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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: 2) by mojo chan on Tuesday March 17 2015, @08:26AM
Gas is dangerous though. Remember that no doctor will participate in an execution, so it has to be carried out by "technicians" who are basically idiots. They can cope with throwing a switch but ask them to handle a gas chamber safely... Chances are more than just the intended victim will be dying.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2015, @07:32PM
Not all gas is dangerous. Nitrogen in itself isn't harmful, remember that the air you breath is ~78% Nitrogen. It only becomes dangerous by displacing too much of the Oxygen that we actually need to breath, therefore doing it safely is just a matter of the operator following procedure to ensure the Nitrogen asphyxiation system is only activated when only the condemned person in the execution chamber, and also ensuring there is no way the Nitrogen can leek into other areas at dangerously high levels, and that is a solvable engineering problem (you could simply do this by building the execution chamber as a single room building so if any gas leeks it will leek into the outside air where it will harmlessly dissipate).