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If it means anything to you, I endorse this as a doctor myself.
I don't see why the legal system doesn't go for easier solutions like dosing a patient up on benzos and then putting them in an anoxic room (say with a 100% nitrogen atmosphere), or use something we already know is insidious and painless like carbon monoxide poisoning. You can even skip the benzos, if they strictly need a doctor to hand them out.
As I see it, there's no real point in quibbling over a little discomfort or even a lot of it when you've already consigned someone to death. Just get the damn thing over it, and don't become more concerned about assuaging your soft first world sense of guilt in the field of state-sanctioned killing. (I have nothing against the death penalty either)
I was under the impression that carbon monoxide poisoning is extremely unpleasant and not at all painless. Nitrogen is the way to go, in my opinion. You don't even need the benzos.
Hmm, you're right. It is more unpleasant than I thought, I must have been mislead by the cases of people passing away in their sleep during house fires.
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Because if you execute prisoners by any method that hasn't been specifically determined as okay in a previous court decision, death penalty opponents will use lawfare to tie up the system in court cases, preventing you from using that method.
Sure, but firing squads have been ok’d by previous court decisions. It’s just that the USA requires every execution to use the method specifically authorized by state legislatures, and the states which allow firing squads have a torturous process to get there from lethal injection.
I believe Oklahoma is moving towards the use of nitrogen asphyxiation.
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I suspected so, and it only cements by general dismay at the level of competence of our global civilization.
At least in India, while getting a prisoner onto Death Row isn't an easy task, with plenty of legal hurdles along the way, we don't fuck around at the very end.
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