Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen
Why do we even still have the death penalty?
So often I am thankful that I dont have to live in this dystopion shithole country. Thanks for reminding me again.
I hate the death penalty - its barbaric, it kills innocent people etc.
But if people are going to do it I can think of no better metaphor for a state sanctioned death penalty than an enourmous hydraulic press.
All these injections and ethical guidelines are misguided. The cruelty is the point so they might as well just make it quick and lean into it.
“Crushed by the weight of the system.”
Maybe “torn apart by the gears of justice?”
I’m pro-death penalty in theory but against it in practice. There’s definitely some people who forfeit their right to exist with the rest of us. But we can never apply it fairly or even guarantee we aren’t executing actually innocent people. And the ugliness and evil of that is more than enough to make me against capital punishment.
It’s sometimes wrong is my #1 reason.
Om top of that, it’s not fairly distributed sometimes and it’s also more expensive than just life in prison. With all that, what’s the purpose? It’s clearly to make other people feel good, not about justice. People love revenge porn, and I think that says a lot about us as people that we’re willing to deal with all the negatives to bring us joy about ending another person’s life.
The process of putting someone to death is already traumatic to the guards that have to make it happen. It makes them question whether they can find salvation - even though their job made them do it.
Now you’re asking them to experiment on people? At the very least let’s use surefire methods & people who are already murderers for this profession
First off, I am against the death penalty. I suppose there are hypothetical scenarios were there may be some remorseless person who committed horrific crimes and for whom there is absolutely no doubt of guilt, and maybe then we can justify removing them from the world permanently. But in the real world, the death penalty is not limited to such scenarios. Innocents have been and continue to be executed. This is unacceptable.
But, if we aren’t going to eliminate it, at the very least we can avoid unneeded suffering during it. As I understand it, nitrogen asphyxiation is a comparatively peaceful way to go. So this headline smells of bullshit to me.
It’s experimental. No institutional review board in the country could ethically ask this guy to volunteer for such an experiment, simply because of the coercive power dynamics inherent in asking such a thing of a prisoner. But the government can, by fiat, decide to experiment on him, and you’re ok with that? Even if “nitrogen asphyxiation is a comparatively peaceful way to go,” human medical experimentation qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment; otherwise, what’s the point of banning cruel and unusual punishment?
It isn’t experimental is the way the word is normally used. We know what the effects of nitrogen asphyxiation are. People are accidentally killed by it all the time. If were going to have a death penalty (and I would argue we shouldn’t) then we should seek less cruel ways to do it, which nitrogen asphyxiation is.
The only experiment is doing it to humans. It’s used to kill chickens by the thousands. Because it causes them less stress, leading to better tasting meat.
Right. So it’s human medical experimentation on a prisoner. Which, ask any social scientist, is some seriously fucked up, unethical shit.
