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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31294 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

It's important to note here that Nitrogen gas is now being used, because anti-death penalty ideologues have lobbied chemical and drug companies to stop supplying the materials for the prior method (lethal injection). So for anti-death penalty advocates to point to nitrogen asphyxiation as cruel is to decry the results of one's own side.

Cruel and unusual punishments were banned at the founding to move past the medieval drawing and quartering, but definition creep has reached the point where it is used to ban the death penalty by the back door. We must settle on some standard of pain that is necessary and work from there.

Well, the catch there is that places like Oklahoma did manage to screw up lethal injections in new and exciting ways.

We don’t have a very good track record standardizing pain or suffering, either.

The lethal injections were screwed up because drug companies stopped providing the drugs, right? IIRC the original lethal injection was a three drug cocktail with the killing agent being specialized potassium salt(and also a sedative and anesthetic), but as it became harder to obtain the necessary chemicals states switched to using a lethal dose of horse tranquilizer, which is less instant and humane.

Well, they had that stumble, and ended up switching to midozalam. But they also managed to inject the wrong drugs.

Shortly before Glossip's scheduled execution, the state learned that a drug supplier had sent the Oklahoma Department of Corrections a supply of potassium acetate rather than potassium chloride. Potassium chloride is the third drug prescribed in Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol.[12] An autopsy on Charles Warner's and Clayton Lockett's bodies revealed that the state had used potassium acetate during each of their executions as well, in violation of their protocol.

Fortunately, potassium acetate works just fine.

Though a nice sharp blade would work too, with less fiddling. For all its indubitably French origins, the guillotine really fits well with America -- the execution technique of the nobility, packaged and commoditized for the masses.

I'm biased here in that I find lethal injection disgusting for humanist reasons, I think it is below the dignity of a murderer to be put down like a dog, that it is more dignified to be hung or shot, to be blamed. The hanged man is a moral actor whose actions we deemed worthy of death, the lethally injectee strapped to a gurney is reduced to an object to be disposed of with minimal fuss.

Technically, there is one state where the default method of execution is shooting- Utah(technically the condemned is given a choice between the firing squad and lethal injection, but in practice every execution in Utah has chosen a firing squad).

Revealed preferences?

Mormons believe that atonement for murder requires the literal shedding of blood, so that might be part of it in some cases, given that this is Utah.

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