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posted by n1 on Monday March 16 2015, @05:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the killing-me-softly dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Monday March 16 2015, @07:27PM

    by Kromagv0 (1825) on Monday March 16 2015, @07:27PM (#158535) Homepage

    Or a lethal dose of heroin/opiates, which is supposed to be an extremely blissful way of kicking the bucket.

    This does remind me of one of the things I learned when my grandfather was dying. When a nurse or doctor asks "More morphine won't help, should I give them more morphine?" they are trying to provide a method to end someone's suffering in the least painful way. Often it is illegal for a doctor to suggest ending a patients life so it needs to be done in a coded manner. My father and one of my aunts who work in the medical field explained this to the rest of the family. My father has made it clear that if my sister and I are faced with a similar question from a doctor about him the answer is to be yes.

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