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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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:45AM (5 children)
Do you support prison sentences? If so, what is the acceptable number of innocent people kidnapped by the state?
Do you support fines? If so, what is the acceptable number of innocent people robbed by the state?
Do you support corporal punishment? If so, what is the acceptable number of innocent people battered by the state?
I don't think any punishment of the innocent is acceptable, and yet it is an inevitable consequence of any system for punishing the guilty. This argument seems no more persuasive for capital punishment than for the alternative punishments (typically imprisonment for life or multiple decades) for capital offenses.
The notion that capital punishment is irreversible, while a wrongly fined or imprisoned man may be freed and made whole, is appealing, and may even be true for small fines and short prison sentences. But how do you make a man whole when you've stolen whole decades from his life after a wrong conviction? Additionally, there's no reason to believe the few wrongful convictions we see overturned represent all or most miscarriages of justice; they're more likely a small minority. It seems clear that the majority of innocents wrongly convicted of capital crimes would instead be wrongfully imprisoned for life, but will still never receive any recognition of their innocence nor any attempt to make them whole.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday March 16 2018, @07:52AM (3 children)
Yes.
If someone innocent was imprisoned and it is later found that he's innocent, he can be freed and compensated. With death penalty this is not possible.
Yes.
See above.
No.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by julian on Friday March 16 2018, @03:58PM (1 child)
You answered exactly the way I would have. Why is this so hard for some people?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 16 2018, @05:29PM
Because "some people" are actually sociopaths. And we seem to attract a disproportionate number of "some people" on this site, Madokami help us...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @07:34PM
He can*, but he probably won't. You can't expect a system that is fallible when convicting the innocent to infallibly exonerate them afterward. But even assuming, for the sake of argument, that our system is very good at detecting wrongful convictions and compensating them, surely some small fraction will slip through the cracks, right?
How many innocents being imprisoned and not freed and compensated is acceptable? Why is this not zero?
*although "compensated" doesn't mean "made whole". This idea that you can take decades from a man's life, institutionalize him so he has to relearn how to function as a free man, then magically erase the harm done with a fat check and "We square, bro?"... I just don't understand how anyone can possibly believe this.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @12:04PM
I support summary executions, but only for Americans.
Actually I support extermination of all non-native Americans.