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Matt Ford writes in The Atlantic that thanks to a European Union embargo on the export of key drugs, and the refusal of major pharmaceutical companies to sell them the nation’s predominant method of execution is increasingly hard to perform. With lethal injection’s future uncertain, some states are turning to previously discarded methods. The Utah legislature just approved a bill to reintroduce firing squads for executions, Alabama’s House of Representatives voted to authorize the electric chair if new drugs couldn’t be found, and after last years botched injection, Oklahoma legislators are mulling the gas chamber.
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2015, @05:47PM
Can we have more articles about tech, and less about controversial topics and famous people just because they get a lot of clicks and comments?
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2015, @05:52PM
Feel free to submit more articles Asnob
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2015, @05:55PM
Yeah and there already was a story here about this did they remove the comments and change the publish date and try to pass it as a new story?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday March 16 2015, @07:12PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2015, @05:59PM
i wasn't aware this site had to publish only tech stories...
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday March 16 2015, @07:22PM
Think further. What if they invent some kind of execution machine ...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fritsd on Monday March 16 2015, @09:59PM
What? Like dr. Kevorkian [wikipedia.org] invented? The Kevorkian machine? I read it was not very appreciated..
What a morbid subject btw.
The State killing a person *is* brutal. Why not just use a guillotine, which has as side effects:
- It's really quick, the condemned doesn't suffer long
- His/her head is off, which can't easily be faked for witnesses and bystanders, so you're really really certain they're really dead.
Or you could, you know, just stop sentencing people to death, like in the countries that signed the ECHR [wikipedia.org] from 1953, and the later amendment Protocol 13.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Soybean on Monday March 16 2015, @06:21PM
Can we have more articles about tech,
Come on, now!
SoylentNews ... is people. Dead people!
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday March 16 2015, @11:00PM
I see them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday March 16 2015, @09:09PM
No.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek