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Tennessee and Old Sparky; a children's [Death Penalty] Thread
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GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered User regular
GNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered User regular
http://time.com/57066/tennessee-senate-electric-chair-capital-punishment-execution/?hpt=hp_t2
I assume being shot by a firing squad is their next choice if for some reason the electrical chair doesn't work.
Edit: Gonna turn this thread into a full out discussion about the death penalty because why not. I can't find a recent thread about it.
My take, it's a barbaric sentence that's outlived its usefulness. I mean really the entire prison system is a sack of shit in America but the states that use it are extra shitty when it comes to prisons.
Texas used to hold top spot in my books when it came to shit hole prisons that produce more criminals than actually go in but Tennessee just took that prize with this move.
Tennessee Senators overwhelming voted on Wednesday to reinstate the electric chair to execute capital inmates in the event that the state is unable to procure the necessary chemicals to perform lethal injections.
I assume being shot by a firing squad is their next choice if for some reason the electrical chair doesn't work.
Edit: Gonna turn this thread into a full out discussion about the death penalty because why not. I can't find a recent thread about it.
My take, it's a barbaric sentence that's outlived its usefulness. I mean really the entire prison system is a sack of shit in America but the states that use it are extra shitty when it comes to prisons.
Texas used to hold top spot in my books when it came to shit hole prisons that produce more criminals than actually go in but Tennessee just took that prize with this move.
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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.
(Note that I was somewhat pleased to find this thread wasn't literally about Tennessee executing children.)
You guys know about the guy in Japan who was on death row for 45 years, and is now being exonerated?
Reinstating the electric chair is insane. You may as well be dousing someone in gasoline and lighting them on fire - i don't care how many children someone killed, it's not justice to electrocute them to death. The legal system is supposed to be an effort to reform the worst parts of ourselves, not an effort to mirror them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?_r=0
Just throwing it out there as a general point.
On the more specific OP topic, why are they having such trouble finding these drugs?
Drug companies generally don't want to be known for providing drugs used in executions, and they're generally not designed for that purpose.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Exactly this. Nobody wants to be known for selling drugs for executions.
I can expound a little though, because I find this whole situation darkly humorous.
Lethal injections in the US are done using a three drug protocol developed by forensic physician Jay Chapman in 1977 in response to the Gary Gilmore execution.
Keep in mind that at the time there was no known reliable drug cocktail for the euthanization of humans, and this isn't exactly something you can set up clinical trials for. Chapman used his experience examining poisoning deaths to come up with a cocktail. Chapman himself has since said that the cocktail is too variable and needs to be changed.
The primary anesthetic used in the Chapman protocol is sodium thiopental. It is no longer manufactured in the US. The last US manufacturer was the pharma company Hospira, who said this:
Sodium thiopental has a legitimate use as an inexpensive general anesthetic for surgery or trauma, and is therefore still manufactured in Europe. However, the EU bans the export of sodium thiopental to the US, specifically because they don't want us killing people with it:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/21/drug-maker-discontinues-key-death-penalty-drug
Some states have switched to different, unproven cocktails. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
In addition to the problem of which drugs?, there's a second problem of where do we get the drugs? Most of these drugs are either surgical anesthetics or controlled substances - which means it is not exactly trivial to obtain them. You can't just buy propofol at the neighborhood apothecary, let alone in the dosages necessary to kill a human being.
Legitimate drug suppliers (of the type that sell drugs to hospitals) are often uneasy, for obvious reasons, to sell execution drugs to correctional facilities. This has led the states buying those drugs to turn to less-stringently-licensed pharmacies. Of course, pharmacies don't really want to be associated with lethal injections, so they aren't really willing to just ship a bunch of surgical anesthetics to State Prison, 123 Capital Row, Prisontown, Missouri.
My favorite part about this whole shitshow?
When it came to light that the Missouri Department of Corrections was sending people across state lines to purchase the drugs with cash: http://themissouritimes.com/8173/doc-hearing-shows-legislative-action-executions-likely/
We live in a nation where you can be arrested and put into prison for buying marijuana with cash and driving it across state lines, while cops themselves buy pentobarbital with cash and drive it across state lines.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Also, some of the key drugs are manufactured in Europe, and there are laws against selling them with the knowledge they will be used for execution.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
For the same reason we turned to a doctor for the cocktail in the first place (granted, one who mostly dealt with already dead people, but nevermind that!): we want to disguise the practice as something medical in nature.
Cyanide (and other fast-acting poisons or painless poisons (well, as far as we know), like carbon monoxide) is strictly non-medical in nature: that's stuff you procure from a munitions warehouse or pest control agency, not a clinic, so the disguise kind of falls apart.
Amongst other things, cyanide is staggeringly dangerous to handle in its lethal form. Poison gasses will happily diffuse through anything, and low level exposure is still dangerous.
It's also not necessarily a quick death.
Basically, no chemist will make it for you so you can kill some people with it. If you screw up and don't make enough, then how do you get into the room to reset? And afterwards how do you purge the room to be safe again?
