Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
as much as it would be really gross looking, a head crushing device would be the most humane non-drug execution method. No brain = no suffering.
If I had to pick a method of death, assuming in my sleep at an advanced age surrounded by loving family was out of the picture, I'd go with high explosives that propagate faster than nerve conduction velocity applied to the head. That'd be a bitch to reset though.
I think that - in theory - there are situations where the death penalty would be appropriate / justifiable or even moral.
That said, in our society where we have the ability to hold individuals who are known / believed to be exceptionally dangerous to society indefinitely with essentially no chance of escape, I find the use of the death penalty dubious.
I think it would have to reach levels of almost cartoon villainy, like imprisoning the Joker or Cobra Commander, where there'd be this huge criminal / terrorist organization constantly assaulting society to work to free the criminal, and that criminal would also have to have been convicted of many capital crimes where the evidence was irrefutable. Even the I don't know if it would be moral, just effective. Maybe imprisoning Osama Bin Laden would have been a test for this, likely why taking him as a casualty and burial at sea was a favorable outcome.
as much as it would be really gross looking, a head crushing device would be the most humane non-drug execution method. No brain = no suffering.
If I had to pick a method of death, assuming in my sleep at an advanced age surrounded by loving family was out of the picture, I'd go with high explosives that propagate faster than nerve conduction velocity applied to the head. That'd be a bitch to reset though.
I think that - in theory - there are situations where the death penalty would be appropriate / justifiable or even moral.
That said, in our society where we have the ability to hold individuals who are known / believed to be exceptionally dangerous to society indefinitely with essentially no chance of escape, I find the use of the death penalty dubious.
I think it would have to reach levels of almost cartoon villainy, like imprisoning the Joker or Cobra Commander, where there'd be this huge criminal / terrorist organization constantly assaulting society to work to free the criminal, and that criminal would also have to have been convicted of many capital crimes where the evidence was irrefutable. Even the I don't know if it would be moral, just effective. Maybe imprisoning Osama Bin Laden would have been a test for this, likely why taking him as a casualty and burial at sea was a favorable outcome.
I'd say most of the appropriate / justifiable / moral situations would be closer to a 'self defense' situation than what I would consider a judicial execution.
The closest real-world example I can come up with would be a drone strike on an active, but unreachable, terrorist.
Maybe - maybe - a deserter on an isolated battlefield. I.e. execution to maintain discipline and there's no reasonable way to imprison them.
Possibly an extremely dangerous criminal somewhere that there is no way they could be adequately held - a 'Wild West' type situation. Or a person who has repeatedly escaped from even the highest security prisons and killed other prisoners / guards in their escape.
But even those are stretches and we could go on all day about moral or not. Those would, of course, be edge cases and not particularly applicable to a general discussion of the death penalty. Although - most cases where the death penalty is invoked would qualify as 'edge cases' in the first place.
Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
I agree with you. It's mostly about the PR.
I will also add that pharma companies have to keep physicians on salary for various jobs (clinical trial manager, pharmacologist, medical affairs director, etc) and many of those physicians move up into C-level executive positions. A lot of physicians believe that the death penalty violates their medical oaths and don't want to be involved with it. So there is some internal pressure within those companies to stay out of executions.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
BTW, you can put me in the @ElJeffe, et. al. camp: I'm not opposed to the death penalty in the abstract, and I can certainly think of some hypothetical situations where it might be justified, but there are too many problems with the way we wield it and we've shown that we can't be trusted with it.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
You wouldn't need a DA, we're talking civil action not criminal.
I'm not a lawyer, I can't really say specifically what the grounds could be for. I just could see it happening considering some of the other insane shit that has been thrown at companies in the courts in the past.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
I always thought no legitimate anesthesiologist will have anything to do with executions, so it ends up being amateur hour.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
They give the prisoner a barbiturate for exactly that purpose (and it complements the other drug reactions).
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I always thought no legitimate anesthesiologist will have anything to do with executions, so it ends up being amateur hour.
I was under that impression too. Still, you'd think that even amateur hour could figure out a way to kill a person painlessly and with a minimum of distress. Carbon monoxide poisoning is painless, for instance, and carbon monoxide is easily generated with household supplies (that's why this is one of the ways people kill themselves, both on purpose and on accident).
Anyway, I too am in the 'not against in principle, but many compelling situational reasons not to and no compelling situational reasons to' camp. So, a firm political no.
However, I don't believe our justice system is capable of dolling it out responsibly, as shown by the alarmingly high number of death row inmates who are being exonerated by retested/new evidence that proves their innocence.
Basically I think there should be a moratorium on the death penalty until such time as we as a species find a better way to find the guilty guilty, and the innocent innocent. because relying on the emotional responses of 12 know-nothings isn't cutting it.
This used to be my position.
At some point I came to the conclusion that the practical barriers to the death penalty would make it impossible to ever implement in a just way. We would need to be 100% certain of the person's guilt, 100% certain that they could not be rehabilitated, and 100% certain we could perform the execution in a humane way. None of those things will ever be true, even if you assume a judicial/sentencing process somehow free of all the problems the U.S. system is burdened with.
So why in the hell did I bother maintaining the 'theoretically pro-death-penalty' position? I'm not running for office, after all.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
basically our whole modern death penalty song and dance is a matter of convincing ourselves that the death penalty represents something other than what it is: the state killing somebody who it has no need to kill. Thus it has all the trappings of a fairly routine medical procedure. But very few if any actual doctors are willing to be involved in the process, so we wind up with a one-size-fits-all procedure that can be administered by a medical tech or by prison employees.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
If we're going to do it, we should just get the guy passed-out drunk and then cap him in the head.
No shitty liquor, either. Spring for the Grey Goose.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
Anesthesia is one of the highest paid specialties. What prison would go through an extra expense to their bottom line to kill someone? I'm not sure why something "simple" like over-dosing on morphine isn't considered. I say this in ignorance of any in depth knowledge of pharmacology.
I always thought no legitimate anesthesiologist will have anything to do with executions, so it ends up being amateur hour.
I was under that impression too. Still, you'd think that even amateur hour could figure out a way to kill a person painlessly and with a minimum of distress. Carbon monoxide poisoning is painless, for instance, and carbon monoxide is easily generated with household supplies (that's why this is one of the ways people kill themselves, both on purpose and on accident).
Anyway, I too am in the 'not against in principle, but many compelling situational reasons not to and no compelling situational reasons to' camp. So, a firm political no.
More or less what zagdrob said. But part of the problem here is that even painless, quick methods aren't painless or quick or effective 100% of the time.
Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
You wouldn't need a DA, we're talking civil action not criminal.
No, "Knowingly use it to kill people" is definitely something covered by criminal law, not civil. You're not going to find a civil court of action covering somebody murdering a family member. The only thing close is "wrongful death" which you're going to come nowhere near given the state sanctioning of the killing.
I'm not a lawyer, I can't really say specifically what the grounds could be for. I just could see it happening considering some of the other insane shit that has been thrown at companies in the courts in the past.
Yea, like that time McDonald's served hot coffee!
It caused third degree burns and they had been previously warned about it. That was a negligence case.
I submit that perhaps you should be careful about making statements around issues you are unfamiliar with. At least if you'd like to be taken seriously.
At some point I came to the conclusion that the practical barriers to the death penalty would make it impossible to ever implement in a just way. We would need to be 100% certain of the person's guilt, 100% certain that they could not be rehabilitated, and 100% certain we could perform the execution in a humane way. None of those things will ever be true, even if you assume a judicial/sentencing process somehow free of all the problems the U.S. system is burdened with.
The cases in which I imagine it might be justified are ones in which:
1) There is extreme privation, such that the state just doesn't have the resources to detain people. During a famine, in a frontier town or small nomadic group, there may simply not be enough food to keep prisoners, enough able-bodied citizens to guard them, or anywhere to house them. This isn't really a worry in modern America, but it could certainly be a real worry in some other situation, and as such may warrant the death penalty as a matter of necessity.
2) The person will be dangerous even when imprisoned. So, for instance, leaders of organized crime in a sufficiently corrupt state may be effectively un-imprisonable, insofar as they are able to direct their organizations even from within prison. Alternately, as long as the Tsars were actually alive, there was a danger that the whites would organize a counter-revolution to re-install them. Again, this has nothing to do with someone who smoked crack and shot up a convenience store, but it's nonetheless a reason the state could need to execute someone.
Neither of these cases require 100% certainty of either guilt or of humane execution. As such, they're not really cases where execution is any better than it is here and now--rather, they're cases where the alternatives are just that much worse. I'm not against the death penalty in principle because I think that such cases exist: where it's bad, but the other options may all be worse. But as before, they bear little relevance to criminal justice as practiced in a wealthy, stable Democracy like America.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
Anesthesia is one of the highest paid specialties. What prison would go through an extra expense to their bottom line to kill someone? I'm not sure why something "simple" like over-dosing on morphine isn't considered. I say this in ignorance of any in depth knowledge of pharmacology.
