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The death penalty

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zekeb
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Re: The death penalty

#76

Post by zekeb »

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AndyinPA
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Re: The death penalty

#77

Post by AndyinPA »

The Nazis used it. It wasn't good for the final solution, though.
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Re: The death penalty

#78

Post by Liz »

Lani wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:08 am A major part of the cruelty of an execution is the preparation rituals for it. The final meal, the final walk, the chair, strapping the person in, attaching the cords, etc. Or being strapped to a gurney and having various medical devices attached. If it was more like letting go of our beloved pets, the death would happen quickly.
A no angsty way is how the Russian's do it. 9mm from behind.
Instead of electric chair/firing squad give the condemned the choice of Heroin/Morphine/Fentanyl?
Plenty available in evidence rooms and about 30K/yr like it so much they use too much.... and seemingly pass without knowing.
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Re: The death penalty

#79

Post by neonzx »

Liz wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 5:08 pm Instead of electric chair/firing squad give the condemned the choice of Heroin/Morphine/Fentanyl?
Plenty available in evidence rooms and about 30K/yr like it so much they use too much.... and seemingly pass without knowing.
I'd thought about Morphine as a solution, too, over the complicated mix of expensive drugs they use.
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Re: The death penalty

#80

Post by Frater I*I »

How about CO?

Person falls asleep, and never wakes.
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Re: The death penalty

#81

Post by LM K »

Of botched executions in the past 120 years, lethal injection was most often botched. Gas chamber executions are the 2nd most botched form of execution.
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zekeb
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Re: The death penalty

#82

Post by zekeb »

I'd say that 100% the sparky deaths are botched. Unless it renders you unconscious immediately, and I doubt that it does, there has to be great pain before your brain shuts down.
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Re: The death penalty

#83

Post by Suranis »

zekeb wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 3:09 pm The guillotine is quicker and more painless than the firing squad. Once built, it's the ultimate in a green way to execute people. Why didn't the S.C. Legislature choose this humane and cost-effective method?
You would think so. But after a bit of use the blade tended to get dulled, requiring constant replacement and re-sharpening, if the executioners could be bothered during the day. Other wise it could take a couple of tries to get through he neck. Fun.

Honestly, given a choice I'd go for the most efficient, least painful and fastest method of killing - bullets. Its not like you Americans have a shortage of them. But we cant have the most holy GUN associated with bad stuff like the death penalty. So lets go for these ridiculous ceremonial things like the Gas chamber or the Electric chair or turning over every pharmacy to get drugs to let the inmate feel his insides melting, when you could pop down to a Walmart for a Box of Happy Joe's Poppin Ammo.
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Re: The death penalty

#84

Post by Uninformed »

Something that crossed my mind (a short trip) is that if you believe in heaven and hell, execution is the quickest way to deliver you to your eternal punishment. I wonder if this colours the thinking of (supposedly) religious people?

On occasion crimes are so horrendous that I feel the perpetrator(s) “forfeit the right to life”, but as is known 100% absolutely certain convictions have been found to be wrong.
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Re: The death penalty

#85

Post by neonzx »

Uninformed wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 8:19 am Something that crossed my mind (a short trip) is that if you believe in heaven and hell, execution is the quickest way to deliver you to your eternal punishment. I wonder if this colours the thinking of (supposedly) religious people?

On occasion crimes are so horrendous that I feel the perpetrator(s) “forfeit the right to life”, but as is known 100% absolutely certain convictions have been found to be wrong.
If they are "religious people", they will have to answer to their maker of why they took a life.

And yes, we've executed persons who were proven innocent posthumously due to new evidence,DNA,etc..
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Re: The death penalty

#86

Post by LM K »

Here's the thing. There is evidence that people maintain some consciousness after being decapitated. It looks like a fast death, but that's because there is no body to show signs of consciousness.

Continue reading only if you're prepared to deal with sticky (and possibly personal) issues about death and consciousness.
► Show Spoiler
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 86126.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- ... sciousness.
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Re: The death penalty

#87

Post by zekeb »

Have you ever received a really really nasty electric shock? I have. On top of that, mine was for only a fraction of a second. Imagine receiving something like that for several seconds - perhaps close to a minute of pain if your scrambled brain still has its senses intact. The chair has to be about the worst way to die.
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Re: The death penalty

#88

Post by Liz »

LM K wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 7:40 pm Here's the thing. There is evidence that people maintain some consciousness after being decapitated. It looks like a fast death, but that's because there is no body to show signs of consciousness.
I've read of been told at some point in time that the French crowds cheered and hollered when the executioner held up a severed head that tried to speak.
When Jean-Paul Marat’s killer, Charlotte Corday, was executed by guillotine in 1793, a man named Francois le Gros allegedly lifted her head and slapped both cheeks. Onlookers claimed that Corday’s face took on an angry expression and her cheeks became flushed. There are other reports from history of severed heads that seem to have shown signs of consciousness. Anne Boleyn, for example, apparently tried to speak after being beheaded. But are these stories bogus or is there scientific evidence that the head can remain conscious after it has been separated from the body that sustains it?
.... this article ends with "As much as people might want to believe that Anne Boleyn tried to speak after being decapitated, the story is probably apocryphal."
I'm one those people that thinks it happens. Whether or not to Anne Boleyn.
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Re: The death penalty

#89

Post by roadscholar »

The chair has to be about the worst way to die.
I agree. Pain happens through nerves. Electricity lighting up then burning out nerves... nah. I’d pick pretty much anything over that.

