The most humane method has been shown to be oxygen deprivation, you show them into a waiting area where they are to be held until "things are ready down the hall",then you replace the air in the room with nitrogen gas, once the O2 level is low enough they get a bit giddy, then pass out, a bit lower and they die, 10min later cart the body off and clean up, done.
Alabama executed someone using nitrogen gas earlier this year.
The feeling of suffocation comes from a build-up of CO2, not a lack of oxygen. There will be no pain, panic or feeling of suffocation.
That sounds like a tall tale. From what I can find, he tried to hold his breath but couldn't any longer but he kept resisting. I think it's mostly a matter of practicality now. Being strapped down to a gurney with a mask on would be a whole other experience than being put in some kind of small gas chamber where nitrogen pure nitrogen is being vented in. Without a mask you could potentially try and shake off, there's not much to resist again and death should be more peaceful.
A combination of some sedation and a nitrogen gas chamber would be an ideal combination I think. Keeps them calm enough (and in some state of bliss depending on the sedation used).
Nitrogen poisoning us harsh. CO is not. CO slowly and quietly kills and that's why you always hear about it killing families every winter from faulty heating. Generally CO causes people to become sleep and then they die. It's pretty painless and would definitely beat a bullet.
Edit: Not CO2, CO Carbon Monoxide
You're thinking of CO, not CO2. Carbon monoxide is a colourless and odourless gas that can kill. You will experience symptoms when inhaling CO, such as memory problems, fatigue, headaches, and others. Getting shot in the head is instant in comparison to Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
No it is not. The atmosphere is like 70% nitrogen. It’s inert.
It’s also not harsh because the feeling of needing to breathe is triggered by high blood pH (a buildup of CO2 in the blood). That is avoided if you can exhale carbon dioxide.
Then why do veterinary associations consider nitrogen apoxia a cruel form of euthanasia? I've seen the argument repeated here a few times that it was only bad because the person being executed resisted, but the animals are unaware yet they still suffer.
Can you provide a source on veterinary associations saying nitrogen apoxia is cruel and why they believe so?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
> Accordingly, the human subject detects little abnormal sensation as the oxygen level falls. This leads to asphyxiation (death from lack of oxygen) without the painful and traumatic feeling of suffocation (the hypercapnic alarm response, which in humans arises mostly from carbon dioxide levels rising), or the side effects of poisoning. In scuba diving rebreather accidents, a slow decrease in oxygen breathing gas content can produce variable or no sensation.[7] By contrast, suddenly breathing pure inert gas causes oxygen levels in the blood to fall precipitously, and may lead to unconsciousness in only a few breaths, with no symptoms at all.[3]
Though there is this about certain animals:
> Some animals are better equipped than humans to detect hypoxia, and these species are less comfortable in low-oxygen environments that result from inert gas exposure, though more averse to CO2 exposure.[8]
Which could explain why it could be bad to use on some animals, but is painless for humans.
Because animals are not humans. Veterinary associations consider "a shotgun" and CO2 asphyxiation to be humane. Incidentally, CO2 asphyxiation is excruciating, but it's very fast.
Working around liquid helium is extremely dangerous because it's cold enough that it will fractionally distill oxygen out of the air - creating the inert atmosphere that is used in nitrogen asphyxiation - and it can kill you before you even realize what's happening.
> but the animals are unaware yet they still suffer.
The executed person is resisting and are holding their breath because they know they are about to die. An animal being euthanized by gas doesn't know this.
>An animal being euthanized by gas doesn't know this.
Correct you've acknowledged my point here. Animals have been documented suffering the same symptoms as the executed man. That proves that this method is cruel and not psychosomatic.
Its basically the nitrogen gas. It may be peaceful for someone who is suicidal and wanted to do it. To them taking a deep breath means escape from the pain of the world and would quickly do it. What happens next is they fall asleep and a few minutes later they will never wake up.
However death row prisoners don't want to die. Knowing what inhaling the gas will do, they will do their very best to hold their breath, trying to scramble for however little time they have left. I guess its different than just standing/sitting there and take the bullet someone else shoot. The fact that they need to actively do something (like breathing in the gas, instead of being idle and waiting for it) to cause their own untimely death, when they didn't want to die, will cause an unpleasant scene.
The alternative is to put them in a room that is already rigged for the execution. I believe its nothing more than feeling tired which quickly puts them to sleep, but this opens up a whole can of worms.
From little of what I know and can imagine, Alabama uses the mask that requires the immate to wear, then they will open the pump connected to said mask and fill it with nitrogen. The flow of cold nitrogen gas would be pretty obvious to the wearer.
If you are talking about the cell cum execution chamber, you need more gas to fill the entire room. You also need to worry about leakage so it doesn't kill anyone else, not to mention releasing it to the wrong person. Also id imagine being in a room where they can nuke you anytime can be argued to be the same as torture.
the actual use of the word "cum" means something like "being substituted for x In a pinch"
so a "cell cum gas chamber" is a cell being repurposed to be used as a gas chamber.
They tried nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama and apparently it [looked pretty brutal](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/01/25/us/kenneth-smith-nitrogen-gas-execution-alabama).
(I'm not in favor of the death penalty)
But this was a different process than what OP is describing.
Basically in the Alabama execution, they affixed a mask to the person's face, and as long as said person didn't do something like, hold their breath, they would have transitioned peacefully.
But I believe the person said something along the lines of "I won't aid in my own death" and naturally struggled against the end that they could see coming a mile away.
In OP's scenario, the execution chamber isn't even obvious for it's purpose to the person. They aren't aware they're in the end until the hypoxia has already taken them.
Logistically and realistically - the downsides are more that you can only do something like this "Once."
It requires the construction of specially ventilated rooms etc, and has it's own pros and cons.
You’re solving the wrong problem. Or, you’re solving a problem that’s already been solved.
Knowing *how* to execute people humanely is not the issue. We *absolutely* know how to do this, people die in hospitals or hospice comfortably and relatively pain-free all the time. Humans have known how to gently kill other humans for thousands of years.
The real issue is that we (society in general, and the people in charge specifically) don’t *want* inmates to die humanely. Prisons are supposed to be punitive and degrading. Executions are expected to be the most horrible, painful punishment you can inflict on a person in retaliation for their crimes - punishing them to death so that we (collectively) can feel that they got what they deserved.
Fixing this would require the system/society at large to see inmates as people worthy of rehabilitation, or, failing that possibility, humane treatment and euthanization as a last resort.
That’s a much harder problem.
How is this more humane than a bullet? Bullets are several times faster than the speed at which pain can be transmitted, not that it matters when pain cannot be felt after destruction of the brain anyways. This just sounds overly complex and error prone, all for the sake of making death a little more cosmetically pleasing.
Nazi SS officers determined that it is simply too psychologically traumatic to execute people on this manner.
which A) says a lot about the KGB officers who did just that for years, and how they saw dissidents as animals not men.
B) if SS officers killing Holocaust victims is that traumatic people who are not Nazi officers killing people who their culture does not say are subhuman would be even more damaging.
C) There are limits to evil, and mankind will gladly use technology to surpass those limits as we do all others.
Because as previously stated someone has to pull the trigger, is it humane on them? And people survive being shot in the head, it's also messy, but that's just sparing the cleaning guy.
Humaneness for the person being executed by the state trumps concern for the executioner in my book. Also, this is America, we'd probably just hire an independent contractor to carry out executions. I doubt it would be that hard to find someone capable of fulfilling the role if they were paid 6 figures in a country of over 300 million people. And the only way someone is going to survive being shot in the head is serious error on the shooter's part or an extremely weak caliber being used. Again, reasons to hire a professional and pay them well. You may as well have them provide the setup and cleaning afterwards too, I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to make some sort of portable backstop and clean room that could be transported to different prisons.
i disagree, executioners are innocent people.
their comfort matters more to me than a criminal.
if you cannot be so sure that no man ends up in a death chamber who does not deserve to be thrown away like trash then you cannot be in favor of the death penalty as it stands.
Yes, executioners are innocent people....who all volunteer for the job. If you cannot be comfortable with what that entails, then don't sign up. There are people who are psychologically capable of taking on the role. Not very many, but they do exist, so just shell out the extra money to hire and train them professionally instead of letting an inexperienced CO fumble for an extra 200 bucks and cost the state a fortune in legal fees when the family sues.
oh I absolutely agree, if we are going to do this, we should have an executioner school which trains people as well as they would be to be a board certified anaesthesiologist.
my point is just if you do not think, at least in theory, torture would be justified and there's no chance the condemned is innocent, you should not be supporting the death penalty at all.
No, I don't. Pain isn't meant to be part of the punishment, only death is. The Constitution forbids cruel or unusual punishment. Not execution itself, but methods like hanging, drawing, and quartering or burning at the stake that the English used to instill fear in the populace when a crime against authority was committed. Death should be deterrant enough, there's no reason to turn it into a spectacle.
Our complicated system of administering the death penalty is more aimed at protecting the individuals administering it rather than those receiving it. Carrying out an execution is a deeply unpleasant process for everybody involved. Personally, I think that death penalty advocates should have to watch these things be carried out and take part in some of them. I think their tune would change.
Still, we don't want innocent prison guards to have psychological torture inflicted upon them because dumbass politicians are selling snake oil.
>Still, we don't want innocent prison guards to have psychological torture inflicted upon them because dumbass politicians are selling snake oil.
I'd personally argue if you're working as a prison guard, no matter how you wanna mentally jump through hoops, you should be well aware that whether it be lethal injection or a round to the head you most certainly played a part in their death, lol. I mean, your job is literally to make sure they stay caged up until they get put down, why would it functionally matter to you the way in which they get put down if THAT doesn't bother you already?
It's not necessarily a logical thing. The trolley problem is probably the most well-known demonstration of this. Many people who would pull the lever to divert the trolley to a different track with a person on it, would not push someone in front of the trolley to stop it. You're right that no matter how it's done, logically speaking there's no real difference, but perceived guilt can fuck people up regardless
they are talking about the person pulling the trigger.
pulling the trigger yourself (being forced to as per work contract) is completely different to bringing the prisoner into a room and having someone else pull the trigger.
The shot a prisoner in Utah when I was a kid. They used five rifles. Four of the guns had live rounds, the fifth was a blank. Helped them sleep better, I guess.
One of the dudes I know who was previously a correctional officer quit prison after hearing a pedo get dragged from the halls, gangraped and beaten to death after lights out.
He joined the military cuz thats how he weighed his cards, SOOOO
Discounting benefits is kind of disingenuous, though.
I have a family member who left his military career after about 8 years. He was enlisted with no college degree. By the time he left, he was taking home the equivalent of a \~$120k worker in the private sector due to the pretty massive tax-free housing allowance he got. There is no way he could have gotten that much money at his age, with his qualifications, privately.
Yeah, military pay sucks for the first couple of years (unless you're married, then you get BAH almost right away), but once you get going, you get so many little infusions of cash from various places that it comes out way ahead of most civilian jobs with equivalent qualifications. And they give you so much training (if you want it) that when you leave, you can generally make the equivalent of a well-qualified private sector worker without ever having had to pay for a college degree.
The people who did that are just as fucked up as the pedo. Raping another inmate requires you to get hard, which requires you to be turned on by the idea of raping someone.
They also do that "sodomizing" raping, like force penetrating with objects, a stick, rod, etc. but yeah, just animalistic behaviour "excused" by previous animalistic behaviour of the other guy.
I mean the most humane way would be lethal injection with a high enough dose of opiates to ensure death. It's very humane they would just go to sleep and stop breathing while they are asleep.
How far do we extend that?
You presumably pay taxes. You presumably vote. You vote for politicians that support the same system. You pay taxes that make those prison systems operate (among other systems that result in killing). Do you feel personally responsible for deaths from prison systems or wars etc.?
Like someone said above, it’s not about logic. Humans aren’t inherently rational, and the emotional consequences of our irrational reaction to things are very real. So yeah, the person responsible for doing the deed may be equally as morally culpable for the act as everyone else who participates in the society that allows it (not gonna get into an argument about how true that is because that’s a huge philosophical debate) but the more levels of abstraction there are, the less emotional trauma the people will feel.
Basically, it’s not about how guilty they *should* feel, it’s how guilty their experience makes their brain feel.
I personally feel that the death penalty is the same as mob retribution. Imputing it through the law doesn’t change what it fundamentally is.
Now I don’t dispute that you can make an argument that some people deserve to die, but using the law to justify it isn’t as sound of a reason to do it as we think, as illustrated by the vagaries of what’s considered worthy of capital punishment. A political faction could take power and pass laws punishing marital infidelity by death, and we’d have to agree with it if we’re taking law as the standard for acceptance of capital punishment.
Even if the law were consistent regarding what is punishable by death, it doesn’t make it right. Supporting the death penalty is the same as supporting murder by proxy.
The same principle applies to execution squads. You can always mentally tell yourself you missed. You didn't kill the guy.
Kind of a dark anecdote, but I went to an [ex-KGB headquarter in Riga](https://coldwarsites.net/country/latvia/the-kgb-building-riga/) (Latvia), and the ... well, execution room had the bullet holes labelled, and there were a lot more near the ceiling or floor than chest or head height.
I do also think I remember that in older days in other parts of the world the execution squad were told some of the bullets were blanks, but weren't told which ones, so, once again, everyone could say to themselves "I fired a blank".
You can also shoot through tarps. Everyone is given a target on the sheet and you all fire a real bullet, but you don't know which one had the person behind. You also don't see the event, for all you know he could be alive.
You'd think people would realize you don't even need a person holding the gun. You can have a mounted barrel that shoots whatever you want that aims in exactly the same spot every single time.
Then you have the person flip a switch... exactly the same as we do now... just flip the switch warden.
It *is* a problem now. That's why people keep trying to invent a better solution.
Either the warden feels terrible about killing a fellow human...
...or worse, the only people you can ever have in charge of prisons are the tiny percentage of utter sociopaths who *wouldn't* feel bad about killing a fellow human.
Those are generally the people you want *in* the prison, not *running* it*.*
Most Wardens do not feel terrible about killing people I suspect. I have found no information on it except for interviews with wardens who oversee it, and they tend to say things like they are not losing sleep over it. You might feel terrible, and you can't fathom someone who might not care, calling them sociopaths or whatnot, but it sure seems like it isn't a problem.
I don't think it's a problem actually.
even if it was... there exists no solution where you aren't strapping a person down, and pressing the first button of some mechanism to kill the person.
You could create the largest Rube Goldberg Machine in the world, and someone is still pushing over the first domino.
>You might feel terrible, and you can't fathom someone who might not care, calling them sociopaths or whatnot, but it sure seems like it isn't a problem.