This is my question as well. My understanding is that morphine overdose is where you just drift into unconsciousness so deeply until even you autonomic breathing impulses are suppressed.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
A real anesthesiologist calculates a dose curve based on your body weight, takes into account other complicating factors (such as any other medications you're on or any metabolic disorders), and monitors your vitals while adjusting the dosage.
The Chapman protocol and other similar protocols are designed to be operating by idiots, basically. But you know what they say about making something idiot-proof: make anything idiot-proof and nature will design a better idiot. One of the more well-known injection fuckups happened recently because they injected the formula into somebody's muscle instead of his vein.
Another recent fuckup happened because the prison bought the ingredients from one of those poorly-regulated compounding pharmacies I mentioned above, and the formula was contaminated.
There's been some concern that even with the Chapman protocol, some of the prisoners might have been paralyzed, not actually asleep. If that was true - and we'll never know for sure unless the afterlife is real - they were awake and in pain during their deaths, but simply couldn't move or speak and appeared to be asleep to the untrained.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
If we're going to do it, we should just get the guy passed-out drunk and then cap him in the head.
No shitty liquor, either. Spring for the Grey Goose.
Hell, it's how I'd like to go.
I'd worry, though, about accommodating people who strongly prefer to keep their bodies intact for e.g. viewing at a funeral, or religious burials, or whatever.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I always thought no legitimate anesthesiologist will have anything to do with executions, so it ends up being amateur hour.
I was under that impression too. Still, you'd think that even amateur hour could figure out a way to kill a person painlessly and with a minimum of distress. Carbon monoxide poisoning is painless, for instance, and carbon monoxide is easily generated with household supplies (that's why this is one of the ways people kill themselves, both on purpose and on accident).
Anyway, I too am in the 'not against in principle, but many compelling situational reasons not to and no compelling situational reasons to' camp. So, a firm political no.
More or less what zagdrob said. But part of the problem here is that even painless, quick methods aren't painless or quick or effective 100% of the time.
So I'm not exactly a drug expert, but the difficulty of dealing with lethal injection confuses me. If I go in for an operation, I get put under. I have no awareness of anything that's going on. A doctor can cut a hole in my chest and remove my heart and I will be none the wiser. So why can't we use this sort of general anesthetic and then dose the person with whatever fatal stuff we want to use?
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
A real anesthesiologist calculates a dose curve based on your body weight, takes into account other complicating factors (such as any other medications you're on or any metabolic disorders), and monitors your vitals while adjusting the dosage.
The Chapman protocol and other similar protocols are designed to be operating by idiots, basically. But you know what they say about making something idiot-proof: make anything idiot-proof and nature will design a better idiot. One of the more well-known injection fuckups happened recently because they injected the formula into somebody's muscle instead of his vein.
Another recent fuckup happened because the prison bought the ingredients from one of those poorly-regulated compounding pharmacies I mentioned above, and the formula was contaminated.
There's been some concern that even with the Chapman protocol, some of the prisoners might have been paralyzed, not actually asleep. If that was true - and we'll never know for sure unless the afterlife is real - they were awake and in pain during their deaths, but simply couldn't move or speak and appeared to be asleep to the untrained.
Horrifying, and the worst part is that a lot of pro-death penalty people would consider this a feature, not a bug.
Well, okay. I agree that it is fair to say that in the hypothetical case of the breakdown of the modern state we would need to re-evaluate the implementation of all sorts of social policy.
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Hmm. That's more complicated than I thought, then. Nonetheless, I'm confident my next guess will be perfectly accurate and adequate.
This is one of those areas where peoples' instincts about poisoning don't really mesh with the reality.
A lot of poisons are painful and poisoning death can be protracted. A poison might cause painful heart convulsions, or lung convulsions, or seizures.
Poisons don't always act consistently.
Take morphine for instance. Morphine by itself causes sedation, hypotension, and pulmonary depression. But the sedation isn't always strong enough to actually keep somebody asleep. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And if it isn't, you have somebody who is either suffocating, or having a seizure, or both, while they die.
And morphine, especially at very high doses, can cause paradoxical agitation and increased sensitivity to pain. It's rare, but it happens.
In September, Ohio officials announced that they had run out of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital and would switch to a combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller similar to morphine.
Mr. McGuire was given midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a powerful analgesic derived from morphine, just before 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, the first time that any state has used that combination. The drugs were selected by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction after the state’s supply of pentobarbital expired in 2009, said JoEllen Smith, the department’s spokeswoman. A federal court had approved their use, she said.
