Ohio Turns Murderer Into Victim In Only Twenty-Six Minutes

It might surprise long term readers to discover that I am not against the death penalty in every situation.  Usually it's a bad idea, and I would never recommend it for any economic crime at all, including crimes in the commission of which innocent people were killed.  It's a bad idea if some guy kills his wife, or visa versa, no matter what the circumstances.  But in cases of particularly heinous murders, like sexually motivated child murders, sure, go ahead, kill the convicted murderer.  In cases like that it's not fair to leave them alive, up at the prison.  Not fair to the parents of the victims.  Give the parents closure, execute the murderer already.  But how?

Up on the muddy banks of the Cayahouga River (sp), they put a guy to death last week in such a spectacularly misguided fashion that it has become quite a sensation.  It was one of those "chemical executions," where they strap the guy down in some Doctor Evil kind of rig with a big machine behind him with three huge cylinders of colored chemicals that will be pumped into an IV over the course of time.  And they tried a new formula out on this poor guy!  Not on a monkey, or a dog or something, something that no one would miss or file a law suit over.  No, they tried out some new bunch of chemicals out on this human being, with witnesses, with cameras, with his family members present.  What the fuck is wrong with Ohio?  They used to be so cool.

Dennis McGuire was the poor victim's name.  The state of Ohio turned him into a victim, and turned his family into plaintiffs in what is sure to be a giant court case.  Twenty-six minutes it took poor Dennis to die!  Strange noises were coming out of him!  Why, it was torture!

I hate to tell you, but hooking those poor devils up to a table like that and injecting them slowly, methodically, with one thing after an other, is always torture.  This time it was just a little bit more obviously torture.  The whole thing is plum stupid, in fact.

What, I wonder, would be wrong with just giving them a shot of pentothal first to knock them out?  I can tell you, that takes about 0.1 seconds.  I had an operation once, and the anesthesiologist said to me, "you're going to feel the needle, and then I want you to count backwards from one hundred."  He said this with a straight face.  I remember feeling the needle and forming the present intention to say "one hundred."  The next thing I remember is waking up the next morning with tubes hanging out everywhere.

After my shot, they opened me up like a gutted fish, searched around for my poor, exploded appendix, picked up and semi-removed my intestines so they could cut off the parts that had gone wrong, sewed up the cuts, hosed out the whole body cavity to wash away the infectious puss, stuffed the guts back in and stapled me up.  I was none the wiser, inhabiting at the time a dream world far, far away.  That's after a shot that took 0.1 seconds to knock me all the way out.

So give Mr. Murderer a shot of pentothal, wait about a minute and a half, and then just inject bubbles into his veins.  Why even waste money on poison?  The bubbles will kill him quickly, and he won't be aware in the slightest that anything is happening at all.  The whole thing takes two minutes.

What is Ohio considering?  Firing squads!  As Ripley said in "Aliens," "did IQ's suddenly drop while I was away?"  Are they so enamored of drama that just stretching a guy out on a cot after his last meal and giving him a simple shot of pentothal before reformatting his hard drive with something fatal is so dull that they won't even consider it?