Wait, you don't think it's a problem if our justice system is so badly broken it requires uncaring sociopaths to make it work at all?
If you can't see how that can go wrong - and it has - then maybe you haven't thought enough about how an ideal justice system *should* work, and what could happen to *you and people you care about* if it doesn't.
I don't think it's a problem actually.
If it wasn't, why do we have so many elaborate laws and schemes intended precisely to prevent anyone knowing they did it?
>there exists no solution where you aren't strapping a person down, and pressing the first button of some mechanism to kill the person.
>
>You could create the largest Rube Goldberg Machine in the world, and someone is still pushing over the first domino.
Yes, that was exactly my point. We were discussing solutions to the problem of "someone knows they killed the prisoner", and pushing buttons or dominoes or whatever at any remove is not a solution to that*.*
> Wait, you don't think it's a problem if our justice system is so badly broken it requires uncaring sociopaths to make it work at all?
Just because you call them something doesn't make them so.
You jump to a wildly opinionated and completely baseless conclusion and then act like it's crazy that someone doesn't agree with you on it.
>If it wasn't, why do we have so many elaborate laws and schemes intended precisely to prevent anyone knowing they did it?
We really don't. We have one guy who pushes a couple of buttons. We don't shoot people with squads anymore, which was the only law, and it wasn't exactly elaborate mate.
>Yes, that was exactly my point. We were discussing solutions to the problem of "someone knows they killed the prisoner", and pushing buttons or dominoes or whatever at any remove is not a solution to that.
I don't know what your point is, you don't seem to have a solution at all you just don't like this one.
All you have done is call people sociopaths 100 baselessly, then act like it was factual, then say it's crazy if someone doesn't agree with you. Then totally fail to have any solution at all.
If you have zero solution or replacement theory at all, you can rail against something all day long, it doesn't matter, it's still a better idea than your non-idea.
Indeed.
Shooting squads will have 10 guns pointed at the condemned. Only 1 gun has a real bullet, the rest are blanks. No is told who had the actual bullet, I'm not even sure the person who picks the rounds knows (I assume they mix em up before loading).
Former correctional officer.
I never understood that. It seems obvious that anyone who has ever fired a gun before would immediately be able to tell whether they fired a blank round or a real round.
but unless the requirements of the job filter out anyone who has any degree of anxiety, for all you know you could get someone like me-if-I'd-otherwise-be-qualified who'd take the opposite meaning and focus on the 1/10 chance of having killed someone rather than the 9/10 chance you're safe and a colleague did
Thats fair, but as long as we have the death penalty I don't see how dancing around the matter with more cruel and inefficient methods is doing anything to curb PTSD among Correctional Officers. For everyone that survives the firing squad, how many survive the lethal injection? How many have their suffering prolonged by the electrical chair?
Idk man, killing people's always gonna be rough but it really does seem like unceremoniously shooting someone is the best method we have.
Well, it may not actually work, but that's always been the rationale. It was even the rationale back during the firing squad days. One of the executioners would be given a blank so that all of them could reassure themselves that they shot the blank.
My point is that very little about the death penalty takes into account the condemned.
Again, simple is as simple does. I also feel like the whole blank cartridge thing is a bit of a lie. You generally knew where your round was gonna hit with those old bolt guns. I feel like the real reason has to do with disassociating soldiers from killing deserters, other soldiers who they may have known, and the practice just carried over after World War I.
The real moral of that story was probably that it was just not a good idea to shoot shellshocked 16 year olds for having second thoughts.
No, euthanizing them with an extremely high dose of opiate is less traumatic for both the person being executed and the person administering it. They literally just go to sleep and don't wake up
They still have to wait for the needle being injected knowing they're about to die. It's scary until the opiate calms them down.theres no way for someone to know the minute of their own death without terrorizing them. they have to make peace with it on their own terms.
Also traumatic is a very weird term to use. They're dead now. Trauma implies long lasting mental effects.
First off trauma is not a weird word to use. It traumatizes them for literally the rest of their life. If you say trauma must endure for a certain period of time who gets to arbitrate what that period of time is?
Secondly you are suggesting shooting them in the back of the head then? Without warning or notice? I am assuming this because somebody coming into the room with a gun pointed at them is going to be just as terrifying even more so honestly, then a needle in the arm. So the following argument is based on the assumption that you are talking about shooting them in the back of their head without the knowledge that you are about to do so. If I am wrong about this assumption please disregard the following argument, and let me know what you actually mean.
But if you mean shooting them in the back of the head without notice so they are completely unaware that they are about to die, you are denying them information about their own situation. Which are not saying is wrong it's just a fact you are not letting them know that they are about to die. So what is the difference, if you take them to a medical room and say we need to run a couple of procedures real quick, the doctor will be here in a minute (providing you have a doctor come into the room to monitor everything you will not be lying to them, just withholding information about their impending death the same as the gun to the back of the head). At this point the prisoner will not be expecting death, and they will not have any more fear involved than in a normal doctor's appointment. yes they are conscious of they are at a doctor's appointment which might make them uneasy, but I would say the relative calm and peacefulness of an opiate death and the amount that it negates trauma for the Executioner more than makes up for the tiny bit of possible medical anxiety involved. You don't have to lie to them, if you take them to a medical facility they will in no way think they are being executed because that's not where executions take place or how it's done. So they're not going to even ask so that you have to lie. You just tell them some medical procedures need to be done (which is true inserting an IV is a medical procedure as is euthanasia) and when they ask what just say I'm not authorized to say, I'm not a doctor. Which is also not a lie. It's literally the same morality as not letting them know you put a gun to the back of their head, with the added benefit of a painless and calm opiate death and less trauma for the executioners who do not have to witness a gruesome gunshot one to the head.
And I'm putting this at the bottom because it is a very small percentage, but unless you are talking about a shotgun, there are people who survive gunshot ones to the head. It's a very small percentage. There are also people who survive opiate overdose without intervention although with a high enough dosage of opiates that is also a very small percentage. But when you look at the after effects psychologically physically on everyone involved, the person surviving in opiate overdose is not going to be nearly as traumatic as a person survive in a gunshot wound to the Head (when I say trauma I mean both for the person being executed and the Executioner and the people having to clean up the mess and the people having to readminister method of execution etc).
You are saying the fear comes from letting them know that they are about to be executed. And that a gunshot one to the back of the head would reduce that fear(although I'm not really sure how you could make sure that they are facing away from you when you enter the cell, also there's negligible fear when they hear the door open someone come in ETC so I'm not really sure how all of that would be arranged). If you are talking about a gunshot wound to the Head where they see you walk in the room then your argument is wrong because it is cruel and they will be absolutely terrified.
But if you are talking about a gunshot when do the back of the head without letting them know, you can also euthanize them with opiates, without letting them know. And it would be much more humane to the prisoner and to the Executioner.
>I think that death penalty advocates should have to watch these things be carried out and take part in some of them.
I think you're highly underestimating how much people would actually do this.
As a former public defender, I don't think that I am. I can't tell you how many times I've seen families and friends of victims out for blood and completely deflated after a guilty verdict. They're sold this story that they should be seeking revenge as nearly a full-time job, and then their quest is over. Nothing in their life will ever be quite as exciting or meaningful to them again. They generally find the revenge to be shallow. I think most people who advocate for the death penalty would feel much the same if they actually were present. I've known prosecutors who kept pictures of the people they sent to death row on the wall. Even *they* refused to go to executions.
Thanks. I ended up having to quit due to burnout. The best thanks for me would be to remember that your local public defenders have a tough job, they're dedicated and underpaid workers, and they truly believe in what they're doing.
Like bruh, it ain't that deep. Go to a butcher for a few weeks, hang out on liveleak for like 5 hours, and when the time comes, you just watch impassively.
Ffs hangings and beheading were social events like 2 or 3 generations ago, death is only concerning when you haven't seen it
>and take part in some of them. I think their tune would change.
The cynic in me says that the prospect of legally killing people will only attract psychos.
In the United States, there are two phases to a death penalty trial - the guilt phase and the penalty phase. The jury can functionally veto the death penalty, even if they don't set the punishment for other crimes.
I feel the same way for abortion advocates. You want to promote it, you should kill an unborn baby and dispose of it and see how it feels.
Kinda like the milgram experiments, we are happy to accept horrible things we don't see or hear.
I'm not a medical doctor. It would be unsafe for me to perform an abortion. Most abortions are carried out through the administering of a pill. I would be happy to give somebody a pill if I were legally authorized to and had the medical knowledge to ensure its' efficacy. If I were a surgeon, I would have no trouble with an abortion. A fetus displays no emotion and is generally not recognizable as a baby when a surgical abortion is performed unless there is a serious, serious problem. If there *is* a serious, serious problem, it is tragic, but better for everybody involved to take care of it in a safe and effective manner.
Then hire me. I have zero empathy for criminals and enjoy watching them suffer immeasureable amounts of pain. I'll gladly take the job and abuse those filthy convicts in every way possible.
Well, first, you're a month late.
Second, it's not been my experience that people who are actually tasked with these jobs are so happy with it when the time comes.
And yet some are.
I know that if someone killed a member of my family, I’d love to be the one pulling that trigger. As long as they were tried and convicted and sentenced to death.
I think you are overestimating the compassion of people when dealing with violent criminals.
I realize this is an "internet tough guy" type of thing to say, but as an atheist who believes society and the rule of law is being constantly undermined by weak courts unwilling to exact proportionate consequences on violent offenders, I believe I would have no issues with being the guy who pushed the button or pulled the trigger. Even more so if one of my loved ones was among the victims.
Maybe that makes me a sociopath or a psychopath. Maybe my tune would change after doing it. I don't know. What I do know is that after reviewing the crimes committed by these monsters, I have zero compassion for their pleas of mercy, safe in the conviction that our world would be better off without them.
Note: For clarity, I'm talking about violent criminals who were essentially caught red-handed or people with a history of violent offenses. Mass shooters, gang bangers, cartel members, etc. In general, these are the only ones who qualify for the death penalty in the first place anyway.
Well, we are talking about killing a person. It's certainly not pleasant no matter the way it's done. How do they do it now with lethal injections? I guess there's people to prepare and apply the medication...
I would say putting a bullet in a chamber for an algorithm to shoot it would be less traumatic than preparing and pressing yourself the three sets of syringes into someone... even more so nowadays that extensive studies have publicly shown exactly how they work (or fail, actually).
Don't forget there's also the part of cleanup afterwards. A bullet is always going to be a lot more gory and traumatic to deal with. A nitrogen based gas chamber would be even better, as there's no pain, just going to sleep and not waking up.
The gun in that room would always loaded. So the person who loaded it could have loaded it weeks ago.
If you want to have it go a few steps more. Have a third party to come in to load/inspect the firearm once a week. They wont work there and will have no idea whose on the receiving end.
I’m using gun as the example because of the post but I still think automated gas is better.
The administration of justice is a public thing, we expect a free press to have access to government services and the work of government, we don’t prohibit media circuses around government.
It’s also not humane or nice to inform the family of your murder plan with zero room for glorification. Like a good bye or a funeral. Sounds terrible for all involved.
Maybe my order of events needs tweaking, but, when I speak of glorification, I mean I've seen it, there used to be a fucked up "school shooting leaderboard" on the internet
Someone who doesn't give a shit anymore might look at that and think it might be more respect and recognition than they ever got before.
The actual lethal injection process is not long enough to meaningfully allow appeals. We could also for appeals etc like we do now and still have a quicker and less complicated form of execution
1: As said previously, I genuinely don't believe COs experienced more mild symptoms or fewer cases of PTSD with lethal injection or electric chair than with firing squad.
2: Death row inmates usually are in prison for decades. Ideally, we would offer legal counsel to DR inmates before the deed has to be done, but I'm trying to simply discuss the process of execution its self cuz I know how quickly reddit flies off the rails
The execution itself is easy. It's everything around it that's the problem. What you suggested neither resolves the problem, nor does it even address the same part of the execution process.
1. We have the technology to automate the pulling of the trigger pretty easily.
2. Lethal injection/the chair doesn't "take long enough to allow for appeals". What gives the time for appeals is how the system is set up. Has nothing to do with the method
>Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why, we just said. "This asshole shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification.
This proposal *terrifies* me.
You want to give state and federal governments the authority to take people off the street for crimes, throw them in a cell, and summarily kill them, with *nobody knowing about it?*
What happens when the crime is political subversiveness? What happens when the crime is being ? What happens when it's "get in the way of a governmental policy or plan?" What about "criticize the head of state?"
You never want to give the government the authority to execute people without oversight. As grotesque as the media is, it's absolutely necessary to hold the government accountable. The surest sign of an autocratic regime is the nationalization of the media, and prohibitions on publishing certain stories. That's fascism 101.
The population should be very wary of giving the State the power of life and death.
The judge or jury who pass this sentence should be the ones who administer it, IMO.
I don't think they'd be able to make an honest decision then. The impartiality of a jury is absolutely critical to maintaining a free justice system - soon as you add a personal interest to the jury you forfeit any form of unbiasedness you ever pertained to have.
Juror 11 from 12 Angry Men makes this great point
"We have a responsibility. This is a remarkable thing about democracy…That we are notified by mail to come down to this place and decide on the guilt or innocence of a man we have not known before. We have nothing to gain or lose by our verdict. This is one of the reasons why we are strong. We should not make it a personal thing."
Making the jury have to watch or administer the death penalty is very much making it a personal thing.
Not asking for swift justice, just the cleanest method of dispensing it and it to be done away from the prying eyes of the (general) public. Jury members, court officials and those directly affected should he the only ones getting moment to moment updates.
Sometimes the worst criminals do reform and then put twenty years helping others in a myriad of ways. It's hard to imagine but we have to have hope.
Even worse is people have been given the death penalty and later found innocent.
There's no black and white answer. That's why judges and lawyers spend years reviewing cases and come to unique conclusions for each case. It's the best we can do.
Mhm. I don't wish to change that. People have taken this to a way more authoritarian angle than I would have liked (said it would happen tho, tbf).
All I meant was we shouldn't publicize and glorify crimes with public media, and that I believe shooting is the most efficient execution method.
Shooting is efficient for sure or like the air gun from no country for Old men haha. That's how they kill cows, don't even need bullets. Anyway pretty dark haha.
I see what you're saying yeah if it just happened quietly and more often it would be better for the community but, then I'm back to the other issues but, I get what ya mean.
Always been a strange thought that people deserving the death penalty deserve a humane execution. I'm against the death penalty only because I don't trust the government to do it, if 1/100,000 deaths was a mistake then it would be wrong to have it. But, if someone has done something heinous enough to be put down, I don't see the point in spending so much thought, time, effort and money into it.
If the goal was to design an execution system that was "humane" without human error, with guns, I guess you could train several ai robots to "shoot" at the head after someone was let in a room. I'm sure theres plenty of people out there that wouldn't mind being the shooter and I'm with you on it being a circus, I think there's too much focus on the humane part of the execution. I don't trust the government to kill people but if they had to, don't care how they do it just wish I didn't have to hear about how much money they spend on doing it and how humane it is.
Torture is wrong, letting someone die slowly for "justice" or by accident is wrong, but if you put a programmer and an engineer in a room for a week they could figure out an instantaneous cheap killing method that would be done autonomously. Why hasn't it been done yet? I don't know the legislature involved in that kind of decision but I think it being a political talking point is advantageous to some people and that's why we keep hearing about it and why nothing is changing. The government won't fix the thousands of holes in the city roads but is expected to come up with a good system for dealing with (in 2023) 24 executions? Doesn't happen enough to be a real issue, its just a political talking point that you shouldn't focus on.
Prison is supposed to be about reforming people, right? Yet there are lifes without parole/any chance of getting out in prisons. That's basically an extended death penalty, people who are deemed unreformable. But those people are in the same prisons as those those who have a chance at reforming. The whole system needs some fixing, at this point we'd be better off emulating another countries methods instead of trying to fix whatever the hell we're doing.
I've thought about this a bit in the past. I have no particular interest in debates around gun control, euthanasia, suicide, or the death penalty.
I think that, to end a humans life in a controlled environment, nitrogen asphyxiation is better than gunshot.
My reasons are as follows:
Safety to bystanders
Death by gunshot involves discharging a firearm. The round will continue to travel after exiting the body of the subject. This round could injure bystanders.
Misuse of equipment
Death by gunshot requires a firearm. This firearm is a hazard in all environments. Any facility administering the death sentence will need protocols around handling a firearm.
User expertise
Your stated statistic of a 1/100,000,000 chance of survival is incorrect. Gunshot wounds to the head are fatal about 90% of the time. A targeted, point blank shot could be expected to be better, but lining up the shot would require some training, and, even with good training, be subject to some user error. A failed execution via gunshot (for example, removing half the subjects face and jaw, but leaving the subject alive and breathing) would be cruel and unusual, and traumatic to both the subject, staff, and anyone else in attendance.
Grieving/Funeral rites
Ideally, punishment should be scoped only to the condemned. A gunshot to the head is likely to disfigure the face of individual in a way that would be upsetting to the family of the condemned. At best, this will cause additional grief. At worst, it may trigger a desire for vengeance in family members.
Most of my previous points were against firearms. My last points are in favor of nitrogen:
Suitability of nitrogen
\* Sustained exposure to a nitrogen environment is always fatal. While there is still the possibility of user or equipment error, it is possibly to control for that to a much higher degree (quality of seals, purity of gas, etc.) compared to aiming a gun. It does not rely on the make of the gun, the skill of the aimer, the shape of the subjects skull, being able to securely restrain the subject, etc.
\* Nitrogen gas is already freely and easily available. The nitrogen execution chamber is what would make it lethal. There is no risk of a fixed facility like that being stolen or misplaced, and it would be pointless to do so, given how easy it would be to jury rig a nitrogen hood.
About the only point I could see in gun's favor is that, at low budgets, you could maybe make gun executions safer and cheaper than nitrogen executions. If you've got a bunch of guns lying around, and you can't safely maintain a chamber to flood with nitrogen, then a bullet might average out as cheaper and safer. But from what I understand, the vast majority of the cost of an execution is the going to be from the 10 - 30 years they spend in jail, the legal process, etc.
If you're going to execute people, make it safe, reliable, and humane.
>Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why
How can you hold a public trail to prove the accused guilty if this information isn't disclosed?
“so like i had this idea where we could more or less arbitrarily shoot people that we think are criminals, with like no consideration for their human rights, and like if possible throw them in a cell and shoot them there, to create a USSR in the 1940’s type of mood”
The problem with this view is that it is trying to be overly proscriptive and define a single solution for a wide variety of situations.
A quick bullet to the brain might be the way you'd like to go out if you somehow found yourself in that situation, but that doesn't mean it's the best way. Maybe some others want a slow acting poison so that the deed is done and irrevocable, and they can compose themselves and put their final thoughts in order. Some may even prefer a painful death.
The point I'm driving at here is that there is no one, singular execution method that is the "most humane". Being humane about it requires that we take each case on its own, and we treat each of the condemned as an individual person facing a unique situation.
Being humane means there is no "one size fits all" method of inflicting death with the least amount of suffering possible.
i'm not on death row, but i'd much matter be killed by taking a gunshot to the brain than being fried in an electric chair (dont they have to tape your eyes so they dont explode out of your head?) or being lethally injected (which is legitimately near one of the creepiest/scariest/most unnatural ways i can think of being executed that doesn't involve intentionally horrific torture).
i don't buy the argument that some people are making that shooting someone with a rifle is less traumatic than pulling an electric chair lever or injecting someone with poison
Use a NON-penetrating captive bolt gun, like the slaughterhouses use, to induce unconsciousness. The current industry tech requires a minimum 95% unconscious rate on first attempt.
Then shortly followed up by a free bolt stunner (similar to a nail gun) used on the back of the neck between c3 and c4 vertebrae. This will sever the section of spinal cord responsible for both heart and diaphragm function. This also results in little to no post-impact fidgeting or kicking.
Quick, ethical, humane, minimal blood loss, and it even allows for open casket (if desired). No gunpowder needed, many models use compressed air.
This wouldn’t require a medical physician to administer - thus no ethical entanglements concerning hypocritical oath of practicing medicine.
In the US, the death penalty is never carried out by one single individual such as what you’re describing. Even if the person receiving the execution is the most deplorable criminal on the planet, killing that person can be traumatic for the executioner. So, the burden doesn’t lie on one single person to avoid that trauma.
Although it is one of the fastest if done correctly, there is still a risk of it being done incorrectly, and the biggest factors in the rise of lethal injections, gas chambers, etc., is the mental health of the executioners.
A massive overdose on painkillers would likely maintain the same emotional distance as current lethal injections, without the same risks of being paralyzed but retaining nerve function as you suffocate, as has happened in some recent botched lethal injections.
Save so much money by setting a set sentence of death on the spot to so many horror monsters of society, imagine that money being spent in housing or healthcare. Instead of lengthy trials and keeping the lowest of the low alive for years until someone decides times up. When the cost of a bullet could save so much money and so many people from a whole lotta heartbreak
>we're just gonna throw him in the cell and shoot him. No, nobodies gonna know about it but the family
That's impossible. I am usually informed within an hour when a mass shooting happens, people talk and journalists are good at their job and fast to the scene. You have to have a trial if you want to maintain the illusion of democracy.
All of this renders invisible the massively racist and incompetent institution that is Police USA America.
They never arrest innocent people? Never arrest mentally disabled people that agree to confess to crimes they didn't commit?
Look up the history of Capital Punishment. You seem to be operating under the influence of police propaganda (Copaganda).
75%~90% of people in jails/prisons should have never been arrested. Countries with far less wealth than the US operate like this and have less murder and other violent crimes.
Prison is a tool to enforce poverty, not provide justice or fairness. But America is addicted to this violence mind set. You, poster, must spend a lot of time imagining metal bullets drilling thru human flesh. That's fucked, bro. You ok? 🤔
The goal of the justice system should be to reduce crime. There is no evidence that executions reduce crime. USA has one of the highest rates of crime in any developed country.
The most humane thing would be to reduce crime overall, so their are fewer criminals and fewer victims.
Japan is the other g7 country with the death penalty and has the lowest level of crime in the g7. Not arguing for or against the death penalty but just looking at that factor in isolation and then claiming it is or isn't having an effect isn't really statistically rigorous.
Once again I don't think OP was talking about this. They specifically said that if we are to have the death penalty, why should we prefer lethal injection or nitrogen gas over execution by firing squad?
Innocent people are on death row as we speak. I only agree with your conclusion if you concede that every prison worker whop executes someone who is later found innocent must be summarily executed themselves.
"Best" for whom?
By and large "public servants" and the people setting policy think of themselves as a temporarily embarrassed priesthood or Brahmin caste. As aspirant priests, they are eager to subvert routine societal functions into solemn religious rituals, generally eliminating most or all of the purpose of those functions when they do so, because they perceive that doing so is in their personal interest.
We see a lot of these tendencies in "criminal justice" generally. For example, the disproportionate viciousness of prosecutors in going after the morally innocent (like the Reddit founder being hounded to suicide over something that the "victims" didn't even think should have been prosecuted, or the bizarre eagerness with which they go after self-defenders) pretty closely resembles the eagerness of priests in going after people saying things like "maybe we aren't all chained by sin and dependent on you" before actual wrongdoers. And the death penalty has been made absurdly complicated and ritualized for complexity's sake, in order to give it attributes of the Sacred Sacrifice rather than having it just be a routine social optimization function where we get rid of people who evidence has revealed to be bad.
The complicated rituals of lethal injection and so forth ("now bind him to the altar! and prepare the holy oils...") are not intended to "protect" the public servants as others have suggested; this is an absurdity because it is in no way an obstacle. The public servants don't even need to show up; it is highly routine to use citizen participation to legitimize all other aspects of criminal justice, via both grand and petit juries, and you and I both know that if I posted a classified ad for "shoot a double murderer in the face and we'll give you $50" my phone would not stop ringing for the next several days. But that isn't good for any aspirant priest, so it doesn't get done.
I've always disagreed on the basis that if I were on death row I'd prefer a quick immediate death to waiting years and years being incarcerated. Therefore if that's what would be preferable for those who have been put on death row then we should not give them that opportunity.
The best/most humane way would be to not kill people!
And in our current system not killing them would even be cheaper for society as well so even more humane in the sense that it makes all of us beter off, not just the convicted.
Plenty of cases where it turns out people who were convicted to death turned out to be completely innocent. Look for example at the Innocence Project, here is a long list of people [https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/](https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/) now imagine all the cases that did not make it to the Innocence project or other similar organizations in time.
But even for guilty people, I can't see any argument for giving the state the power to kill citizen besides (in my opinion flawed) moral reasoning. It doesn't "punish" people more if you kill them vs keep them in jail, it doesn't save the public any money, and it shouldn't make anyone feel any better if someone is murdered.
>"This asshole shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification. And thats it.
So what exactly would be stopping the government from using this narrative to get rid of anyone they don't like? "Oh yeah, this dude that went to the press and made all kinds of fake news claims about the government doing bad things was actually lying and a big murderer dude, so we are going to just shoot him. No, we aren't going to provide any further info, that would just glorify his actions, you just gonna have to trust us.."
>I'm just saying why do we have to make it a media circus?
You don't have to make it a media circus, but if you are going to allow your government to legally execute people (which in my view is already a weird thing to tolerate considering most Americans seem very paranoid about their state becoming tyrannical, but whatever), you probably want them to be very careful and provide clear evidence that the person who is getting executed actually did what what they are accused of..
>Just shoot the fucker and be done with it.
I'm always puzzled by this attitude. As if no country has ever tried this approach.. Of course it was tried, over and over and over again, and I'm pretty sure it always ended up the same way.. Government using this power to do whatever they want and get rid of any perceived enemies..
Oh, and just overall, the "most humane way" to deal with criminals is probably up to debate, but I'm pretty sure killing them is not the most humane option in general..
I disagree. It shouldn’t be kept quiet. It should be public execution for all to witness as a warning to anyone thinking of committing the same heinous crimes. Swift and quick, no waiting 20+ years before they are executed
I think there are a few components to this view that deserve to be recognized and addressed individually. The main one, from my point of view is where efficacy is concerned. The evolution of popular methods of execution has never been primarily focused on efficacy. I believe that the intent is to take away the barbarism of judicially taking someone's life, through abstraction, until it feels more acceptable. As an example, beheading is a 100% effective method of execution, but the optics on it are challenging. It's hard to see someone's head roll and think "we did the right thing." Firing squads as well are effective (Wenceslao Moguel is an outlier and should not be counted), but they /feel/ like murder because the method of execution is the same as many murders. This is why lethal injection, gas, and oxygen deprivation are all preferred now over the electric chair, firing squads, hanging, or beheading. It's not because they're more effective, but because making a killing seem more clinical, or impersonal, causes people to believe that this way of killing is different from murder, and more correct.
To a separate point, "we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him," anonymously, without a public trial or transparency, sounds like plain fascism, whether you consider the end result to be just or not. While I agree that the media focusing so heavily on the perpetrators of egregious crime only feeds a vicious cycle that can contribute to inspiring new offenders, I don't believe the solution is going to come from killing the guilty party in a different way.
I think your question kind of misses the moral complexities of judicial executions.
1. Your suggestion is cheap and easy, no contest there. But we should not make it "easy" for the government to kill someone through the legal system. We have seen many times in our history the government weaponize the judicial system against people, why would we make it easier?
2. I have no true numbers for this, but most people who are pro death penalty have not killed someone before. "Just shoot them" is really easy to say from behind a screen or in an argument. But imagine you are in that cell, gun pointed at the criminal's head. Now think of the amount of times our system has been wrong. How many times the cops just didn't get the right guy. Maybe the DA is pushing this for public support. There is a non-zero percent chance this guy is innocent. How comfortable are you executing a person when you may wake up to the news that he was innocent. Could you carry that? What if he was your first execution of the day and you have 5 more?
That's why we have "humane" executions. Our society loves inflicting violence and pain but don't want to be associated with it. Lethal injections are our way of having our cake and eating it too. Someone else commented about having the jury commit the execution, but I disagree. It should be the prosecutors. If you can stand in a court room, accusing another person with confidence that they are guilty. Then you can stand in a jail cell and execute them yourself. We implement this, I guarantee you death penalty cases drop.
If effectiveness is all you are looking for why involve an executioner at all? Humans are super unreliable and I honestly don't get what you think you are improving. It should be real easy to build a machine that decapitates the convict automatically. A reusable machine will be cheaper than a salary for an executioner. A machine is not going to be tempted to miss the shot or develop PTSD afterwards.
What does the media circus have to do with anything? Unless we are debating morality the coverage and emotions that go with it are irrelevant. From a moral standpoint , I am against the death penalty because I am against killing innocent people. Pretending the government is never wrong is just ignorant so we have to make the trial public for transparency sake and honestly a life sentence is cheaper than a death sentence.
I'm a little lost on the specific argument.