A reporter for The Columbus Dispatch, one of the witnesses at the execution, described Mr. McGuire as struggling, gasping loudly, snorting and making choking noises for nearly 10 minutes before falling silent and being declared dead a few minutes later. An Associated Press report described him as snorting loudly and making snoring noises, but did not say he struggled or made choking sounds.
“Whether there were choking sounds or it was just snorting, the execution didn’t go the way it was supposed to go,” said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and an expert in lethal injection cases. “Usually, lethal injection takes about four or five minutes, if done properly.”
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Lethal morphine overdoses in the hospital usually involve multiple administrations over the course of a few hours. Somebody on a miscalibrated drip, for instance.
If we're expecting a lethal injection to take a few minutes like putting down a sick dog, welp...
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Just figure out what the like the most strung out heroin user can handle. And give them 10x that. It's an experience so pleasurable that people ruin their lives trying to get it over and over.
Lethal morphine overdoses in the hospital usually involve multiple administrations over the course of a few hours. Somebody on a miscalibrated drip, for instance.
If we're expecting a lethal injection to take a few minutes like putting down a sick dog, welp...
Thanks for the info up above, even if it was horrific.
I morbidly wonder how much worse we make things because we don't want to lose the drama of the situation. I know that's not what they would call it but I fail to see the problem with an execution taking 8 hours.
Just figure out what the like the most strung out heroin user can handle. And give them 10x that. It's an experience so pleasurable that people ruin their lives trying to get it over and over.
Literally two posts up it was explained why that doesn't work.
Seriously though, I've had pets put to sleep, and it always seemed like it was relatively quick and painless. Is there some reason that the same cocktail wouldn't / can't be used on humans? If you're going to kill people with lethal injection, that seems like a lot better way to go then these shitty cocktails they are using.
Of course, I imagine that you still need FDA approval to ironically make sure the drugs are safe / effective. And it's not like you can really do an FDA approved clinical trial.
It's really fucked up when you think about it...it almost would make more sense to use hanging / firing squad than what we're using. At least, more internally consistent.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Just figure out what the like the most strung out heroin user can handle. And give them 10x that. It's an experience so pleasurable that people ruin their lives trying to get it over and over.
Right but such a massive heroin overdose is absolutely not pleasurable.
Just figure out what the like the most strung out heroin user can handle. And give them 10x that. It's an experience so pleasurable that people ruin their lives trying to get it over and over.
Literally two posts up it was explained why that doesn't work.
Seriously though, I've had pets put to sleep, and it always seemed like it was relatively quick and painless. Is there some reason that the same cocktail wouldn't / can't be used on humans? If you're going to kill people with lethal injection, that seems like a lot better way to go then these shitty cocktails they are using.
Of course, I imagine that you still need FDA approval to ironically make sure the drugs are safe / effective. And it's not like you can really do an FDA approved clinical trial.
It's really fucked up when you think about it...it almost would make more sense to use hanging / firing squad than what we're using. At least, more internally consistent.
Pretty sure its the same drug that they refuse to sell to prisons for executions.
The vast majority of drugs used on animals are just lower dosage versions of human drugs.
Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
You wouldn't need a DA, we're talking civil action not criminal.
No, "Knowingly use it to kill people" is definitely something covered by criminal law, not civil. You're not going to find a civil court of action covering somebody murdering a family member. The only thing close is "wrongful death" which you're going to come nowhere near given the state sanctioning of the killing.
I'm not a lawyer, I can't really say specifically what the grounds could be for. I just could see it happening considering some of the other insane shit that has been thrown at companies in the courts in the past.
Yea, like that time McDonald's served hot coffee!
It caused third degree burns and they had been previously warned about it. That was a negligence case.
I submit that perhaps you should be careful about making statements around issues you are unfamiliar with. At least if you'd like to be taken seriously.
And I would submit to you that you do not quote out of context when making counter arguments. I never said anything about "Knowingly use it to kill people" that was from a previous poster and I discarded it as being irrelevant. You do not sue in criminal court, that is done is civil court and was the basis of the original post (and hence why you do not need a DA's interest).
Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
You wouldn't need a DA, we're talking civil action not criminal.
No, "Knowingly use it to kill people" is definitely something covered by criminal law, not civil. You're not going to find a civil court of action covering somebody murdering a family member. The only thing close is "wrongful death" which you're going to come nowhere near given the state sanctioning of the killing.
I'm not a lawyer, I can't really say specifically what the grounds could be for. I just could see it happening considering some of the other insane shit that has been thrown at companies in the courts in the past.
Yea, like that time McDonald's served hot coffee!
It caused third degree burns and they had been previously warned about it. That was a negligence case.
