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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: 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