones, because the body is hardwired to detect and panic in response to CO2 suffocation, but there’s no such innate detection mechanism for low-O2 or high-N2 (or argon or any other inert gas).
25 minutes is pretty amazing for a body to survive in a hypoxic environment. That sounds like it was a horrible experience for everyone. It would seem there’s no good way to die…
Didn’t they try that once and the condemned was trying not to breath as long as he could, convulsing, fighting for his life till the last moment? From what I read it wasn’t peaceful at all.
Yeah, another commenter brought that up. I was naively unaware. Sucks…I really thought it was the calmest way to die. It was comforting to know there might be a quiet and non-messy way out in case of an agonizing advanced terminal illness or something like that in my future.
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