I submit that perhaps you should be careful about making statements around issues you are unfamiliar with. At least if you'd like to be taken seriously.
And I would submit to you that you do not quote out of context when making counter arguments. I never said anything about "Knowingly use it to kill people" that was from a previous poster and I discarded it as being irrelevant. You do not sue in criminal court, that is done is civil court and was the basis of the original post (and hence why you do not need a DA's interest).
Litigation does not require one to be reasonable. Pharmaceutical companies get sued all the time for people who are killed or even just inconvenienced by their products, never mind selling the product to an agency they know will use it to kill people (albeit legally, but perhaps not in the state or country the company is based in).
I did rephrase it to make the sentence work and how I did was perhaps unclear. "Selling it knowing it will be used to kill people" would perhaps be fairer and more in line with the bolded that you wrote in response to my earlier post. It is a clearer wording of what I intended.
It is still nowhere close to a reasonable cause of action against the manufacturer. "Wrongful Death" generally requires negligent or wrongful acts. Selling things to government agencies empowered by law to make use of them isn't going to make that bar. If they don't kill as expected it's tough to get them on "Emotional Distress" as they come with all kinds of warning to not use them as they're being used.
Those are things you might be able to sue the prison for but you'd have a high bar to clear with them specifically empowered by statute to take those actions.
The EU countries cannot provide the drugs by law, the rest just do not want to be sued. Let's not fool ourselves in thinking the drug companies do this for some noble purpose.
It is highly unlikely that any drug manufacturer would ever have to seriously defend a wrongful death lawsuit based on the manufacturing of lethal injection drugs, at least from victims or their families.* There's too much attenuation between the manufacturing and the State's implementation of the injection.
*If a State brought a lawsuit, alleging discrepancies between the drugs provided and what was contracted for, then there could be a case.
I suspect the issues would involve the what if there is a shortage of a one or more life-saving drugs, while the company is devoting resources towards making drugs for executions. I don't know if there would be any legal issues, but I could imagine that would be a serious blow to a company's PR.
And just because there isn't any real standing, doesn't mean they want to pay someone to appear at the civil court case to look at Judge Judy and say "Really, Your Honor?".
Of if the state is sued in a wrongful death because they are shit at determining guilt, the drug company that sold the state the drugs could also be named in the suit, because they should reasonably know the state is shit at determining guilt.
Just figure out what the like the most strung out heroin user can handle. And give them 10x that. It's an experience so pleasurable that people ruin their lives trying to get it over and over.
Literally two posts up it was explained why that doesn't work.
Seriously though, I've had pets put to sleep, and it always seemed like it was relatively quick and painless. Is there some reason that the same cocktail wouldn't / can't be used on humans? If you're going to kill people with lethal injection, that seems like a lot better way to go then these shitty cocktails they are using.
Of course, I imagine that you still need FDA approval to ironically make sure the drugs are safe / effective. And it's not like you can really do an FDA approved clinical trial.
It's really fucked up when you think about it...it almost would make more sense to use hanging / firing squad than what we're using. At least, more internally consistent.
We had to put one of our dogs down a few months ago.
If we're going to do it, we should just get the guy passed-out drunk and then cap him in the head.
No shitty liquor, either. Spring for the Grey Goose.
I remember reading a story a while back, supposedly about how executions were handled in the Soviet empire. The story went that when a man was sentenced to death (through secret tribunal, naturally), he was not notified. Instead, he was told that the charges against him had been dismissed, that he was free to go, and that his family was waiting outside to pick him up. He would be led to a room with his belongings where he was allowed to change out of his prison scrubs. Then, while his back was turned, the guard would draw his pistol and shoot him in the back of the head.
This was told as an example of how brutal and savage the Soviet union could be, but to me it seems oddly more just than anything we do. When we execute someone, we go through a long drawn-out ritual, parading the accused through a series of courtrooms and cameras, through ceremonial last meals, leading up to a cold-blooded ritualized murder in front of cameras. It might as well have been designed to cause as much anxiety and panic as possible. It speaks to who we are as a people, and I like to think that we are better than that.
I'm personally not a fan of the surprise execution either. I would want to know I was going to die. Sure, I wouldn't want it agonizingly drawn out, but...
Anyway, it's a moot point since I don't think we are capable of fulfilling the moral requirements necessary to justify either method of implementation.
