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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26712 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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It's been a while since I deep-dived on US execution policy, but what I remember is that every state has lethal injection, but sanctions from Europe make it progressively harder to obtain lethal injection drugs. The supreme court isn't friendly to the electric chair, so Alabama had to come up with something they could cast as humane, and some of the reputation for humane is due to Europe, but it's more about keeping the supreme court happy.

It’s not European sanctions that are preventing US states from obtaining lethal injection drugs. Yes I’m aware that some states were getting the drugs from, I think, the Netherlands for a while before they blocked the export, but the idea that the US, a country of 330 million people with the largest pharmaceutical industry on the planet, can’t possibly internally source drugs to kill people is absurd. The point being that it isn’t Europeans causing problems for the American death sentence, it’s other Americans.

I suspect that Alabama moving to nitrogen hypoxia is about 1% to do with humane-ness and 99% to do with the fact that unlike controlled drugs, it’s impossible to prevent Alabama from acquiring Nitrogen.

I dunno, if I'm a drug company, I'd look at "manufacturing drugs that very rarely get used" to be a vestigial-at-best method of generating profit versus "make cool and novel drug and get rich off the patent."

Which, of course, is ridiculous. No one penning the Amendment on cruel and unusual punishment would have regarded hanging as cruel and unusual. To make a legal argument against the Constitutionality of execution basically requires pretending the words don't mean what everyone understood them to mean until approximately last Tuesday.

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