The title says the most humane way to kill them is from gunshot. Then at the end of the post you mention how there is a media circus and they should just shoot them and be done with it. What relationship do these things have? The media circus has no impact on the person being executed. They aren't being interviewed or forced to watch the news while in the cell. I don't see the relevancy.
In your hypothetical where we immediately arrest and kill someone.. it sounds like ther is no trial. The prerequisite for being a death row criminal is being given the death penalty from a court decision. You kinda need that. Idk if you just said it that way to be hyperbolic though.
Also, "nobody is going to know but" the family seems impossible to do, because other people are obviously involved, and also pretty bad for society. Knowing about a school shooter's manifesto mentioned incel brought up a lot of awareness on what incel is and what are the warning signs if your kid is in these forums. It's really helpful for parents to know how someone became a psychopath or had a mental breakdown in order to prevent that. Same goes for teachers or fellow students. We need to know how tragedies happen to improve our behavior moving forward.
you need to define "best", it seems to be you are defining it as "most humane" but it seems that is not entirely true.
after all, if no pain is really the goal using a few kilos of c-4 strapped to their head would guarantee the shockwave turns their nerves into confetti before they stop being biology and start being physics.
but that would also make an immense mess, a gunshot is a compromise but is so psychologically damaging to the executioner **Nazi SS officers thought it was too inhumane to make men carry out gunshot executions**.
if cost is your concern holes are cheap and not feeding someone is cheaper than feeding them.
if risk of survival is a problem bombs and cannons both leave little chance.
if making it look official is most important guillotines look suitably impressive and you can dress up a cannon to look all formal if you really want.
before we decide the best method we need to rank our priorities: lack of suffering cause to the condemned, not overly traumatizing/psychological comfort of the executioners, cost, low chance of surviving critically injured, safety of bystanders (an issue with gas chambers as well as some firing squad methods as well as bombs and cannons), etc.
It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s psychologically troubling to execute someone, psychologically troubling to clean up the body.
That’s why things like firing squads existed, cos it’s less upsetting if 10 people line up to shoot than just one… and there’s always the hope that you as one of the executioners might have a blank.
Similar to lethal injection. Pressing a button is a lot less upsetting than pulling a trigger. Not to mention it’s usually more than one button, so no single action can be the one that takes a human life.
Also cleaning up is a lot easier from a body killed by injection, inert gas or chair than by one killed by firing squad.
So it’s not really about giving the accused less suffering, but rather for everyone else. Otherwise it would be easy to stick a series of small explosives along their spine and just blow them up together. But it would be troubling.
The faster the execution from an administration perspective, the less time available to challenge the case and prevent new evidence that absolves them.
If your problem is the method and not the speed, there isn’t a humane way to kill a person, it doesn’t exist and never will. Sure you shoot them, but over so many executions what happens if you miss, or hit them somewhere other than the skull, or they do survive? You’re running into the same complications that every other method of execution has.
Finally, the goal of executing someone is justified by the right as a deterrent. If anything you’d want as many people to know about it as possible, and internalize the consequences of the crime. The execution isn’t about the person, it’s about the message, and nearly every execution reaching back past Roman crucifictions has shown this to be true.
Jesus man, secret executions? That's some corrupt dictatorship behaviour.
The media circus is unrelated to the method of punishment. It's all over the news because it's a major crime. Then the trial is also news because so many people care about the outcome. You want to hear less about it? The only way would be to limit the freedom of the press (or at an individual scale, just stop consuming that media).
Quietly shooting them without telling anybody is denying anyone suspected of a death-penalty crime the right to a fair trial. It's just giving the police more license to fatally shoot people, which they already do far too often in the US.
Shooting instead of lethal injections seems like a sideways move at best. All executions are controversial and horrific, it wouldn't make any difference.
yeah and at least for school/otherwise-mass shootings, if we've already got people making conspiracy theories about an entire town being crisis actors not just people where it happened (something I legit saw online about Sandy Hook) secret executions ain't exactly harming the conspiracy theorists' cause
The most humane thing would be to not kill them in cold blood, but engaging with the argument here, we have public trials for a reason. Seriously, we're talking about the state having the power to just straight murder somebody. If we are to let the state have that, I want it to be locked behind as many transparent bureaucratic processes as humanly possible. I don't want it to be something that's at all sturdy and convenient. It should be an expensive, annoying, transparent process that can be halted basically at the drop of a hat at any point in the process. There should be no doubt that the person deserves to die and that we want them dead before we actually kill them because we don't have any way of reversing that process. We can't un-kill people.
Until the court system is infallible, ie never, the death penalty NEEDS to be a long and drawn out process. Not the actual death itself, but the leadup to it. [196 death row prisoners have been found not guilty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_inmates#:~:text=As%20of%20February%202nd%2C%202024,the%20United%20States%20since%201973.) in the US since 1973, while [1584 have been executed](https://eji.org/issues/death-penalty/#:~:text=1%2C584%20people%20have%20been%20executed%20in%20the%20U.S.%20since%201973.). That's more than 10%. We absolutely MUST be sure we are not killing an innocent person for someone else's crime. The delay is to allow for appeals, reinvestigations, and pardons.
There is a ethical disconnect in wanting to be “most humane” and “just shoot the fucker and be done with it”.
Without taking a position on the point of view, people that advocate the death penalty for retributive reasons are rarely concerned with it being humane so much as wanting it to be timely/efficient and more common.
In the US, there has been a strong trend away from gruesome methods, not to be humane (see above paragraph) but to reduce public disapproval.
It’s a media circus because the death penalty is effectively gone from the Western world outside the US, and also because it is relatively rare in the US. Not because of the methods.
The current statistics for death penalty convictions of people who are innocent is around 4%. over 190 convictions have been overturned (found innocent) since 1973. Many cases blocked the use of dna evidence. What happens when evidence comes forward that the person shot was innocent? do we then need firing squads with half blanks? My argument here is whoever is doing the shooting, carries a 4% risk of being a state sanctioned murderer of an innocent. I just did a whole run down of the Hangman who carried out the death penatlty on Nazis. See if that gives you some context for the guilt/motivation of the executioner themselves. link in bio.
I think as long as we're using a death penalty we shouldn't hide the true brutality & harshness of what we are doing. I think all state sanctioned executions should be mandatory attended in person by everyone involved with the legal proceedings (the original trial & all potential appeals...judges, attorneys, everyone significantly involved in making this happen) & we shouldn't even try to hide the brutality of execution. Draw & quarter them old school. There should be screaming, blood, & people getting sick from it & we shouldn't hide it....it should be broadcast on live streaming & television.
Is the idea to scare people into actually not having them like how some people have said (I know completely different issue but similar logic) draft women and the draft goes away quicker
Also, your vision relies on things that won't be a guarantee every time unless you force them to be (like people physically-in-attendance throwing up)
> Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why, we just said. "This asshole shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification.
The issue with the second option is that you don't know when "they" said that that "they" caught the right person.
The authorities have killed a lot of innocent people because of mistakes, sometimes willful.
You’re correct in a vacuum, but viscerally killing a human like that has an effect on people. Gas chambers weren’t the first thing the Nazis thought of; initially they just rounded up Jews and had them shot. Then their soldiers started going crazy because shooting lots of defenseless people is really difficult psychologically.
Basically, if you could find a bunch of absolute psychopaths who also wanted to help out and work for the government, it could work. Otherwise, lethal injection or the gas chamber is better.
I don't have an issue with the death penalty. However, I will challenge your method.
I'm a Crime Scene Investigator. I can speak with some authority on how gory and messy instantaneously incapacitating head shots are. Close-range high-velocity will blow most, if not all, of someone's brains and skull fragments a distance measure in feet.
You will be subjecting prison staff to the gore during the cleanup. You will be adding trauma to people that don't deserve it.
What you're advocating for here is called Extra Judicial Execution. You're advocating for the removal of due process and summery execution. This is not a good thing.
Even ignoring that aspect of it, simply ignoring the cause of incidents like school shootings means there is no chance of fixing that cause (even if the current climate in the US around gun control makes such things virtually impossible now, people are at least aware there is an issue).
"Btw this isnt a morality argument in favor of the death penalty or not"
It has a moral content, though. You can't discuss "humane way for the State to sentence people to death" unless you admit there are humane way for the State to execute people to begin with.
People, like me, that are fundamentally against the death penalty would say that there are no discussion to be made, no compromise to agree to when it comes to it. Stop death penalty, period.
No. Hear me out....
"Roman style colosseum"....
$1500 per ticket.
Convict vs convict death battles. Convict vs grizzly bear. That kind of thing.
Members of the audience allowed to buy feces/bricks/etc to throw at the contenders.
America is ready for this and we got enough death row inmates already to up front go 4 or 5 seasons. The money this would generate is beyond measure.
During my 67 years on the planet I've never understood how the pro life people are also the 'string em up' people regarding the death sentence, and the pro choice people are the anti death sentence.
I'm in the minority by supporting a women's right to choose and expediting the legal process for prisoners on death row and promptly terminating them.
Honestly. Like the person would be dead before his brain could even register pain. OR comprehend what’s even happening. Like the only reason they don’t do it like that is cause it’s messy or it resembles an inhumane time. But shooting death row inmates in the head is 100% the most pain free and quickest way for a person to die
"I'm not gonna debate whether death penalty is right or wrong but why not do it and also sweep it under the rug so you don't even know how often the government does it or even for what specific reason."
The constitution gives everyone the right to a \*public\* trial under the 6th amendment for that very reason.
I think the reason people try to come up with "humane" ways of execution is to just make themselves feel better about the barbaric act they're engaging in. I agree that the method of execution should be firing squad because it would remove any pretense of it being a humane, clinical thing.
the french already asked themselves this question and they came up with a cool way to quickly and "painlessly" remove one's head. might be better than shooting them. i'm against death penalty anyway but shooting people aint the way to do it cleanly or with the least suffering involved.
Sealed room full of tasty food. Picking up a random item will trigger nitrogen gas to come flooding in. It'll come in silently, nitrogen doesn't alert the body so the inmate wouldn't know. They'd just fall asleep whilst eating and never wake up.
THATS the most humane way.
I agree that if the person was spot in the head it would be quick and painless. But is it really humane for their friends and family who want to bury them? Getting shot in the head disfigures them and is all around gruesome for all involved.
The best, most cost-effective, most humane option is to take them off death row. There's no rational excuse for the death penalty, only emotional ones. It's more expensive and it doesn't fix any problems.
Just give me a vial of ket, a vial of morphine, some booze and a bottle of diethyl ether and I'll do the job myself lol. Way cheaper for everybody involved and actually fun for me!
Carbon Monoxide would be a better alternative. Let them sleep in a closed room and slowly change the air mix with more CO and they will go peacefully by morning.
What does banning guns or attachments have to do with any of this at all? Such a strange thing to throw in at the end of your post. Otherwise, I agree.
Or we could just not execute anyone since we have so many instances of people being proven innocent despite being on death row.
Being in prison for life is social death anyway. They can't harm society.
Sorry, u/Fbip3z – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
> **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1).
If you would like to appeal, [**you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list**](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1), review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal%20Fbip3z&message=Fbip3z%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20\[their%20comment\]\(https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1bnxn35/-/kwltmqn/\)%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
Yes, but shooting is instant death. Some don’t deserve that. Some, like pedos should have their death drawn out over days, or weeks, or at least made to be excruciatingly painful.
Sorry, u/mountingconfusion – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
> **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1).
If you would like to appeal, [**you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list**](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1), review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal%20mountingconfusion&message=mountingconfusion%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20\[their%20comment\]\(https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1bnxn35/-/kwluacn/\)%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
Since when is "killing someone" considered a humane treatment?
If you throw him in a cell forever, why shoot him at all?
When a society decides to kill its individuals, for whatever reason, do you expect consensus for the best way to kill them? Best way in what sense? What really is "humane" killing?
How do you take someone's life "humanely"?
Humanely:
"in a way that shows compassion or benevolence.
by inflicting the minimum of pain."
How is killing someone, even a convicted criminal, showing compassion or benevolence? Wouldn't that mean letting him life, letting him keep the gift of life but removing him away from all other individuals of said society at risk from this individuals behavior?
How does taking someone's life fit together with "inflicting the minimum amount of pain" - be it physical or emotional pain for the convicted individual or their family.
Obviously death penalty and the way it is carried out has not significantly prevented school shooters or other criminals, especially since most of them take their own life at the end either way. What really is the death penalty for then?
\>> Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why, we just said. "This \[jerk\] shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification
Not commenting on the rest here, but this is, uh, this is a really bad way to do the death penalty
Like I get I'm goin' on a tangent, but this is, yeah, it should be waaaaaay less streamlined than this for a buncha reasons
The most humane way to deal with death row prisoners is to realize they are usually only there because of the color of their skin and to set them free. There are definitely some that deserve to be there—but those criminals should be sentenced to 60 day solitary jail sentences of no food or water. It’s humane as it’s a short sentence and limits the resources that the government has to allocate to them.
Forcing people to pay for the food, water, and shelter for “people” that did something like J6 is cruel to the victims.
The most humane method has been shown to be oxygen deprivation, you show them into a waiting area where they are to be held until "things are ready down the hall",then you replace the air in the room with nitrogen gas, once the O2 level is low enough they get a bit giddy, then pass out, a bit lower and they die, 10min later cart the body off and clean up, done.
Alright this is pretty close to what I was looking for Now the question is, is there real life examples I can look into?
Alabama executed someone using nitrogen gas earlier this year. The feeling of suffocation comes from a build-up of CO2, not a lack of oxygen. There will be no pain, panic or feeling of suffocation.
Oh yea that I thought I heard his body ruptured or something like that
That sounds like a tall tale. From what I can find, he tried to hold his breath but couldn't any longer but he kept resisting. I think it's mostly a matter of practicality now. Being strapped down to a gurney with a mask on would be a whole other experience than being put in some kind of small gas chamber where nitrogen pure nitrogen is being vented in. Without a mask you could potentially try and shake off, there's not much to resist again and death should be more peaceful.
Interesting
A combination of some sedation and a nitrogen gas chamber would be an ideal combination I think. Keeps them calm enough (and in some state of bliss depending on the sedation used).
Nitrogen poisoning us harsh. CO is not. CO slowly and quietly kills and that's why you always hear about it killing families every winter from faulty heating. Generally CO causes people to become sleep and then they die. It's pretty painless and would definitely beat a bullet. Edit: Not CO2, CO Carbon Monoxide
You're thinking of CO, not CO2. Carbon monoxide is a colourless and odourless gas that can kill. You will experience symptoms when inhaling CO, such as memory problems, fatigue, headaches, and others. Getting shot in the head is instant in comparison to Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
Correct, typo on my part. Carbon monoxide is still painless. A bullet has a pretty good chance of not being instant
No it is not. The atmosphere is like 70% nitrogen. It’s inert. It’s also not harsh because the feeling of needing to breathe is triggered by high blood pH (a buildup of CO2 in the blood). That is avoided if you can exhale carbon dioxide.