Yeah, I used to be more supportive of the death penalty, but even then, I felt it need to have strict requirements (no cognitive issues - aka mental disability or brain still developing, needed to have been more than one murder, needed proof that it was planned and not in a fit of passion, that the perpetrator did it for a really shitty reason - sadistic shitheel, psychopath, bigoted shitheel, easy way to make money/get something they wanted). As others have said, we as a society and a species really fucking suck at determining guild and there were, and still is, too many innocent people getting convicted for crimes they didn't commit and our country has a really shitty habit of going overboard, when someone is guilty of a crime (aka we've got to be hard on crime, so we're going to fucking destroy one's future over the most petty things and be shocked when that results in one being a professional criminal - even worse when factoring in the number of influential people that get away with shit, or get much more lenient treatment because they are both wealthy and rich).
Then throw in zagdrop's comment about how in this day and age we can pretty much make it so difficult to escape from supermax, that it might as well be considered impossible for 99.999999% of criminals. Plus, we could easily find the money to better fund those supermax prisons and make it even harder to escape from them. That could be accomplished by changing how we handle the criminal justice system. We could stop wasting money on prosecuting people for stupid shit, going overboard with punishments, emphasizing the reform expect instead of punishment and removing the death penalty, which removes the need to have so many appeals against death sentences that cost money.
Posts
You still need a legal basis for suit. Would they argue Negligence? Breach of Contract? Libel?
I have absolutely no idea what you think they would have grounds for suit for.
Shit, even if the drugs led to horrible suffering that's hard to sue for because they're being used contrary to their indicated use.
Edit: And the "Knowingly use it to kill people" is a non-starter since that'd have to be brought by the state that was doing the killing. That is a can of worms that no DA in the country is going to touch with a ten foot pole. Killing people isn't illegal, murder/manslaughter is.
If I had to pick a method of death, assuming in my sleep at an advanced age surrounded by loving family was out of the picture, I'd go with high explosives that propagate faster than nerve conduction velocity applied to the head. That'd be a bitch to reset though.
I think it would have to reach levels of almost cartoon villainy, like imprisoning the Joker or Cobra Commander, where there'd be this huge criminal / terrorist organization constantly assaulting society to work to free the criminal, and that criminal would also have to have been convicted of many capital crimes where the evidence was irrefutable. Even the I don't know if it would be moral, just effective. Maybe imprisoning Osama Bin Laden would have been a test for this, likely why taking him as a casualty and burial at sea was a favorable outcome.
I'd say most of the appropriate / justifiable / moral situations would be closer to a 'self defense' situation than what I would consider a judicial execution.
The closest real-world example I can come up with would be a drone strike on an active, but unreachable, terrorist.
Maybe - maybe - a deserter on an isolated battlefield. I.e. execution to maintain discipline and there's no reasonable way to imprison them.
Possibly an extremely dangerous criminal somewhere that there is no way they could be adequately held - a 'Wild West' type situation. Or a person who has repeatedly escaped from even the highest security prisons and killed other prisoners / guards in their escape.
But even those are stretches and we could go on all day about moral or not. Those would, of course, be edge cases and not particularly applicable to a general discussion of the death penalty. Although - most cases where the death penalty is invoked would qualify as 'edge cases' in the first place.
I agree with you. It's mostly about the PR.
I will also add that pharma companies have to keep physicians on salary for various jobs (clinical trial manager, pharmacologist, medical affairs director, etc) and many of those physicians move up into C-level executive positions. A lot of physicians believe that the death penalty violates their medical oaths and don't want to be involved with it. So there is some internal pressure within those companies to stay out of executions.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You wouldn't need a DA, we're talking civil action not criminal.
I'm not a lawyer, I can't really say specifically what the grounds could be for. I just could see it happening considering some of the other insane shit that has been thrown at companies in the courts in the past.
I basically don't understand why "the inmate suffered horrible agony during the process" is a thing that happens. Is it something about how general anesthesia works, and it's not actually compatible with fatal doses of the requisite drugs? Is it just "too expensive" to do it properly? Is it just that nobody gives a shit?
I always thought no legitimate anesthesiologist will have anything to do with executions, so it ends up being amateur hour.
They give the prisoner a barbiturate for exactly that purpose (and it complements the other drug reactions).
I was under that impression too. Still, you'd think that even amateur hour could figure out a way to kill a person painlessly and with a minimum of distress. Carbon monoxide poisoning is painless, for instance, and carbon monoxide is easily generated with household supplies (that's why this is one of the ways people kill themselves, both on purpose and on accident).
Anyway, I too am in the 'not against in principle, but many compelling situational reasons not to and no compelling situational reasons to' camp. So, a firm political no.
This used to be my position.
