This has been a recurring topic on this blog. What on earth could be easier than taking a human life? There are a million ways to do it. It happens every day, the taking of life, and it is accomplished with little difficulty by people who range from highly intelligent to kind of stupid. Physical strength might be an advantage, but it is in no way required. Ordinary people who resolve to murder someone succeed most of the time, but when the government undertakes to murder someone, all of a sudden it's an unconquerable dilemma. What's all the hubbub, bub?
All of the traditional methods of execution have been discarded as either too brutal or too messy, yet the United States remains determined to murder miscreants in numerous categories. They settled on lethal injection in or around 1977. What followed was a waking nightmare for the condemned prisoners, their families, and the public employees charged with administering the “injection.”
After endless stays and appeals, the process itself bears no resemblance to a simple injection. You'd think that it would be easy. Just fasten the lucky winner to a Lazy-Boy (TM) chair and give him a gentle shot of Fentanyl to cool him out. Let him relax for a short time listening to his favorite music. He may nod out, or he will at least be on Cloud-9. Then administer the fatal dose of Fentanyl. No one, I repeat, no one survives a massive overdose of Fentanyl. Hell, dozens of people every day die from accidental recreational overdoses of Fentanyl, or heroin, or Oxy. None of the doomed prisoners would complain about this type of execution, and it would be much less emotionally damaging to the prison staff as well. So of course we're not going to do that.
Instead of doing it so gently and quickly, every death-penalty state has some kind of contraption to administer multiple drugs in a particular order. They create special tables shaped like crucifixes that the celebrant must be strapped onto. The lucky winner is then catheterized and hooked up to the rather large, multi-colored array of muscle relaxers and poisons that will kill him. All of this takes time, and is done before a live studio audience. The condemned prisoner can watch as the first chemical comes down the tube and into his arm, followed by the second, and the third. This drama is sometimes followed by the death of the person on the strange table. Sometimes it goes horribly wrong, and the audience is treated to long periods of moaning and squirming. Mistakes are made with the order of the chemicals, or the nature of the chemicals, and the target of the enterprise may only start screaming, and straining at his restraints, while not dying at all. Someone ordered the wrong chemicals, or the usual chemicals were not available and substitutions were made on the fly. Sorry, Charlie! In which galaxy could this be considered a humane method of execution? There is nothing remotely humane about it in my estimation.
Our increasingly deranged president has directed the Department of Justice to forget all of this lethal injection crap in favor of a return to more traditional methods of execution. Methods that are even less humane than lethal injection. He's a death-penalty fan, evidently, and he's been on a tear since he lost the election trying to kill as many condemned prisoners as he can before January 20th. I guess he wants to speed up the process.
He wants a return to death by hanging; death in electric-chairs; death in gas chambers; and death by firing squad. All of these things are no less problematic than those stupid lethal injections.
Most of the shortcomings of these methods are well known, and were included in the articles that have been appearing on the subject. They include:
Hanging is a mathematical challenge. It always has been. There are many variables. The weight of the prisoner to be hanged; the sturdiness of the neck that will hopefully be snapped; the dimensions of the prisoner's head; the crafting of a proper noose in the proper size. Drop the person too far, and the head tears off; not far enough, and the person dangles awkwardly and slowly strangles.
Electric chairs are also subject to variables. Not enough electricity and the subject slowly boils in their own juices. Too much electricity and the subject may burst into flames. Wasn't it Florida that had an electric-chair with a cute nickname? I can't think of it right now. Was it Old Sparky? That thing was over-amped. Flames and sparks would shoot out of the condemned prisoner's eyes and ears.
Gas chambers were a stupid idea in the first place. For one thing, doesn't it seem like something that Ming the Merciless would try to do to Flash Gordon? You get the old strapped to a chair routine, with windows for the audience to see the process, and then the release of some kind of poison gas. This all went wrong frequently. In practice, the gas had wildly different effects on the various celebrants. Life clings to some people like barnacles cling to a battleship, so there would often be a prolonged period of moaning.
The firing squad may be the most difficult to pull off. That's too many shooters to manage comfortably. Men, and these days they would make sure to include women in the squad, do not take easily to this duty. How many in the squad? Between five and ten? Minus the one whose gun is loaded with blanks? They're supposed to shoot to kill a person who is bound to a post? Or these days more likely strapped to a wall? No way this is going to go smoothly. Most firing squad members are going to avoid firing the death-shot. This is what was happening in the last states to give up the practice. Seven man squad, one with blanks, and the prisoner would end up with six non-fatal bullets in him, hanging there slowly bleeding to death. In a proper traditional firing squad, the captain of the squad would have approached the victim and shot him in the head with his pistol, that's the coup de grace, die Gnadenschuss (the mercy shot). It appears that we are out of the mercy business at this point.
Why has Trump called for these old-school punishments to be brought back now? Is this another case of red meat for his base? The low-functioning portion of his base at least. I'm sure that his rich fans are just as horrified as the rest of us. Secretly, that is, because we know that there is nothing lurid and stupid enough to scare them away from those glorious tax cuts, with the hope of further cuts to follow.
I have hated the Twenty-First Century with a passion almost from its first day, and certainly since that pathetic circus that was Bush v. Gore. The whole thing has been an unfunny carnival of idiocy, from W. Bush throwing away a budget surplus on a foolish tax cut for the rich (“it's your money!”), up to and including whatever Trump is Tweeting about today. The cherry on the Cake of Fools is the fact that seventy-one million voters cast their ballots to reelect Donald Trump, who is manifestly a bad person, a bad businessman, a bad politician, and the worst president in history. What were they thinking? Oh, that's right, Q-Anon, etc., they were saving America from those socialist Demon-Rats. This election will long be taught as the greatest failure in the history of Political Science.
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