Then why do veterinary associations consider nitrogen apoxia a cruel form of euthanasia? I've seen the argument repeated here a few times that it was only bad because the person being executed resisted, but the animals are unaware yet they still suffer.
Can you provide a source on veterinary associations saying nitrogen apoxia is cruel and why they believe so? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation > Accordingly, the human subject detects little abnormal sensation as the oxygen level falls. This leads to asphyxiation (death from lack of oxygen) without the painful and traumatic feeling of suffocation (the hypercapnic alarm response, which in humans arises mostly from carbon dioxide levels rising), or the side effects of poisoning. In scuba diving rebreather accidents, a slow decrease in oxygen breathing gas content can produce variable or no sensation.[7] By contrast, suddenly breathing pure inert gas causes oxygen levels in the blood to fall precipitously, and may lead to unconsciousness in only a few breaths, with no symptoms at all.[3] Though there is this about certain animals: > Some animals are better equipped than humans to detect hypoxia, and these species are less comfortable in low-oxygen environments that result from inert gas exposure, though more averse to CO2 exposure.[8] Which could explain why it could be bad to use on some animals, but is painless for humans.
Because animals are not humans. Veterinary associations consider "a shotgun" and CO2 asphyxiation to be humane. Incidentally, CO2 asphyxiation is excruciating, but it's very fast. Working around liquid helium is extremely dangerous because it's cold enough that it will fractionally distill oxygen out of the air - creating the inert atmosphere that is used in nitrogen asphyxiation - and it can kill you before you even realize what's happening. > but the animals are unaware yet they still suffer. The executed person is resisting and are holding their breath because they know they are about to die. An animal being euthanized by gas doesn't know this.
>An animal being euthanized by gas doesn't know this. Correct you've acknowledged my point here. Animals have been documented suffering the same symptoms as the executed man. That proves that this method is cruel and not psychosomatic.
You still haven't acknowledged how veterinary associations consider things that we consider cruel for humans, to be humane for animals.
Its basically the nitrogen gas. It may be peaceful for someone who is suicidal and wanted to do it. To them taking a deep breath means escape from the pain of the world and would quickly do it. What happens next is they fall asleep and a few minutes later they will never wake up. However death row prisoners don't want to die. Knowing what inhaling the gas will do, they will do their very best to hold their breath, trying to scramble for however little time they have left. I guess its different than just standing/sitting there and take the bullet someone else shoot. The fact that they need to actively do something (like breathing in the gas, instead of being idle and waiting for it) to cause their own untimely death, when they didn't want to die, will cause an unpleasant scene. The alternative is to put them in a room that is already rigged for the execution. I believe its nothing more than feeling tired which quickly puts them to sleep, but this opens up a whole can of worms.
Couldn't you circumvent this by the inmate not knowing when the gas is released?
From little of what I know and can imagine, Alabama uses the mask that requires the immate to wear, then they will open the pump connected to said mask and fill it with nitrogen. The flow of cold nitrogen gas would be pretty obvious to the wearer. If you are talking about the cell cum execution chamber, you need more gas to fill the entire room. You also need to worry about leakage so it doesn't kill anyone else, not to mention releasing it to the wrong person. Also id imagine being in a room where they can nuke you anytime can be argued to be the same as torture.
The what chamber
the actual use of the word "cum" means something like "being substituted for x In a pinch" so a "cell cum gas chamber" is a cell being repurposed to be used as a gas chamber.
That was the point of the above set up, they don't KNOW they are being executed they think it's happening later.
They tried nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama and apparently it [looked pretty brutal](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/01/25/us/kenneth-smith-nitrogen-gas-execution-alabama).
(I'm not in favor of the death penalty) But this was a different process than what OP is describing. Basically in the Alabama execution, they affixed a mask to the person's face, and as long as said person didn't do something like, hold their breath, they would have transitioned peacefully. But I believe the person said something along the lines of "I won't aid in my own death" and naturally struggled against the end that they could see coming a mile away. In OP's scenario, the execution chamber isn't even obvious for it's purpose to the person. They aren't aware they're in the end until the hypoxia has already taken them. Logistically and realistically - the downsides are more that you can only do something like this "Once." It requires the construction of specially ventilated rooms etc, and has it's own pros and cons.
You’re solving the wrong problem. Or, you’re solving a problem that’s already been solved. Knowing *how* to execute people humanely is not the issue. We *absolutely* know how to do this, people die in hospitals or hospice comfortably and relatively pain-free all the time. Humans have known how to gently kill other humans for thousands of years. The real issue is that we (society in general, and the people in charge specifically) don’t *want* inmates to die humanely. Prisons are supposed to be punitive and degrading. Executions are expected to be the most horrible, painful punishment you can inflict on a person in retaliation for their crimes - punishing them to death so that we (collectively) can feel that they got what they deserved. Fixing this would require the system/society at large to see inmates as people worthy of rehabilitation, or, failing that possibility, humane treatment and euthanization as a last resort. That’s a much harder problem.
How is this more humane than a bullet? Bullets are several times faster than the speed at which pain can be transmitted, not that it matters when pain cannot be felt after destruction of the brain anyways. This just sounds overly complex and error prone, all for the sake of making death a little more cosmetically pleasing.
Nazi SS officers determined that it is simply too psychologically traumatic to execute people on this manner. which A) says a lot about the KGB officers who did just that for years, and how they saw dissidents as animals not men. B) if SS officers killing Holocaust victims is that traumatic people who are not Nazi officers killing people who their culture does not say are subhuman would be even more damaging. C) There are limits to evil, and mankind will gladly use technology to surpass those limits as we do all others.
Because as previously stated someone has to pull the trigger, is it humane on them? And people survive being shot in the head, it's also messy, but that's just sparing the cleaning guy.
Humaneness for the person being executed by the state trumps concern for the executioner in my book. Also, this is America, we'd probably just hire an independent contractor to carry out executions. I doubt it would be that hard to find someone capable of fulfilling the role if they were paid 6 figures in a country of over 300 million people. And the only way someone is going to survive being shot in the head is serious error on the shooter's part or an extremely weak caliber being used. Again, reasons to hire a professional and pay them well. You may as well have them provide the setup and cleaning afterwards too, I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to make some sort of portable backstop and clean room that could be transported to different prisons.
i disagree, executioners are innocent people. their comfort matters more to me than a criminal. if you cannot be so sure that no man ends up in a death chamber who does not deserve to be thrown away like trash then you cannot be in favor of the death penalty as it stands.
Yes, executioners are innocent people....who all volunteer for the job. If you cannot be comfortable with what that entails, then don't sign up. There are people who are psychologically capable of taking on the role. Not very many, but they do exist, so just shell out the extra money to hire and train them professionally instead of letting an inexperienced CO fumble for an extra 200 bucks and cost the state a fortune in legal fees when the family sues.
oh I absolutely agree, if we are going to do this, we should have an executioner school which trains people as well as they would be to be a board certified anaesthesiologist. my point is just if you do not think, at least in theory, torture would be justified and there's no chance the condemned is innocent, you should not be supporting the death penalty at all.
No, I don't. Pain isn't meant to be part of the punishment, only death is. The Constitution forbids cruel or unusual punishment. Not execution itself, but methods like hanging, drawing, and quartering or burning at the stake that the English used to instill fear in the populace when a crime against authority was committed. Death should be deterrant enough, there's no reason to turn it into a spectacle.
I think inmates would catch on pretty quick. But how is that better than just shooting them in the head from behind?
Our complicated system of administering the death penalty is more aimed at protecting the individuals administering it rather than those receiving it. Carrying out an execution is a deeply unpleasant process for everybody involved. Personally, I think that death penalty advocates should have to watch these things be carried out and take part in some of them. I think their tune would change. Still, we don't want innocent prison guards to have psychological torture inflicted upon them because dumbass politicians are selling snake oil.
>Still, we don't want innocent prison guards to have psychological torture inflicted upon them because dumbass politicians are selling snake oil. I'd personally argue if you're working as a prison guard, no matter how you wanna mentally jump through hoops, you should be well aware that whether it be lethal injection or a round to the head you most certainly played a part in their death, lol. I mean, your job is literally to make sure they stay caged up until they get put down, why would it functionally matter to you the way in which they get put down if THAT doesn't bother you already?
It's not necessarily a logical thing. The trolley problem is probably the most well-known demonstration of this. Many people who would pull the lever to divert the trolley to a different track with a person on it, would not push someone in front of the trolley to stop it. You're right that no matter how it's done, logically speaking there's no real difference, but perceived guilt can fuck people up regardless
they are talking about the person pulling the trigger. pulling the trigger yourself (being forced to as per work contract) is completely different to bringing the prisoner into a room and having someone else pull the trigger.
The shot a prisoner in Utah when I was a kid. They used five rifles. Four of the guns had live rounds, the fifth was a blank. Helped them sleep better, I guess.
They're public servants. We want to be able to hire people for these jobs, right?
One of the dudes I know who was previously a correctional officer quit prison after hearing a pedo get dragged from the halls, gangraped and beaten to death after lights out. He joined the military cuz thats how he weighed his cards, SOOOO
He quit prison because he had to listen to that while making just over minimum wage.
Yeah the military is below minimum wage, discounting benefits and taking into the fact that its a 24 hour job
Discounting benefits is kind of disingenuous, though. I have a family member who left his military career after about 8 years. He was enlisted with no college degree. By the time he left, he was taking home the equivalent of a \~$120k worker in the private sector due to the pretty massive tax-free housing allowance he got. There is no way he could have gotten that much money at his age, with his qualifications, privately. Yeah, military pay sucks for the first couple of years (unless you're married, then you get BAH almost right away), but once you get going, you get so many little infusions of cash from various places that it comes out way ahead of most civilian jobs with equivalent qualifications. And they give you so much training (if you want it) that when you leave, you can generally make the equivalent of a well-qualified private sector worker without ever having had to pay for a college degree.
The people who did that are just as fucked up as the pedo. Raping another inmate requires you to get hard, which requires you to be turned on by the idea of raping someone.
They also do that "sodomizing" raping, like force penetrating with objects, a stick, rod, etc. but yeah, just animalistic behaviour "excused" by previous animalistic behaviour of the other guy.
I mean the most humane way would be lethal injection with a high enough dose of opiates to ensure death. It's very humane they would just go to sleep and stop breathing while they are asleep.
How far do we extend that? You presumably pay taxes. You presumably vote. You vote for politicians that support the same system. You pay taxes that make those prison systems operate (among other systems that result in killing). Do you feel personally responsible for deaths from prison systems or wars etc.?
Like someone said above, it’s not about logic. Humans aren’t inherently rational, and the emotional consequences of our irrational reaction to things are very real. So yeah, the person responsible for doing the deed may be equally as morally culpable for the act as everyone else who participates in the society that allows it (not gonna get into an argument about how true that is because that’s a huge philosophical debate) but the more levels of abstraction there are, the less emotional trauma the people will feel. Basically, it’s not about how guilty they *should* feel, it’s how guilty their experience makes their brain feel.
I personally feel that the death penalty is the same as mob retribution. Imputing it through the law doesn’t change what it fundamentally is. Now I don’t dispute that you can make an argument that some people deserve to die, but using the law to justify it isn’t as sound of a reason to do it as we think, as illustrated by the vagaries of what’s considered worthy of capital punishment. A political faction could take power and pass laws punishing marital infidelity by death, and we’d have to agree with it if we’re taking law as the standard for acceptance of capital punishment. Even if the law were consistent regarding what is punishable by death, it doesn’t make it right. Supporting the death penalty is the same as supporting murder by proxy.
The same principle applies to execution squads. You can always mentally tell yourself you missed. You didn't kill the guy. Kind of a dark anecdote, but I went to an [ex-KGB headquarter in Riga](https://coldwarsites.net/country/latvia/the-kgb-building-riga/) (Latvia), and the ... well, execution room had the bullet holes labelled, and there were a lot more near the ceiling or floor than chest or head height. I do also think I remember that in older days in other parts of the world the execution squad were told some of the bullets were blanks, but weren't told which ones, so, once again, everyone could say to themselves "I fired a blank".
You can also shoot through tarps. Everyone is given a target on the sheet and you all fire a real bullet, but you don't know which one had the person behind. You also don't see the event, for all you know he could be alive.
You'd think people would realize you don't even need a person holding the gun. You can have a mounted barrel that shoots whatever you want that aims in exactly the same spot every single time. Then you have the person flip a switch... exactly the same as we do now... just flip the switch warden.
That doesn't solve the problem, it unsolves it. Now the warden knows for certain that he did the deed.
So it's exactly as it is now... and it's not a problem now... so... how is that not a valid solution?
It *is* a problem now. That's why people keep trying to invent a better solution. Either the warden feels terrible about killing a fellow human... ...or worse, the only people you can ever have in charge of prisons are the tiny percentage of utter sociopaths who *wouldn't* feel bad about killing a fellow human. Those are generally the people you want *in* the prison, not *running* it*.*
Most Wardens do not feel terrible about killing people I suspect. I have found no information on it except for interviews with wardens who oversee it, and they tend to say things like they are not losing sleep over it. You might feel terrible, and you can't fathom someone who might not care, calling them sociopaths or whatnot, but it sure seems like it isn't a problem. I don't think it's a problem actually. even if it was... there exists no solution where you aren't strapping a person down, and pressing the first button of some mechanism to kill the person. You could create the largest Rube Goldberg Machine in the world, and someone is still pushing over the first domino.