At some point I came to the conclusion that the practical barriers to the death penalty would make it impossible to ever implement in a just way. We would need to be 100% certain of the person's guilt, 100% certain that they could not be rehabilitated, and 100% certain we could perform the execution in a humane way. None of those things will ever be true, even if you assume a judicial/sentencing process somehow free of all the problems the U.S. system is burdened with.
So why in the hell did I bother maintaining the 'theoretically pro-death-penalty' position? I'm not running for office, after all.
basically our whole modern death penalty song and dance is a matter of convincing ourselves that the death penalty represents something other than what it is: the state killing somebody who it has no need to kill. Thus it has all the trappings of a fairly routine medical procedure. But very few if any actual doctors are willing to be involved in the process, so we wind up with a one-size-fits-all procedure that can be administered by a medical tech or by prison employees.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
No shitty liquor, either. Spring for the Grey Goose.
Anesthesia is one of the highest paid specialties. What prison would go through an extra expense to their bottom line to kill someone? I'm not sure why something "simple" like over-dosing on morphine isn't considered. I say this in ignorance of any in depth knowledge of pharmacology.
More or less what zagdrob said. But part of the problem here is that even painless, quick methods aren't painless or quick or effective 100% of the time.
Carbon monoxide poisoning, for instance, isn't painless unless you're already deeply asleep.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
No, "Knowingly use it to kill people" is definitely something covered by criminal law, not civil. You're not going to find a civil court of action covering somebody murdering a family member. The only thing close is "wrongful death" which you're going to come nowhere near given the state sanctioning of the killing.
Yea, like that time McDonald's served hot coffee!
I submit that perhaps you should be careful about making statements around issues you are unfamiliar with. At least if you'd like to be taken seriously.
The cases in which I imagine it might be justified are ones in which:
1) There is extreme privation, such that the state just doesn't have the resources to detain people. During a famine, in a frontier town or small nomadic group, there may simply not be enough food to keep prisoners, enough able-bodied citizens to guard them, or anywhere to house them. This isn't really a worry in modern America, but it could certainly be a real worry in some other situation, and as such may warrant the death penalty as a matter of necessity.
2) The person will be dangerous even when imprisoned. So, for instance, leaders of organized crime in a sufficiently corrupt state may be effectively un-imprisonable, insofar as they are able to direct their organizations even from within prison. Alternately, as long as the Tsars were actually alive, there was a danger that the whites would organize a counter-revolution to re-install them. Again, this has nothing to do with someone who smoked crack and shot up a convenience store, but it's nonetheless a reason the state could need to execute someone.
Neither of these cases require 100% certainty of either guilt or of humane execution. As such, they're not really cases where execution is any better than it is here and now--rather, they're cases where the alternatives are just that much worse. I'm not against the death penalty in principle because I think that such cases exist: where it's bad, but the other options may all be worse. But as before, they bear little relevance to criminal justice as practiced in a wealthy, stable Democracy like America.
This is my question as well. My understanding is that morphine overdose is where you just drift into unconsciousness so deeply until even you autonomic breathing impulses are suppressed.
A real anesthesiologist calculates a dose curve based on your body weight, takes into account other complicating factors (such as any other medications you're on or any metabolic disorders), and monitors your vitals while adjusting the dosage.
The Chapman protocol and other similar protocols are designed to be operating by idiots, basically. But you know what they say about making something idiot-proof: make anything idiot-proof and nature will design a better idiot. One of the more well-known injection fuckups happened recently because they injected the formula into somebody's muscle instead of his vein.
Another recent fuckup happened because the prison bought the ingredients from one of those poorly-regulated compounding pharmacies I mentioned above, and the formula was contaminated.
There's been some concern that even with the Chapman protocol, some of the prisoners might have been paralyzed, not actually asleep. If that was true - and we'll never know for sure unless the afterlife is real - they were awake and in pain during their deaths, but simply couldn't move or speak and appeared to be asleep to the untrained.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Hell, it's how I'd like to go.
I'd worry, though, about accommodating people who strongly prefer to keep their bodies intact for e.g. viewing at a funeral, or religious burials, or whatever.
Hmm. That's more complicated than I thought, then. Nonetheless, I'm confident my next guess will be perfectly accurate and adequate.
:bzz
Horrifying, and the worst part is that a lot of pro-death penalty people would consider this a feature, not a bug.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
This is one of those areas where peoples' instincts about poisoning don't really mesh with the reality.
A lot of poisons are painful and poisoning death can be protracted. A poison might cause painful heart convulsions, or lung convulsions, or seizures.
Poisons don't always act consistently.