Say... wouldn’t there be a whole bunch of street heroin seized in drug busts just lying around evidence rooms doing nothing? :think:
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Re: The death penalty

#90

Post by noblepa »

roadscholar wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 11:12 pm
The chair has to be about the worst way to die.
I agree. Pain happens through nerves. Electricity lighting up then burning out nerves... nah. I’d pick pretty much anything over that.

Say... wouldn’t there be a whole bunch of street heroin seized in drug busts just lying around evidence rooms doing nothing? :think:
I agree that electrocution is probably painful.

But I think being burned at the stake may be worse. I've read that in the dark ages, when such executions were more common, that the condemned, or their friends, would pay an archer to shoot the prisoner through the heart, as soon as the fire was lit.

I, too, have read of guillotined heads showing signs of consciousness, such as blinking eyes or attempts to speak (with no lungs to provide air, that doesn't work very well).

I don't think that there have been any studies to determine if a brain retains any consciousness during an electrocution. I'm not sure how one would test that, even using animals. The high voltage and current used would almost certainly obscure any EEG information. The electricity-induced muscle contractions would make it impossible for any vocalization, but might appear to be the victim reacting to the jolt.
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Re: The death penalty

#91

Post by AndyinPA »

All right, let's get really gruesome.
To be hanged, drawn and quartered was, from 1352 after the Treason Act 1351, a statutory penalty in England for men convicted of high treason, although the ritual was first recorded during the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272). The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered (chopped into four pieces). His remains would then often be displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge, to serve as a warning of the fate of traitors. For reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burned at the stake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_d ... _quartered

We maybe need to recognize that executions may have belonged back in those dark days, but don't anymore. I mean the collective we, not just those of us here. I think most of us already do.
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Re: The death penalty

#92

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https://www.chron.com/news/article/Expe ... 192390.php
HOUSTON (AP) — While officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice are blaming miscommunication for preventing reporters from witnessing the state’s first execution in nearly a year, legal and death penalty experts worry it's another example of what they see as a lack of transparency and competency in how the death penalty is carried out in the U.S.

Two reporters, including one with The Associated Press, had been set to witness Wednesday’s execution of Quintin Jones at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. But they were not escorted into a viewing room adjacent to the death chamber because a call was never made to summon them.

Jones, condemned for the September 1999 killing of his great-aunt, Berthena Bryant, was executed with no media present. The previous 570 executions carried out since Texas resumed capital punishment in 1982 all had at least one media witness — and it was often an AP journalist.

The AP aims to cover every U.S. execution, one of the gravest procedures carried out by governments, and has for decades because the public has the right to know about all stages of the criminal justice process. The AP often is the sole media presence at U.S. executions, and explains the American death penalty process to the world.
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Re: The death penalty

#93

Post by noblepa »

AndyinPA wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 11:11 am https://www.chron.com/news/article/Expe ... 192390.php
HOUSTON (AP) — While officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice are blaming miscommunication for preventing reporters from witnessing the state’s first execution in nearly a year, legal and death penalty experts worry it's another example of what they see as a lack of transparency and competency in how the death penalty is carried out in the U.S.

Two reporters, including one with The Associated Press, had been set to witness Wednesday’s execution of Quintin Jones at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. But they were not escorted into a viewing room adjacent to the death chamber because a call was never made to summon them.

Jones, condemned for the September 1999 killing of his great-aunt, Berthena Bryant, was executed with no media present. The previous 570 executions carried out since Texas resumed capital punishment in 1982 all had at least one media witness — and it was often an AP journalist.

The AP aims to cover every U.S. execution, one of the gravest procedures carried out by governments, and has for decades because the public has the right to know about all stages of the criminal justice process. The AP often is the sole media presence at U.S. executions, and explains the American death penalty process to the world.
Texas seems to be very gung-ho on the death penalty.

I remember a few years ago, comedian Ron White, who apparently is from the Lone Star State, approvingly joked that, while some states are abolishing the death penalty, Texas was installing an express lane.
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Re: The death penalty

#94

Post by Frater I*I »

zekeb wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 9:10 pm Have you ever received a really really nasty electric shock? I have. On top of that, mine was for only a fraction of a second. Imagine receiving something like that for several seconds - perhaps close to a minute of pain if your scrambled brain still has its senses intact. The chair has to be about the worst way to die.
I was almost electrocuted over 20 years ago switching leads in an HVAC motor. I was locked on for almost 20 seconds, it hurt like hell. Today my miniature painting looks like hammered dog [expletive deleted] because of the tremble my hands have, as now the full extent of the damage is coming clear.
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Re: The death penalty

#95

Post by Uninformed »

Strange to think that I was very lucky that a shock immediately threw me across a room.
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Re: The death penalty

#96

Post by roadscholar »

That's why DC is so much more dangerous than AC. You hit a DC current just right, it can contract a hand onto the wire or whatever and you can't let go. Yikes.
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Re: The death penalty

#97

Post by chancery »

Ah, the Edison vs Westinghouse dispute.
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Re: The death penalty

#98

Post by Frater I*I »

roadscholar wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 1:03 pm That's why DC is so much more dangerous than AC. You hit a DC current just right, it can contract a hand onto the wire or whatever and you can't let go. Yikes.
Gotta reverse your current's there.
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Re: The death penalty

#99

Post by chancery »

An interesting article about the issues and potential problems with using nitrogen as a means of execution.

https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/07/17/pu ... for-state/
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Re: The death penalty

#100

Post by roadscholar »

Frater I*I wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 3:06 pm
roadscholar wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 1:03 pm That's why DC is so much more dangerous than AC. You hit a DC current just right, it can contract a hand onto the wire or whatever and you can't let go. Yikes.
Gotta reverse your current's there.
Not how I learned it. The AC can throw you across the room, not the DC.
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