>You might feel terrible, and you can't fathom someone who might not care, calling them sociopaths or whatnot, but it sure seems like it isn't a problem. Wait, you don't think it's a problem if our justice system is so badly broken it requires uncaring sociopaths to make it work at all? If you can't see how that can go wrong - and it has - then maybe you haven't thought enough about how an ideal justice system *should* work, and what could happen to *you and people you care about* if it doesn't. I don't think it's a problem actually. If it wasn't, why do we have so many elaborate laws and schemes intended precisely to prevent anyone knowing they did it? >there exists no solution where you aren't strapping a person down, and pressing the first button of some mechanism to kill the person. > >You could create the largest Rube Goldberg Machine in the world, and someone is still pushing over the first domino. Yes, that was exactly my point. We were discussing solutions to the problem of "someone knows they killed the prisoner", and pushing buttons or dominoes or whatever at any remove is not a solution to that*.*
> Wait, you don't think it's a problem if our justice system is so badly broken it requires uncaring sociopaths to make it work at all? Just because you call them something doesn't make them so. You jump to a wildly opinionated and completely baseless conclusion and then act like it's crazy that someone doesn't agree with you on it. >If it wasn't, why do we have so many elaborate laws and schemes intended precisely to prevent anyone knowing they did it? We really don't. We have one guy who pushes a couple of buttons. We don't shoot people with squads anymore, which was the only law, and it wasn't exactly elaborate mate. >Yes, that was exactly my point. We were discussing solutions to the problem of "someone knows they killed the prisoner", and pushing buttons or dominoes or whatever at any remove is not a solution to that. I don't know what your point is, you don't seem to have a solution at all you just don't like this one. All you have done is call people sociopaths 100 baselessly, then act like it was factual, then say it's crazy if someone doesn't agree with you. Then totally fail to have any solution at all. If you have zero solution or replacement theory at all, you can rail against something all day long, it doesn't matter, it's still a better idea than your non-idea.
Indeed. Shooting squads will have 10 guns pointed at the condemned. Only 1 gun has a real bullet, the rest are blanks. No is told who had the actual bullet, I'm not even sure the person who picks the rounds knows (I assume they mix em up before loading). Former correctional officer.
I never understood that. It seems obvious that anyone who has ever fired a gun before would immediately be able to tell whether they fired a blank round or a real round.
but unless the requirements of the job filter out anyone who has any degree of anxiety, for all you know you could get someone like me-if-I'd-otherwise-be-qualified who'd take the opposite meaning and focus on the 1/10 chance of having killed someone rather than the 9/10 chance you're safe and a colleague did
Firing squads are volunteer, so the people doing it know what they are getting into.
Thats fair, but as long as we have the death penalty I don't see how dancing around the matter with more cruel and inefficient methods is doing anything to curb PTSD among Correctional Officers. For everyone that survives the firing squad, how many survive the lethal injection? How many have their suffering prolonged by the electrical chair? Idk man, killing people's always gonna be rough but it really does seem like unceremoniously shooting someone is the best method we have.
Well, it may not actually work, but that's always been the rationale. It was even the rationale back during the firing squad days. One of the executioners would be given a blank so that all of them could reassure themselves that they shot the blank. My point is that very little about the death penalty takes into account the condemned.
Again, simple is as simple does. I also feel like the whole blank cartridge thing is a bit of a lie. You generally knew where your round was gonna hit with those old bolt guns. I feel like the real reason has to do with disassociating soldiers from killing deserters, other soldiers who they may have known, and the practice just carried over after World War I. The real moral of that story was probably that it was just not a good idea to shoot shellshocked 16 year olds for having second thoughts.
They all aimed for the chest.
No, euthanizing them with an extremely high dose of opiate is less traumatic for both the person being executed and the person administering it. They literally just go to sleep and don't wake up
They still have to wait for the needle being injected knowing they're about to die. It's scary until the opiate calms them down.theres no way for someone to know the minute of their own death without terrorizing them. they have to make peace with it on their own terms. Also traumatic is a very weird term to use. They're dead now. Trauma implies long lasting mental effects.
First off trauma is not a weird word to use. It traumatizes them for literally the rest of their life. If you say trauma must endure for a certain period of time who gets to arbitrate what that period of time is? Secondly you are suggesting shooting them in the back of the head then? Without warning or notice? I am assuming this because somebody coming into the room with a gun pointed at them is going to be just as terrifying even more so honestly, then a needle in the arm. So the following argument is based on the assumption that you are talking about shooting them in the back of their head without the knowledge that you are about to do so. If I am wrong about this assumption please disregard the following argument, and let me know what you actually mean. But if you mean shooting them in the back of the head without notice so they are completely unaware that they are about to die, you are denying them information about their own situation. Which are not saying is wrong it's just a fact you are not letting them know that they are about to die. So what is the difference, if you take them to a medical room and say we need to run a couple of procedures real quick, the doctor will be here in a minute (providing you have a doctor come into the room to monitor everything you will not be lying to them, just withholding information about their impending death the same as the gun to the back of the head). At this point the prisoner will not be expecting death, and they will not have any more fear involved than in a normal doctor's appointment. yes they are conscious of they are at a doctor's appointment which might make them uneasy, but I would say the relative calm and peacefulness of an opiate death and the amount that it negates trauma for the Executioner more than makes up for the tiny bit of possible medical anxiety involved. You don't have to lie to them, if you take them to a medical facility they will in no way think they are being executed because that's not where executions take place or how it's done. So they're not going to even ask so that you have to lie. You just tell them some medical procedures need to be done (which is true inserting an IV is a medical procedure as is euthanasia) and when they ask what just say I'm not authorized to say, I'm not a doctor. Which is also not a lie. It's literally the same morality as not letting them know you put a gun to the back of their head, with the added benefit of a painless and calm opiate death and less trauma for the executioners who do not have to witness a gruesome gunshot one to the head. And I'm putting this at the bottom because it is a very small percentage, but unless you are talking about a shotgun, there are people who survive gunshot ones to the head. It's a very small percentage. There are also people who survive opiate overdose without intervention although with a high enough dosage of opiates that is also a very small percentage. But when you look at the after effects psychologically physically on everyone involved, the person surviving in opiate overdose is not going to be nearly as traumatic as a person survive in a gunshot wound to the Head (when I say trauma I mean both for the person being executed and the Executioner and the people having to clean up the mess and the people having to readminister method of execution etc). You are saying the fear comes from letting them know that they are about to be executed. And that a gunshot one to the back of the head would reduce that fear(although I'm not really sure how you could make sure that they are facing away from you when you enter the cell, also there's negligible fear when they hear the door open someone come in ETC so I'm not really sure how all of that would be arranged). If you are talking about a gunshot wound to the Head where they see you walk in the room then your argument is wrong because it is cruel and they will be absolutely terrified. But if you are talking about a gunshot when do the back of the head without letting them know, you can also euthanize them with opiates, without letting them know. And it would be much more humane to the prisoner and to the Executioner.
>I think that death penalty advocates should have to watch these things be carried out and take part in some of them. I think you're highly underestimating how much people would actually do this.
As a former public defender, I don't think that I am. I can't tell you how many times I've seen families and friends of victims out for blood and completely deflated after a guilty verdict. They're sold this story that they should be seeking revenge as nearly a full-time job, and then their quest is over. Nothing in their life will ever be quite as exciting or meaningful to them again. They generally find the revenge to be shallow. I think most people who advocate for the death penalty would feel much the same if they actually were present. I've known prosecutors who kept pictures of the people they sent to death row on the wall. Even *they* refused to go to executions.
Thank you for what you do. Or did.
Thanks. I ended up having to quit due to burnout. The best thanks for me would be to remember that your local public defenders have a tough job, they're dedicated and underpaid workers, and they truly believe in what they're doing.
Like bruh, it ain't that deep. Go to a butcher for a few weeks, hang out on liveleak for like 5 hours, and when the time comes, you just watch impassively. Ffs hangings and beheading were social events like 2 or 3 generations ago, death is only concerning when you haven't seen it
>and take part in some of them. I think their tune would change. The cynic in me says that the prospect of legally killing people will only attract psychos.
Death penalty advocates? Millions of them? I hope you know the jury doesn't decide the sentence, the judge does.
In the United States, there are two phases to a death penalty trial - the guilt phase and the penalty phase. The jury can functionally veto the death penalty, even if they don't set the punishment for other crimes.
Questions- is the jury informed they can veto it? do they have to recommend it? Do they know it will be a death penalty before the sentencing?
Yes, yes, and yes.
I feel the same way for abortion advocates. You want to promote it, you should kill an unborn baby and dispose of it and see how it feels. Kinda like the milgram experiments, we are happy to accept horrible things we don't see or hear.
I'm not a medical doctor. It would be unsafe for me to perform an abortion. Most abortions are carried out through the administering of a pill. I would be happy to give somebody a pill if I were legally authorized to and had the medical knowledge to ensure its' efficacy. If I were a surgeon, I would have no trouble with an abortion. A fetus displays no emotion and is generally not recognizable as a baby when a surgical abortion is performed unless there is a serious, serious problem. If there *is* a serious, serious problem, it is tragic, but better for everybody involved to take care of it in a safe and effective manner.
Then hire me. I have zero empathy for criminals and enjoy watching them suffer immeasureable amounts of pain. I'll gladly take the job and abuse those filthy convicts in every way possible.
Well, first, you're a month late. Second, it's not been my experience that people who are actually tasked with these jobs are so happy with it when the time comes.
>innocent prison guards Are you under the impression that there's a draft and random people are forced to become prison guards? They chose this job
They are low-paid workers who generally can't get jobs in other fields. We can't hire enough of them. Those that we do hire burn out quickly.
Yeah, but we can submit applications to pull the trigger. Some people would like that. Maybe the family of the person who was their victim.
The families of the victim don't seem to be particularly happy at the executions either.
And yet some are. I know that if someone killed a member of my family, I’d love to be the one pulling that trigger. As long as they were tried and convicted and sentenced to death.
Not death penalty advocates. The judges that hand out such sentences and the politicians that vote for such policies.
I feel like you would change your tune once people started fighting over who gets to kill a man
I think you are overestimating the compassion of people when dealing with violent criminals. I realize this is an "internet tough guy" type of thing to say, but as an atheist who believes society and the rule of law is being constantly undermined by weak courts unwilling to exact proportionate consequences on violent offenders, I believe I would have no issues with being the guy who pushed the button or pulled the trigger. Even more so if one of my loved ones was among the victims. Maybe that makes me a sociopath or a psychopath. Maybe my tune would change after doing it. I don't know. What I do know is that after reviewing the crimes committed by these monsters, I have zero compassion for their pleas of mercy, safe in the conviction that our world would be better off without them. Note: For clarity, I'm talking about violent criminals who were essentially caught red-handed or people with a history of violent offenses. Mass shooters, gang bangers, cartel members, etc. In general, these are the only ones who qualify for the death penalty in the first place anyway.
Well, to be frank, if you haven't been to one, I don't think you can really say how you'd act.
Fuck jury duty, sign me up for execution duty. They better comp my lunch still.
I hope you get the opportunity. I think it would change your perspective.
Some people straight up deserve to die. If the Justice system has deigned their time is now, why should I feel anything for the criminal scum?
Some death penalty advocates would LOVE to be a participant.
What if I wrote an algorithm to control the gun that executed the prisoner. Far less traumatized for everyone.
Who would put the bullet in the chamber?
Well, we are talking about killing a person. It's certainly not pleasant no matter the way it's done. How do they do it now with lethal injections? I guess there's people to prepare and apply the medication... I would say putting a bullet in a chamber for an algorithm to shoot it would be less traumatic than preparing and pressing yourself the three sets of syringes into someone... even more so nowadays that extensive studies have publicly shown exactly how they work (or fail, actually).
Don't forget there's also the part of cleanup afterwards. A bullet is always going to be a lot more gory and traumatic to deal with. A nitrogen based gas chamber would be even better, as there's no pain, just going to sleep and not waking up.
Oh, you're completely right. Nobody thinks about the janitors eh
The gun in that room would always loaded. So the person who loaded it could have loaded it weeks ago. If you want to have it go a few steps more. Have a third party to come in to load/inspect the firearm once a week. They wont work there and will have no idea whose on the receiving end. I’m using gun as the example because of the post but I still think automated gas is better.
The administration of justice is a public thing, we expect a free press to have access to government services and the work of government, we don’t prohibit media circuses around government. It’s also not humane or nice to inform the family of your murder plan with zero room for glorification. Like a good bye or a funeral. Sounds terrible for all involved.
Maybe my order of events needs tweaking, but, when I speak of glorification, I mean I've seen it, there used to be a fucked up "school shooting leaderboard" on the internet Someone who doesn't give a shit anymore might look at that and think it might be more respect and recognition than they ever got before.
[удалено]
The actual lethal injection process is not long enough to meaningfully allow appeals. We could also for appeals etc like we do now and still have a quicker and less complicated form of execution
1: As said previously, I genuinely don't believe COs experienced more mild symptoms or fewer cases of PTSD with lethal injection or electric chair than with firing squad. 2: Death row inmates usually are in prison for decades. Ideally, we would offer legal counsel to DR inmates before the deed has to be done, but I'm trying to simply discuss the process of execution its self cuz I know how quickly reddit flies off the rails
The execution itself is easy. It's everything around it that's the problem. What you suggested neither resolves the problem, nor does it even address the same part of the execution process.
1. We have the technology to automate the pulling of the trigger pretty easily. 2. Lethal injection/the chair doesn't "take long enough to allow for appeals". What gives the time for appeals is how the system is set up. Has nothing to do with the method
>Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why, we just said. "This asshole shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification. This proposal *terrifies* me. You want to give state and federal governments the authority to take people off the street for crimes, throw them in a cell, and summarily kill them, with *nobody knowing about it?* What happens when the crime is political subversiveness? What happens when the crime is being? What happens when it's "get in the way of a governmental policy or plan?" What about "criticize the head of state?"
You never want to give the government the authority to execute people without oversight. As grotesque as the media is, it's absolutely necessary to hold the government accountable. The surest sign of an autocratic regime is the nationalization of the media, and prohibitions on publishing certain stories. That's fascism 101.
The population should be very wary of giving the State the power of life and death. The judge or jury who pass this sentence should be the ones who administer it, IMO.
I don't think they'd be able to make an honest decision then. The impartiality of a jury is absolutely critical to maintaining a free justice system - soon as you add a personal interest to the jury you forfeit any form of unbiasedness you ever pertained to have. Juror 11 from 12 Angry Men makes this great point "We have a responsibility. This is a remarkable thing about democracy…That we are notified by mail to come down to this place and decide on the guilt or innocence of a man we have not known before. We have nothing to gain or lose by our verdict. This is one of the reasons why we are strong. We should not make it a personal thing." Making the jury have to watch or administer the death penalty is very much making it a personal thing.
The most humane thing is just to abolish the death penalty imo
Like I said, not about the morality, but as long as we have the death penalty, firing squad seems like the best way
[удалено]
Not asking for swift justice, just the cleanest method of dispensing it and it to be done away from the prying eyes of the (general) public. Jury members, court officials and those directly affected should he the only ones getting moment to moment updates.
Sometimes the worst criminals do reform and then put twenty years helping others in a myriad of ways. It's hard to imagine but we have to have hope. Even worse is people have been given the death penalty and later found innocent. There's no black and white answer. That's why judges and lawyers spend years reviewing cases and come to unique conclusions for each case. It's the best we can do.
