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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: 5, Insightful) by ilPapa on Friday March 16 2018, @05:06AM (9 children)
The problem is, our legal system is not equipped to ascertain this necessity without killing some innocent people along the way. What margin of error are you comfortable with when it comes to state-approved murder?
You're squarely in eugenics territory now, Mighty Buzzard, and I'll bet that despite your tough talk you don't really want to be there. I know there's still some good left in you.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Friday March 16 2018, @07:21AM (3 children)
So? We kill innocent people all the time. How many lives could we save with a mandatory regulator to prevent cars from exceeding 25 mph? We decide the increased standard of living for the living outweighs the increased mortality. And so forth. We should kill monsters because we should be the sort of people who refuse to leave them alive. Even in prison they often kill and many in prison do not deserve death. Once we decide somebody is -never- coming back out we should put them down. If we had penal colonies we could use that option for those meriting lifetime exclusion from society but not quite horrible enough that killing them is the best for the other prisioners, but we don't.
Cost benefit. And to get the maximum benefit death needs to be certain and swift. Time from police catching a monster (multiple murder, torture / rape / murder, terrorism, other really horrible things) to a public execution should be less than a year. And it should be done where others likely to be deterred will be likely to witness the event. Twenty years after the crime, a dozen appeals later and after a half dozen attempts stopped at the last minute by a stay has little deterrent effect.
Btw, the arguments about dirty people in the criminal justice system is not a valid argument. You solve that by making the withholding of exculpatory evidence and other such nonsense that results in a death count as murder under color of law and sentence the district attorney. Execute a few Mike Nifong types along with any remaining "good ol boys" and the problem would be as close to solved as anything with humans involved ever is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:02AM (1 child)
You're rather flippant, almost casual, with other people's lives.
We can't prevent all accidents. But I bet if we tried you'd be the first in line to cry foul.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 16 2018, @08:43PM
The US has no shortage of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, but also temporarily out-of-baddies heroes, and temporarily unvictimized hardliners.
The probability of each of those three situations turning around is not equal.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday March 16 2018, @10:38AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:28AM
You're only in eugenics territory if there is a genetic basis to criminality. Are you asserting this?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 16 2018, @10:55AM (3 children)
Mistakes have always and will always happen as long as human beings are involved. So long as your best reasonable effort is made to ensure that you're executing the correct person, your conscience can remain clean. What constitutes "best reasonable effort" needs thorough consideration and debate though.
As for my supposed willingness, I long ago volunteered to shoot people from opposing armies who had done me no wrong whatsoever. An enemy nation's soldiers are no more likely to be evil bastards than the general public (less so even in my opinion) but sometimes they need to be killed. Killing those whose guilt of especially heinous crimes have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt is even easier morally.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday March 16 2018, @05:29PM (2 children)
Seems to me it's generally not the soldiers that need to be killed, but the generals and civil leaders behind them. Unfortunately they're never on the battlefield, and the rules of "civilized warfare" prohibit assassination. Funny that...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:15AM (1 child)
Yeah, I've never been a fan of "civilized" warfare anyway. If you're going to go to war you should make sure to treat your enemies so horrifically that A) nobody wants to fuck with you again for a very long time and B) your own citizens are less eager to decide war is the thing to do. It would save a hell of a lot of lives, much like bombing Japan did.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday March 18 2018, @03:10PM
I would agree, except for your ridiculously over-broad definition of "enemy". Civilians are very rarely anyone's enemy - people mostly just want to be left alone to live their lives. Your enemy is the cabal of powerful individuals running the country, generally with very little regard for the desires or well-being of the citizens (even in titular democracies). And more immediately, the working class soldiers who have agreed to kill people for the sake of "their" country.