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Oklahoma plans to start carrying out executions with nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used in the U.S. but that some states have already approved amid difficulties with lethal injections.
At a news conference Wednesday, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh said that over the next few months the state would develop a protocol for using nitrogen.
[...] In recent years, Oklahoma and other states have struggled to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections, the most common execution method but one that has increasingly faced scrutiny.
In 2015, a state court put a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma after a series of botched executions, including one in which an inmate convulsed for 43 minutes before dying and another in which the wrong drug was administered.
Oklahoma is poised to become the first state to use nitrogen gas in executions
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @03:07AM (11 children)
The death penalty really only makes sense in places and times where you can't ensure that convicted criminals will serve out their sentences without escaping.
Back during the old west, where that was the case, having the death penalty was a practical necessity. But, the reality is that those days are long gone and in most, if not all, countries, the authorities are capable of keeping prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives if need be.
That being said, I do think there's a reasonable argument to be made for executing high level cartel members that have demonstrated that they can't be kept locked up.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @08:08AM (2 children)
The USA is not capable of keeping prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives if need be.
All it takes is one judge saying the prison is too crowded, and hoards of criminals are set free upon our streets. All it takes is one clueless/evil democratic governor/president saying "they look like nice boys", and out come the criminals.
Thus today, in the USA, having the death penalty is a practical necessity.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pendorbound on Friday March 16 2018, @02:22PM
Cite one example in which a US judge has ordered that murderers be released from prison due to overcrowding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:53PM
People such as the above are why we can't have nice things. They ate tough on everything except themselves, and it results in a shitty society.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @02:13PM (7 children)
How about when you don't want to spend outrageous amounts of money supporting a prisoner for life? Why should a heinous criminal get a free ride at considerable expense to the society they damaged for the rest of their natural life?
The only reason NOT to execute such criminals is that it's historically proven basically impossible to ensure innocent people aren't accidentally executed as well, and at least falsely imprisoned people can potentially be released to live out the remainder of their life.
Perhaps we could reach a compromise - make all prisoners join work camps performing community service valued at the cost of keeping them imprisoned, with the option of death if they don't feel like working. That'd also present a definite cash value for a starting point of restitution in the case of false imprisonment - back pay for all the work you did. Of course, it would present a problem for individuals genuinely incapable of making any productive contribution - but such individuals are actually exceptionally rare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @02:42PM (3 children)
The money is spent either way. Either you spend it in court making really sure that the guilty is guilty or you spend it on prison time.
Lowering the standards would save money, but what kind of monster is going to go along with that?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @04:23PM (2 children)
I should be clear that I am personally opposed to the death penalty, specifically because of the rampant abuse and corruption readily apparent in the legal system. But there are good arguments to be made in its favor, especially if you could somehow mitigate those problems.
Not necessarily - give them say 5-10 years to appeal and prove their innocence, which they would presumably be trying to do anyway, and after which point it's very unlikely they could succeed on such a cold case. If you haven't gotten off "lifer row" by then, you probably never will, and why should society continue to support you? Brutal, yes. But that's the nature of the law - making someone spend their life in a cage is arguably even more brutal. And innocent people die all the time - one of the tragic realities of a universe that has no apparent bias towards fairness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
Except the whole reason that most people are executed is because they were found guilty of the premeditated killing of another innocent person. But apparently, some people are OK with that, at least when it is done in the name of "protecting" others.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @05:32PM
Quite. The problem is there is a very real disconnect between being found guilty, and actually *being* guilty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @06:27PM (2 children)
You currently spend 3 times the amount of keeping a prisoner locked up for life when executing them. It really is cheaper not to kill them, so do you have a better argument than you don't want to spend the money on them, because that argument leads to abolishing the death penalty.
That is called slavery. Abolishing slavery was generally considered to be a good thing, and you want to bring it back?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday March 16 2018, @06:57PM
The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, allows for slavery as punishment for a crime. Take a look [wikipedia.org].
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM
Under the current system, yes, it's quite expensive to execute someone. If something changed, for example if someone invented a highly reliable lie detector so that you could simply ask the accused "Did you do X?" and "Why?" and then be at least as confident of their guilt or innocence, things could change dramatically.
I'm in favor of making able-bodied individuals earn their keep. And yes, there are unfavorable comparisons with slavery, except that every guilty person chose to be there through their actions. The innocent are still a problem, as are the potential perverse incentives to increase incarceration - probably no worse than existing for-profit prisons, but those are already causing serious problems.
Heck, as far as slavery is concerned, the real horror was introduced quite recently along with the African slave trade - the idea that race determined suitability for slavery, and that someone could of be born a slave. Historically slaves have mostly been the same race as their masters, and their children were free, with the opportunity to become full citizens in societies where that was relevant.