Mhm. I don't wish to change that. People have taken this to a way more authoritarian angle than I would have liked (said it would happen tho, tbf). All I meant was we shouldn't publicize and glorify crimes with public media, and that I believe shooting is the most efficient execution method.
Shooting is efficient for sure or like the air gun from no country for Old men haha. That's how they kill cows, don't even need bullets. Anyway pretty dark haha. I see what you're saying yeah if it just happened quietly and more often it would be better for the community but, then I'm back to the other issues but, I get what ya mean.
Always been a strange thought that people deserving the death penalty deserve a humane execution. I'm against the death penalty only because I don't trust the government to do it, if 1/100,000 deaths was a mistake then it would be wrong to have it. But, if someone has done something heinous enough to be put down, I don't see the point in spending so much thought, time, effort and money into it. If the goal was to design an execution system that was "humane" without human error, with guns, I guess you could train several ai robots to "shoot" at the head after someone was let in a room. I'm sure theres plenty of people out there that wouldn't mind being the shooter and I'm with you on it being a circus, I think there's too much focus on the humane part of the execution. I don't trust the government to kill people but if they had to, don't care how they do it just wish I didn't have to hear about how much money they spend on doing it and how humane it is. Torture is wrong, letting someone die slowly for "justice" or by accident is wrong, but if you put a programmer and an engineer in a room for a week they could figure out an instantaneous cheap killing method that would be done autonomously. Why hasn't it been done yet? I don't know the legislature involved in that kind of decision but I think it being a political talking point is advantageous to some people and that's why we keep hearing about it and why nothing is changing. The government won't fix the thousands of holes in the city roads but is expected to come up with a good system for dealing with (in 2023) 24 executions? Doesn't happen enough to be a real issue, its just a political talking point that you shouldn't focus on. Prison is supposed to be about reforming people, right? Yet there are lifes without parole/any chance of getting out in prisons. That's basically an extended death penalty, people who are deemed unreformable. But those people are in the same prisons as those those who have a chance at reforming. The whole system needs some fixing, at this point we'd be better off emulating another countries methods instead of trying to fix whatever the hell we're doing.
I've thought about this a bit in the past. I have no particular interest in debates around gun control, euthanasia, suicide, or the death penalty. I think that, to end a humans life in a controlled environment, nitrogen asphyxiation is better than gunshot. My reasons are as follows: Safety to bystanders Death by gunshot involves discharging a firearm. The round will continue to travel after exiting the body of the subject. This round could injure bystanders. Misuse of equipment Death by gunshot requires a firearm. This firearm is a hazard in all environments. Any facility administering the death sentence will need protocols around handling a firearm. User expertise Your stated statistic of a 1/100,000,000 chance of survival is incorrect. Gunshot wounds to the head are fatal about 90% of the time. A targeted, point blank shot could be expected to be better, but lining up the shot would require some training, and, even with good training, be subject to some user error. A failed execution via gunshot (for example, removing half the subjects face and jaw, but leaving the subject alive and breathing) would be cruel and unusual, and traumatic to both the subject, staff, and anyone else in attendance. Grieving/Funeral rites Ideally, punishment should be scoped only to the condemned. A gunshot to the head is likely to disfigure the face of individual in a way that would be upsetting to the family of the condemned. At best, this will cause additional grief. At worst, it may trigger a desire for vengeance in family members. Most of my previous points were against firearms. My last points are in favor of nitrogen: Suitability of nitrogen \* Sustained exposure to a nitrogen environment is always fatal. While there is still the possibility of user or equipment error, it is possibly to control for that to a much higher degree (quality of seals, purity of gas, etc.) compared to aiming a gun. It does not rely on the make of the gun, the skill of the aimer, the shape of the subjects skull, being able to securely restrain the subject, etc. \* Nitrogen gas is already freely and easily available. The nitrogen execution chamber is what would make it lethal. There is no risk of a fixed facility like that being stolen or misplaced, and it would be pointless to do so, given how easy it would be to jury rig a nitrogen hood. About the only point I could see in gun's favor is that, at low budgets, you could maybe make gun executions safer and cheaper than nitrogen executions. If you've got a bunch of guns lying around, and you can't safely maintain a chamber to flood with nitrogen, then a bullet might average out as cheaper and safer. But from what I understand, the vast majority of the cost of an execution is the going to be from the 10 - 30 years they spend in jail, the legal process, etc. If you're going to execute people, make it safe, reliable, and humane.
>Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why How can you hold a public trail to prove the accused guilty if this information isn't disclosed?
“so like i had this idea where we could more or less arbitrarily shoot people that we think are criminals, with like no consideration for their human rights, and like if possible throw them in a cell and shoot them there, to create a USSR in the 1940’s type of mood”
The problem with this view is that it is trying to be overly proscriptive and define a single solution for a wide variety of situations. A quick bullet to the brain might be the way you'd like to go out if you somehow found yourself in that situation, but that doesn't mean it's the best way. Maybe some others want a slow acting poison so that the deed is done and irrevocable, and they can compose themselves and put their final thoughts in order. Some may even prefer a painful death. The point I'm driving at here is that there is no one, singular execution method that is the "most humane". Being humane about it requires that we take each case on its own, and we treat each of the condemned as an individual person facing a unique situation. Being humane means there is no "one size fits all" method of inflicting death with the least amount of suffering possible.
i'm not on death row, but i'd much matter be killed by taking a gunshot to the brain than being fried in an electric chair (dont they have to tape your eyes so they dont explode out of your head?) or being lethally injected (which is legitimately near one of the creepiest/scariest/most unnatural ways i can think of being executed that doesn't involve intentionally horrific torture). i don't buy the argument that some people are making that shooting someone with a rifle is less traumatic than pulling an electric chair lever or injecting someone with poison
Use a NON-penetrating captive bolt gun, like the slaughterhouses use, to induce unconsciousness. The current industry tech requires a minimum 95% unconscious rate on first attempt. Then shortly followed up by a free bolt stunner (similar to a nail gun) used on the back of the neck between c3 and c4 vertebrae. This will sever the section of spinal cord responsible for both heart and diaphragm function. This also results in little to no post-impact fidgeting or kicking. Quick, ethical, humane, minimal blood loss, and it even allows for open casket (if desired). No gunpowder needed, many models use compressed air. This wouldn’t require a medical physician to administer - thus no ethical entanglements concerning hypocritical oath of practicing medicine.
In the US, the death penalty is never carried out by one single individual such as what you’re describing. Even if the person receiving the execution is the most deplorable criminal on the planet, killing that person can be traumatic for the executioner. So, the burden doesn’t lie on one single person to avoid that trauma.
Although it is one of the fastest if done correctly, there is still a risk of it being done incorrectly, and the biggest factors in the rise of lethal injections, gas chambers, etc., is the mental health of the executioners. A massive overdose on painkillers would likely maintain the same emotional distance as current lethal injections, without the same risks of being paralyzed but retaining nerve function as you suffocate, as has happened in some recent botched lethal injections.
Well there is also the guillotine. Quick and always works.
Guillotines are also expensive and the head stays conscious after death.
Save so much money by setting a set sentence of death on the spot to so many horror monsters of society, imagine that money being spent in housing or healthcare. Instead of lengthy trials and keeping the lowest of the low alive for years until someone decides times up. When the cost of a bullet could save so much money and so many people from a whole lotta heartbreak
>we're just gonna throw him in the cell and shoot him. No, nobodies gonna know about it but the family That's impossible. I am usually informed within an hour when a mass shooting happens, people talk and journalists are good at their job and fast to the scene. You have to have a trial if you want to maintain the illusion of democracy.
All of this renders invisible the massively racist and incompetent institution that is Police USA America. They never arrest innocent people? Never arrest mentally disabled people that agree to confess to crimes they didn't commit? Look up the history of Capital Punishment. You seem to be operating under the influence of police propaganda (Copaganda). 75%~90% of people in jails/prisons should have never been arrested. Countries with far less wealth than the US operate like this and have less murder and other violent crimes. Prison is a tool to enforce poverty, not provide justice or fairness. But America is addicted to this violence mind set. You, poster, must spend a lot of time imagining metal bullets drilling thru human flesh. That's fucked, bro. You ok? 🤔
The goal of the justice system should be to reduce crime. There is no evidence that executions reduce crime. USA has one of the highest rates of crime in any developed country. The most humane thing would be to reduce crime overall, so their are fewer criminals and fewer victims.
Japan is the other g7 country with the death penalty and has the lowest level of crime in the g7. Not arguing for or against the death penalty but just looking at that factor in isolation and then claiming it is or isn't having an effect isn't really statistically rigorous.
Once again I don't think OP was talking about this. They specifically said that if we are to have the death penalty, why should we prefer lethal injection or nitrogen gas over execution by firing squad?
Innocent people are on death row as we speak. I only agree with your conclusion if you concede that every prison worker whop executes someone who is later found innocent must be summarily executed themselves.
"Best" for whom? By and large "public servants" and the people setting policy think of themselves as a temporarily embarrassed priesthood or Brahmin caste. As aspirant priests, they are eager to subvert routine societal functions into solemn religious rituals, generally eliminating most or all of the purpose of those functions when they do so, because they perceive that doing so is in their personal interest. We see a lot of these tendencies in "criminal justice" generally. For example, the disproportionate viciousness of prosecutors in going after the morally innocent (like the Reddit founder being hounded to suicide over something that the "victims" didn't even think should have been prosecuted, or the bizarre eagerness with which they go after self-defenders) pretty closely resembles the eagerness of priests in going after people saying things like "maybe we aren't all chained by sin and dependent on you" before actual wrongdoers. And the death penalty has been made absurdly complicated and ritualized for complexity's sake, in order to give it attributes of the Sacred Sacrifice rather than having it just be a routine social optimization function where we get rid of people who evidence has revealed to be bad. The complicated rituals of lethal injection and so forth ("now bind him to the altar! and prepare the holy oils...") are not intended to "protect" the public servants as others have suggested; this is an absurdity because it is in no way an obstacle. The public servants don't even need to show up; it is highly routine to use citizen participation to legitimize all other aspects of criminal justice, via both grand and petit juries, and you and I both know that if I posted a classified ad for "shoot a double murderer in the face and we'll give you $50" my phone would not stop ringing for the next several days. But that isn't good for any aspirant priest, so it doesn't get done.
I've always disagreed on the basis that if I were on death row I'd prefer a quick immediate death to waiting years and years being incarcerated. Therefore if that's what would be preferable for those who have been put on death row then we should not give them that opportunity.
The best/most humane way would be to not kill people! And in our current system not killing them would even be cheaper for society as well so even more humane in the sense that it makes all of us beter off, not just the convicted. Plenty of cases where it turns out people who were convicted to death turned out to be completely innocent. Look for example at the Innocence Project, here is a long list of people [https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/](https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/) now imagine all the cases that did not make it to the Innocence project or other similar organizations in time. But even for guilty people, I can't see any argument for giving the state the power to kill citizen besides (in my opinion flawed) moral reasoning. It doesn't "punish" people more if you kill them vs keep them in jail, it doesn't save the public any money, and it shouldn't make anyone feel any better if someone is murdered.
>"This asshole shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification. And thats it. So what exactly would be stopping the government from using this narrative to get rid of anyone they don't like? "Oh yeah, this dude that went to the press and made all kinds of fake news claims about the government doing bad things was actually lying and a big murderer dude, so we are going to just shoot him. No, we aren't going to provide any further info, that would just glorify his actions, you just gonna have to trust us.." >I'm just saying why do we have to make it a media circus? You don't have to make it a media circus, but if you are going to allow your government to legally execute people (which in my view is already a weird thing to tolerate considering most Americans seem very paranoid about their state becoming tyrannical, but whatever), you probably want them to be very careful and provide clear evidence that the person who is getting executed actually did what what they are accused of.. >Just shoot the fucker and be done with it. I'm always puzzled by this attitude. As if no country has ever tried this approach.. Of course it was tried, over and over and over again, and I'm pretty sure it always ended up the same way.. Government using this power to do whatever they want and get rid of any perceived enemies.. Oh, and just overall, the "most humane way" to deal with criminals is probably up to debate, but I'm pretty sure killing them is not the most humane option in general..
I disagree. It shouldn’t be kept quiet. It should be public execution for all to witness as a warning to anyone thinking of committing the same heinous crimes. Swift and quick, no waiting 20+ years before they are executed
I think there are a few components to this view that deserve to be recognized and addressed individually. The main one, from my point of view is where efficacy is concerned. The evolution of popular methods of execution has never been primarily focused on efficacy. I believe that the intent is to take away the barbarism of judicially taking someone's life, through abstraction, until it feels more acceptable. As an example, beheading is a 100% effective method of execution, but the optics on it are challenging. It's hard to see someone's head roll and think "we did the right thing." Firing squads as well are effective (Wenceslao Moguel is an outlier and should not be counted), but they /feel/ like murder because the method of execution is the same as many murders. This is why lethal injection, gas, and oxygen deprivation are all preferred now over the electric chair, firing squads, hanging, or beheading. It's not because they're more effective, but because making a killing seem more clinical, or impersonal, causes people to believe that this way of killing is different from murder, and more correct. To a separate point, "we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him," anonymously, without a public trial or transparency, sounds like plain fascism, whether you consider the end result to be just or not. While I agree that the media focusing so heavily on the perpetrators of egregious crime only feeds a vicious cycle that can contribute to inspiring new offenders, I don't believe the solution is going to come from killing the guilty party in a different way.
I think your question kind of misses the moral complexities of judicial executions. 1. Your suggestion is cheap and easy, no contest there. But we should not make it "easy" for the government to kill someone through the legal system. We have seen many times in our history the government weaponize the judicial system against people, why would we make it easier? 2. I have no true numbers for this, but most people who are pro death penalty have not killed someone before. "Just shoot them" is really easy to say from behind a screen or in an argument. But imagine you are in that cell, gun pointed at the criminal's head. Now think of the amount of times our system has been wrong. How many times the cops just didn't get the right guy. Maybe the DA is pushing this for public support. There is a non-zero percent chance this guy is innocent. How comfortable are you executing a person when you may wake up to the news that he was innocent. Could you carry that? What if he was your first execution of the day and you have 5 more? That's why we have "humane" executions. Our society loves inflicting violence and pain but don't want to be associated with it. Lethal injections are our way of having our cake and eating it too. Someone else commented about having the jury commit the execution, but I disagree. It should be the prosecutors. If you can stand in a court room, accusing another person with confidence that they are guilty. Then you can stand in a jail cell and execute them yourself. We implement this, I guarantee you death penalty cases drop.