This would all involve expense, which ironically people are very much opposed to when it comes to state planned and orchestrated executions of prisoners.
basically there's no point except revenge
It is not painless, and it is not necessarily fast. The state of California won't use it because it is considered cruel.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Some people seem to think that the strength of one's virtue may be measured by the intensity of your hatred towards evil.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
whole justice system be fucked
When a problem crops-up, there's always a group of people who insist that the solution to the problem is to start killing trouble-makers. Sometimes, we end-up listening to those people. When this high-stakes approach doesn't bear any fruit, we don't want to say that we killed people out of anger & stupidity, so we tend to double-down and say, "Well, obviously we just haven't killed enough trouble-makers yet. Eventually we'll get 'em all!"
And so it goes.
It's easy for most of the public to just shrug at best, because with the death penalty you're usually dealing with extremely unsympathetic victims (the kid who shot-up Giffords, for example, whom everyone here - including yourself and @Feral - said at the time that you gave no shits about having executed should that be his fate), and since at a fundamental level nobody cares about the average death row inmate, the system that processes them as thing to be disposed of won't change.
Anyway to get on the actual train of this thread, if we are gonna have the death penalty hanging around, you would think they'd seek out the more humane / least painful and/or agonizing means. People who put value in "let them suffer!" are probably fucked in the head. Not that anyone (here or in Tennessee's legislature) have expressed that. But I imagine constituents making that an argument. "Criminals are cruel people, so why comfort them?" (the answer is because the country is partly predicated on being above barbarism)
The electric chair just screams dated cruelty. Good grief. So let me ask the educated folks here - the stipulation is that this is for the event of injection stuffs not being acquired. Does that include "we just decided not to buy it," or is it absolute-all-odds-prevented-acquisition only? Edit - Derp, what I meant to ask is what can prevent the acquisition of the chemicals?
Presumably it would cover any and every reason, including, "This one really deserves it," because the reinstatement doesn't come with any actual strings attached - the drugs are just an excuse (although the shortages are a real issue).
All the effort they're spending on trying to kill people could instead be spent on trying to save people.
No, no - one day we'll kill all of the bad people, and it'll have been worth it! You'll see!
In terms of methods of execution, the electric chair is quite barbaric, and really, 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.
@Yall Feral answered your question from the other thread in detail above. TL;DR is the people who make life saving medicines are not real cool with them being used to kill people.
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. That's not even considering the proven issues with wrongful convictions / railroading, or the huge reluctance of the legal system to reexamine or audit cases where the death penalty has been applied to potentially improve the process. I mean, spending years in prison is certainly no picnic, but it's not 'final' like the death penalty.
Add in the massively increased costs vs. simple imprisonment, the fact that we seemingly can't come up with a humane technique, the disparities in application across class / race / intelligence levels, and the fact that the death penalty hasn't been shown to deter most crime shows that it simply has no place in modern society.
The practical concerns alone make, as Jeffe said, any discussion about the moral issues pretty much moot.
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.
At the very best, we're supporting a faulty system that has been shown to endanger innocent lives and made costly mistakes.
At the very worst, on top of it, it's an inefectual system, both as deterance and cost/benefit, and only serves as revenge.
Isn't it supposed to kill a person quickly If done right by professional. By snapping their neck and killing them instantly.
I understand that done badly it becomes a horrible slow way to die, but that's why I used the words "done right by a professional".
You would think the US would be all over hanging, what with its Old West connotations(and Jim Crow hush).
But as others have pointed out, our ability to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt those said people is rather suspect, or has been in the past. Till we can sort that mess out, it is pretty irresponsible to use this form of punishment.
I think that having one person responsible for sorting the hanging out would be a job nobody would want to take. Same with being the guy to shoot somebody in the back of the head; firing squads were told that one of them had a blank round, for example, so that each member could console themselves that they personally might not have shot the guy.
Firing squad Jun 18, 2010 Utah Ronnie Lee Gardner
Lethal gas Mar 3, 1999 Arizona Walter LaGrand[92]
Hanging Jan 25, 1996 Delaware William Bailey
Last use of certain execution methods in the U.S. per Wikipedia. That's a lot more recently than I would have expected.
Firing squad Jun 18, 2010 Utah Ronnie Lee Gardner
Lethal gas Mar 3, 1999 Arizona Walter LaGrand[92]
Hanging Jan 25, 1996 Delaware William Bailey
Last use of certain execution methonds in Per Wikipedia. That's a lot more recently than I would have expected.
Suits aren't the issue. Can you name any reasonable grounds for the basis of such a suit?
If you want to be cynical go with it's not worth the potential PR fallout, which again ties into the whole horrible nature of the thing.
I don't disagree with your premise. There are some people who are simply too dangerous to remain in society.
In a society that doesn't have the capacity to segregate those people from society, there is a legitimate argument that the society would have the justification and be morally in the right to execute those people. There is an argument to be made that there is a moral obligation - in that case - to execute that individual in the most humane manner possible. I'm not sure that's the case, but I'd certainly agree it's justifiable.
That doesn't apply to our society which has the ability to incarcerate those individuals indefinitely with essentially no chance of escape. Supermax, if properly executed with 24/7 monitoring, is close enough to inescapable to say it's inescapable. It's not really that different than death row where many inmates live out good chunks of their sentences before (possibly) being executed.
So, even if we could determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone falls into the 'irredeemable dangerous person whose only aim is to cause harm' - and has no potential to be otherwise in the future - that's still not moral justification for executing them.
I disagree with the "whole horrible nature of the thing" part, but that is a whole different argument.
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).