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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4360 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 27, 2022

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I see these articles from time to time about how difficult it is for the USA to execute people - not talking about appeals or courts, but literally the physical process of execution via lethal injection consistently fails. Elizabeth Bruenig has been on this beat for a while - Kenneth Smith, Alan Eugene Miller, Joe Nathan James Jr - 3 pieces she's written about at least that discuss doctors/executioners unable to find a vein, or something, and unable to carry out the execution.

What I can't figure out is, why is this so difficult? This came up for me specifically because of all the recent articles in Canada about MAiD (aptly named? dystopian?) Medical Assistance in Dying - I'm not hearing tons of articles about Doctors struggling to administer euthanasia, people dying horrifically painful deaths as they have reactions to the chemicals, etc. etc. - Why is MAiD so seemingly easy to administer, but execution not? It seems like they both involve sticking a needle in someone and injecting a substance. I hope this isn't a stupid question - I'm not looking to debate morality of either of these items but just explore actual logistics and mechanics. What am I missing?

My understanding is that various drug manufacturers have taken steps to avoid their drugs being used for executions (believe this happened for both pentobarbital and sodium thiopental), which has led to prisons needing to use compounding pharmacies to make the drugs for them, with varied quality.

I've also read that many doctors don't want to be involved in the testing or administering of lethal injection cocktails, so the state kind of has to take who it can get, leading to more varied quality there.

I'm guessing MAiD hasn't yet had the same degree of pushback from those groups, at least so far (though I would be very surprised if it hasn't had any). That could certainly change in the future.

Also, frankly- I think comfort is a much higher priority for doctor assisted suicide than it is for execution by lethal injection. I think screaming pain moves the popular support needle away from euthanasia much faster than from execution.

This raises the question of why the US is insistent on using lethal injection when other parts of the developed world, when they have the death penalty, mostly use hanging.

I'd guess it's the same reason we don't use corporal punishment (painful just to watch, incredibly painful to endure, but low-time-preference offenders get maximally deterred by it and potentially-rehabilitated offenders can still go back to family and work the next day) but we do use long prison terms (no instant of which is super awful, except maybe the one where the offender is fired and the one where their SO leaves them, but which adds up to more suffering over years).

At least subconsciously, we want to be cruel but we don't want to feel like we're cruel, so the cruelty has to be slow and calm and quiet.

And as for why the US in particular? My guess here is that it's because we're aware that when we were routinely cruel, we were just too awful at it. Corporal punishment reminds us of Puritan pillories for skipping church in the best case, or of whipped slaves in the worst. Hanging reminds us of lynch mobs. The one good thing you can say for long prison terms (including our ever-longer waits on Death Row) is that they provide lots of time to rectify an unjust miscarriage of justice. (not that we will, in general, but at least the possibility remains open)

Does anyone think that Japanese or Singaporean long drop hanging is any crueler than lethal injection? I mean, sure, public hanging from a construction crane, Iran-style, is outside the Overton window due to perceived cruelty. But that’s not what’s being discussed. There’s some movement in the us away from lethal injection because, as noted, it doesn’t work very well, but usually to firing squad or inert gas asphyxiation.

Honestly kinda seems like a fixation with being modern and technocratic more than anything else.

I get the sense that among the proponents of the death penalty in the US, there is a certain ritual component to the act; it's not just about killing criminals, but rather there is a specific vision of the appropriate way(s) to kill the most heinous criminals so that justice may be served in a proper American way. Hanging is not part of any such vision, and instead evokes a sense of foreign countries and brutal episodes of history that definitively are out of place now that history has ended, almost as if the proposal were to enact the death penalty by public guillotine.

(You might imagine an opponent of the religion restricting access to white flour to disrupt Catholic/Orthodox Christian communion, and then asking why they don't just do it with slices of whole grain rye bread instead.)

Thank you this makes sense - it comes down to the actual chemical composition, and the difficulty obtaining it.

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