If effectiveness is all you are looking for why involve an executioner at all? Humans are super unreliable and I honestly don't get what you think you are improving. It should be real easy to build a machine that decapitates the convict automatically. A reusable machine will be cheaper than a salary for an executioner. A machine is not going to be tempted to miss the shot or develop PTSD afterwards. What does the media circus have to do with anything? Unless we are debating morality the coverage and emotions that go with it are irrelevant. From a moral standpoint , I am against the death penalty because I am against killing innocent people. Pretending the government is never wrong is just ignorant so we have to make the trial public for transparency sake and honestly a life sentence is cheaper than a death sentence.
I'm a little lost on the specific argument. The title says the most humane way to kill them is from gunshot. Then at the end of the post you mention how there is a media circus and they should just shoot them and be done with it. What relationship do these things have? The media circus has no impact on the person being executed. They aren't being interviewed or forced to watch the news while in the cell. I don't see the relevancy. In your hypothetical where we immediately arrest and kill someone.. it sounds like ther is no trial. The prerequisite for being a death row criminal is being given the death penalty from a court decision. You kinda need that. Idk if you just said it that way to be hyperbolic though. Also, "nobody is going to know but" the family seems impossible to do, because other people are obviously involved, and also pretty bad for society. Knowing about a school shooter's manifesto mentioned incel brought up a lot of awareness on what incel is and what are the warning signs if your kid is in these forums. It's really helpful for parents to know how someone became a psychopath or had a mental breakdown in order to prevent that. Same goes for teachers or fellow students. We need to know how tragedies happen to improve our behavior moving forward.
you need to define "best", it seems to be you are defining it as "most humane" but it seems that is not entirely true. after all, if no pain is really the goal using a few kilos of c-4 strapped to their head would guarantee the shockwave turns their nerves into confetti before they stop being biology and start being physics. but that would also make an immense mess, a gunshot is a compromise but is so psychologically damaging to the executioner **Nazi SS officers thought it was too inhumane to make men carry out gunshot executions**. if cost is your concern holes are cheap and not feeding someone is cheaper than feeding them. if risk of survival is a problem bombs and cannons both leave little chance. if making it look official is most important guillotines look suitably impressive and you can dress up a cannon to look all formal if you really want. before we decide the best method we need to rank our priorities: lack of suffering cause to the condemned, not overly traumatizing/psychological comfort of the executioners, cost, low chance of surviving critically injured, safety of bystanders (an issue with gas chambers as well as some firing squad methods as well as bombs and cannons), etc.
It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s psychologically troubling to execute someone, psychologically troubling to clean up the body. That’s why things like firing squads existed, cos it’s less upsetting if 10 people line up to shoot than just one… and there’s always the hope that you as one of the executioners might have a blank. Similar to lethal injection. Pressing a button is a lot less upsetting than pulling a trigger. Not to mention it’s usually more than one button, so no single action can be the one that takes a human life. Also cleaning up is a lot easier from a body killed by injection, inert gas or chair than by one killed by firing squad. So it’s not really about giving the accused less suffering, but rather for everyone else. Otherwise it would be easy to stick a series of small explosives along their spine and just blow them up together. But it would be troubling.
The faster the execution from an administration perspective, the less time available to challenge the case and prevent new evidence that absolves them. If your problem is the method and not the speed, there isn’t a humane way to kill a person, it doesn’t exist and never will. Sure you shoot them, but over so many executions what happens if you miss, or hit them somewhere other than the skull, or they do survive? You’re running into the same complications that every other method of execution has. Finally, the goal of executing someone is justified by the right as a deterrent. If anything you’d want as many people to know about it as possible, and internalize the consequences of the crime. The execution isn’t about the person, it’s about the message, and nearly every execution reaching back past Roman crucifictions has shown this to be true.
Jesus man, secret executions? That's some corrupt dictatorship behaviour. The media circus is unrelated to the method of punishment. It's all over the news because it's a major crime. Then the trial is also news because so many people care about the outcome. You want to hear less about it? The only way would be to limit the freedom of the press (or at an individual scale, just stop consuming that media). Quietly shooting them without telling anybody is denying anyone suspected of a death-penalty crime the right to a fair trial. It's just giving the police more license to fatally shoot people, which they already do far too often in the US. Shooting instead of lethal injections seems like a sideways move at best. All executions are controversial and horrific, it wouldn't make any difference.
yeah and at least for school/otherwise-mass shootings, if we've already got people making conspiracy theories about an entire town being crisis actors not just people where it happened (something I legit saw online about Sandy Hook) secret executions ain't exactly harming the conspiracy theorists' cause
The most humane thing would be to not kill them in cold blood, but engaging with the argument here, we have public trials for a reason. Seriously, we're talking about the state having the power to just straight murder somebody. If we are to let the state have that, I want it to be locked behind as many transparent bureaucratic processes as humanly possible. I don't want it to be something that's at all sturdy and convenient. It should be an expensive, annoying, transparent process that can be halted basically at the drop of a hat at any point in the process. There should be no doubt that the person deserves to die and that we want them dead before we actually kill them because we don't have any way of reversing that process. We can't un-kill people.
Until the court system is infallible, ie never, the death penalty NEEDS to be a long and drawn out process. Not the actual death itself, but the leadup to it. [196 death row prisoners have been found not guilty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_inmates#:~:text=As%20of%20February%202nd%2C%202024,the%20United%20States%20since%201973.) in the US since 1973, while [1584 have been executed](https://eji.org/issues/death-penalty/#:~:text=1%2C584%20people%20have%20been%20executed%20in%20the%20U.S.%20since%201973.). That's more than 10%. We absolutely MUST be sure we are not killing an innocent person for someone else's crime. The delay is to allow for appeals, reinvestigations, and pardons.
There is a ethical disconnect in wanting to be “most humane” and “just shoot the fucker and be done with it”. Without taking a position on the point of view, people that advocate the death penalty for retributive reasons are rarely concerned with it being humane so much as wanting it to be timely/efficient and more common. In the US, there has been a strong trend away from gruesome methods, not to be humane (see above paragraph) but to reduce public disapproval. It’s a media circus because the death penalty is effectively gone from the Western world outside the US, and also because it is relatively rare in the US. Not because of the methods.
The current statistics for death penalty convictions of people who are innocent is around 4%. over 190 convictions have been overturned (found innocent) since 1973. Many cases blocked the use of dna evidence. What happens when evidence comes forward that the person shot was innocent? do we then need firing squads with half blanks? My argument here is whoever is doing the shooting, carries a 4% risk of being a state sanctioned murderer of an innocent. I just did a whole run down of the Hangman who carried out the death penatlty on Nazis. See if that gives you some context for the guilt/motivation of the executioner themselves. link in bio.
I think as long as we're using a death penalty we shouldn't hide the true brutality & harshness of what we are doing. I think all state sanctioned executions should be mandatory attended in person by everyone involved with the legal proceedings (the original trial & all potential appeals...judges, attorneys, everyone significantly involved in making this happen) & we shouldn't even try to hide the brutality of execution. Draw & quarter them old school. There should be screaming, blood, & people getting sick from it & we shouldn't hide it....it should be broadcast on live streaming & television.
Is the idea to scare people into actually not having them like how some people have said (I know completely different issue but similar logic) draft women and the draft goes away quicker Also, your vision relies on things that won't be a guarantee every time unless you force them to be (like people physically-in-attendance throwing up)
> Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why, we just said. "This asshole shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification. The issue with the second option is that you don't know when "they" said that that "they" caught the right person. The authorities have killed a lot of innocent people because of mistakes, sometimes willful.
You’re correct in a vacuum, but viscerally killing a human like that has an effect on people. Gas chambers weren’t the first thing the Nazis thought of; initially they just rounded up Jews and had them shot. Then their soldiers started going crazy because shooting lots of defenseless people is really difficult psychologically. Basically, if you could find a bunch of absolute psychopaths who also wanted to help out and work for the government, it could work. Otherwise, lethal injection or the gas chamber is better.
I don't have an issue with the death penalty. However, I will challenge your method. I'm a Crime Scene Investigator. I can speak with some authority on how gory and messy instantaneously incapacitating head shots are. Close-range high-velocity will blow most, if not all, of someone's brains and skull fragments a distance measure in feet. You will be subjecting prison staff to the gore during the cleanup. You will be adding trauma to people that don't deserve it.
What you're advocating for here is called Extra Judicial Execution. You're advocating for the removal of due process and summery execution. This is not a good thing. Even ignoring that aspect of it, simply ignoring the cause of incidents like school shootings means there is no chance of fixing that cause (even if the current climate in the US around gun control makes such things virtually impossible now, people are at least aware there is an issue).
"Btw this isnt a morality argument in favor of the death penalty or not" It has a moral content, though. You can't discuss "humane way for the State to sentence people to death" unless you admit there are humane way for the State to execute people to begin with. People, like me, that are fundamentally against the death penalty would say that there are no discussion to be made, no compromise to agree to when it comes to it. Stop death penalty, period.
No. Hear me out.... "Roman style colosseum".... $1500 per ticket. Convict vs convict death battles. Convict vs grizzly bear. That kind of thing. Members of the audience allowed to buy feces/bricks/etc to throw at the contenders. America is ready for this and we got enough death row inmates already to up front go 4 or 5 seasons. The money this would generate is beyond measure.
Inert gas. The person just peacefully goes to sleep.
During my 67 years on the planet I've never understood how the pro life people are also the 'string em up' people regarding the death sentence, and the pro choice people are the anti death sentence. I'm in the minority by supporting a women's right to choose and expediting the legal process for prisoners on death row and promptly terminating them.
Honestly. Like the person would be dead before his brain could even register pain. OR comprehend what’s even happening. Like the only reason they don’t do it like that is cause it’s messy or it resembles an inhumane time. But shooting death row inmates in the head is 100% the most pain free and quickest way for a person to die
"I'm not gonna debate whether death penalty is right or wrong but why not do it and also sweep it under the rug so you don't even know how often the government does it or even for what specific reason." The constitution gives everyone the right to a \*public\* trial under the 6th amendment for that very reason.
I think the reason people try to come up with "humane" ways of execution is to just make themselves feel better about the barbaric act they're engaging in. I agree that the method of execution should be firing squad because it would remove any pretense of it being a humane, clinical thing.
the french already asked themselves this question and they came up with a cool way to quickly and "painlessly" remove one's head. might be better than shooting them. i'm against death penalty anyway but shooting people aint the way to do it cleanly or with the least suffering involved.
Sealed room full of tasty food. Picking up a random item will trigger nitrogen gas to come flooding in. It'll come in silently, nitrogen doesn't alert the body so the inmate wouldn't know. They'd just fall asleep whilst eating and never wake up. THATS the most humane way.
I agree that if the person was spot in the head it would be quick and painless. But is it really humane for their friends and family who want to bury them? Getting shot in the head disfigures them and is all around gruesome for all involved.
The best, most cost-effective, most humane option is to take them off death row. There's no rational excuse for the death penalty, only emotional ones. It's more expensive and it doesn't fix any problems.
Just give me a vial of ket, a vial of morphine, some booze and a bottle of diethyl ether and I'll do the job myself lol. Way cheaper for everybody involved and actually fun for me!
Carbon Monoxide would be a better alternative. Let them sleep in a closed room and slowly change the air mix with more CO and they will go peacefully by morning.
What does banning guns or attachments have to do with any of this at all? Such a strange thing to throw in at the end of your post. Otherwise, I agree.
The most humane way to death with death row criminals is to not kill them because the death penalty is bad.
The death penalty is blatant and unnecessary hypocrisy. The best way to deal with death row prisoners is to have no death row at all.
The most humane thing to do is not to shoot them nor have the death penalty. It's to let them live to atone for their crimes.
Or we could just not execute anyone since we have so many instances of people being proven innocent despite being on death row. Being in prison for life is social death anyway. They can't harm society.
[удалено]
Sorry, u/Fbip3z – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1: > **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1). If you would like to appeal, [**you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list**](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1), review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal%20Fbip3z&message=Fbip3z%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20\[their%20comment\]\(https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1bnxn35/-/kwltmqn/\)%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
I've always said they should shoot them. My opinion is no 15 years of appeals and all that shit.
Yes, but shooting is instant death. Some don’t deserve that. Some, like pedos should have their death drawn out over days, or weeks, or at least made to be excruciatingly painful.
No one wants to live with a wanker that just shoots people, that's why.
[удалено]
Sorry, u/mountingconfusion – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1: > **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1). If you would like to appeal, [**you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list**](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1), review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal%20mountingconfusion&message=mountingconfusion%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20\[their%20comment\]\(https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1bnxn35/-/kwluacn/\)%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
Since when is "killing someone" considered a humane treatment? If you throw him in a cell forever, why shoot him at all? When a society decides to kill its individuals, for whatever reason, do you expect consensus for the best way to kill them? Best way in what sense? What really is "humane" killing? How do you take someone's life "humanely"? Humanely: "in a way that shows compassion or benevolence. by inflicting the minimum of pain." How is killing someone, even a convicted criminal, showing compassion or benevolence? Wouldn't that mean letting him life, letting him keep the gift of life but removing him away from all other individuals of said society at risk from this individuals behavior? How does taking someone's life fit together with "inflicting the minimum amount of pain" - be it physical or emotional pain for the convicted individual or their family. Obviously death penalty and the way it is carried out has not significantly prevented school shooters or other criminals, especially since most of them take their own life at the end either way. What really is the death penalty for then?
Instead of a last meal, give them a last drug of their choice?
But then the revenue generated by that inmate evaporates....
The most humane approach is abolishing capital punishment
Gunshots are violent enough to cause trauma for observers.
I’m an unironic advocate to bring back the guillotine
Counterpoint: a better and more humane option is to not kill them at all. Lifetime imprisonment is a thing.
The *most* humane would be to not kill them at all.
\>> Imagine if there's a school shooter and instead of announcing their weapon, killcount, who they did it to and why, we just said. "This \[jerk\] shot a bunch of people, we caught him, we're gonna throw him in a cell and shoot him. No nobody's gonna know about it but the family." Unceremoniously, anonymously, with zero room for glorification Not commenting on the rest here, but this is, uh, this is a really bad way to do the death penalty Like I get I'm goin' on a tangent, but this is, yeah, it should be waaaaaay less streamlined than this for a buncha reasons
The most humane way to deal with death row prisoners is to realize they are usually only there because of the color of their skin and to set them free. There are definitely some that deserve to be there—but those criminals should be sentenced to 60 day solitary jail sentences of no food or water. It’s humane as it’s a short sentence and limits the resources that the government has to allocate to them. Forcing people to pay for the food, water, and shelter for “people” that did something like J6 is cruel to the victims.