Take morphine for instance. Morphine by itself causes sedation, hypotension, and pulmonary depression. But the sedation isn't always strong enough to actually keep somebody asleep. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And if it isn't, you have somebody who is either suffocating, or having a seizure, or both, while they die.
And morphine, especially at very high doses, can cause paradoxical agitation and increased sensitivity to pain. It's rare, but it happens.
The states that have pondered morphine or related opioids are pairing them with a sedative to ensure the 'patient' stays asleep. Example: http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/17/nation/la-na-execution-drugs-20140118
Sounds like that should work, right? lolnope
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/us/ohio-execution-using-untested-drug-cocktail-renews-the-debate-over-lethal-injections.html
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If we're expecting a lethal injection to take a few minutes like putting down a sick dog, welp...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Thanks for the info up above, even if it was horrific.
I morbidly wonder how much worse we make things because we don't want to lose the drama of the situation. I know that's not what they would call it but I fail to see the problem with an execution taking 8 hours.
Literally two posts up it was explained why that doesn't work.
Seriously though, I've had pets put to sleep, and it always seemed like it was relatively quick and painless. Is there some reason that the same cocktail wouldn't / can't be used on humans? If you're going to kill people with lethal injection, that seems like a lot better way to go then these shitty cocktails they are using.
Of course, I imagine that you still need FDA approval to ironically make sure the drugs are safe / effective. And it's not like you can really do an FDA approved clinical trial.
It's really fucked up when you think about it...it almost would make more sense to use hanging / firing squad than what we're using. At least, more internally consistent.
Right but such a massive heroin overdose is absolutely not pleasurable.
Pretty sure its the same drug that they refuse to sell to prisons for executions.
The vast majority of drugs used on animals are just lower dosage versions of human drugs.
And I would submit to you that you do not quote out of context when making counter arguments. I never said anything about "Knowingly use it to kill people" that was from a previous poster and I discarded it as being irrelevant. You do not sue in criminal court, that is done is civil court and was the basis of the original post (and hence why you do not need a DA's interest).
I was referencing the bolded below:
I did rephrase it to make the sentence work and how I did was perhaps unclear. "Selling it knowing it will be used to kill people" would perhaps be fairer and more in line with the bolded that you wrote in response to my earlier post. It is a clearer wording of what I intended.
It is still nowhere close to a reasonable cause of action against the manufacturer. "Wrongful Death" generally requires negligent or wrongful acts. Selling things to government agencies empowered by law to make use of them isn't going to make that bar. If they don't kill as expected it's tough to get them on "Emotional Distress" as they come with all kinds of warning to not use them as they're being used.
Those are things you might be able to sue the prison for but you'd have a high bar to clear with them specifically empowered by statute to take those actions.
It is highly unlikely that any drug manufacturer would ever have to seriously defend a wrongful death lawsuit based on the manufacturing of lethal injection drugs, at least from victims or their families.* There's too much attenuation between the manufacturing and the State's implementation of the injection.
*If a State brought a lawsuit, alleging discrepancies between the drugs provided and what was contracted for, then there could be a case.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
MWO: Adamski
We had to put one of our dogs down a few months ago.
The sedative didn't work.
I remember reading a story a while back, supposedly about how executions were handled in the Soviet empire. The story went that when a man was sentenced to death (through secret tribunal, naturally), he was not notified. Instead, he was told that the charges against him had been dismissed, that he was free to go, and that his family was waiting outside to pick him up. He would be led to a room with his belongings where he was allowed to change out of his prison scrubs. Then, while his back was turned, the guard would draw his pistol and shoot him in the back of the head.
This was told as an example of how brutal and savage the Soviet union could be, but to me it seems oddly more just than anything we do. When we execute someone, we go through a long drawn-out ritual, parading the accused through a series of courtrooms and cameras, through ceremonial last meals, leading up to a cold-blooded ritualized murder in front of cameras. It might as well have been designed to cause as much anxiety and panic as possible. It speaks to who we are as a people, and I like to think that we are better than that.
Anyway, it's a moot point since I don't think we are capable of fulfilling the moral requirements necessary to justify either method of implementation.
Then throw in zagdrop's comment about how in this day and age we can pretty much make it so difficult to escape from supermax, that it might as well be considered impossible for 99.999999% of criminals. Plus, we could easily find the money to better fund those supermax prisons and make it even harder to escape from them. That could be accomplished by changing how we handle the criminal justice system. We could stop wasting money on prosecuting people for stupid shit, going overboard with punishments, emphasizing the reform expect instead of punishment and removing the death penalty, which removes the need to have so many appeals against death sentences that cost money.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.