Rationalizing the Death Penalty

Is that what they call it? I thought it involved mopeds, mistresses, espresso and going "Ciao!" a lot.

The problem with the death penalty in Europe is all the crazy off-with-their-heads history.

Between capital punishment and sharp military uniforms, there is a lot of bad blood.

 

Considering what happened in Oklahoma last night we pretty have to reconsider how we go about the death penalty at this point.
They did such a bad job it became a case of torture before execution.
I'm pretty sure that's because they are getting their drugs from a shady source (maybe a vet) and the drug isn't working the way it's supposed to.

A bullet would have been kinder.

Oklahoma Botches Clayton Lockett's Execution

 

Sure enough.

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I was waiting for someone to comment on that botched procedure that was all over CNN yesterday. As I see it? No different than any other medical fuck-up. Only difference is that he was supposed to die, not recover.

 

Except that a medical procedure would have a review board and people could be sued.
We know that's not happening.
The one thing that has to happen is the state has to prove they are getting their drugs from a reputable source, that the drugs are clean, and the people who are administering them know what the hell they are doing.
Transparency is key and they have been fighting that from the start.

 

Places like Oklahoma that continue to use the death penalty are doing so as a political statement of how tough they are.

Everybody else refuses to participate, as a statement of how civilized they are.

Oklahoma is going to lose this fight.

 

Obviously I'm not against the death penalty. As a matter of fact, that was an interview question because my state does have the death penalty on it's books.
Why would we need to kill white collar criminals? How about we apply the laws we have and jail them? Place a significant chunk in the correctional system and the rest will figure it out pretty quickly.

 

I don't know that I have a problem with the death penalty, in theory-- at least, not for the perpetrators of especially vicious and brutal murders, or serial murderers.

What I do have a problem with is that the death penalty in America is handed out far too casually, the burden of proof is far too low, and the prisoner spends years, or even decades, living on Death Row while their lawyers send appeal after appeal through the system; not to mention that shockingly often, deeply insufficient care is taken to ensure that the convicted party is, in fact, actually guilty of the crime in question. And when a person is actually executed, it is often barbarically excruciating.

This is actually one area where I wish American law would learn a thing or two from Jewish Law. Back in the day when we ran our own court system, and judged capital cases, such cases were judged by a court of between 23 and 71 judges. The judges had to return guilty verdicts numbering precisely one fewer than their total number (i.e., a court of 23 could only convict with 22 guilty votes)-- more than one vote for not guilty rendered an acquittal, and a unanimous vote for guilty rendered an automatic acquittal by mistrial, the presumption being that the only way that not a single person could vote to spare the life of another human being was for the judges to be corrupted by bribery. To even be considered a capital case, there had to be two eyewitnesses to the crime, who verbally warned the perpetrator not to do the crime on pain of death, and heard the perpetrator acknowledge the warning and reject it before doing the crime. The witness accounts had to match perfectly, and perjury of eyewitness testimony in a capital case was itself a capital crime. Testimony and evidence was considered in the minutest of detail, always with an eye toward acquitting. If all these things still resulted in a guilty verdict, execution had to take place within 48 hours, by the quickest methods known at that time, and the condemned had to be rendered insensible with a drug or alchol before execution.

If American capital cases were conducted with that level of scrupulousness, and that level of bias toward not ending in a sentence of death, I would be much more comfortable with the idea of there being a functioning death penalty.

 

The death penalty is not administered justly in the US. On this basis, it should be discontinued. Justice is not blind. Justice or in-justice can depend on many factors not related to actual criminal behavior - i.e., race, sex, age, wealth, the social status of the victim, location along with countless other biases found within our judicial system.

 

A letter to the editor in today's edition of my local newspaper proposes an interesting tactic to administering the death penalty, and I'm curious to hear what folks here think of the idea.

I'm sure there are plenty of complications associated with such measures, but on the surface I personally find it promising. Thoughts?

 

Because it's the fuel that runs the engine that produces the best grunge albums.

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Using an illegal narcotic that has gone through zero regulatory processes is a little questionable. I mean, it's not like the FDA has a QCQA stamp that can go on the side of a brick of black tar.

I'm petty and I would, however, prefer to see murderers killed by their own murder weapons. Just imagine the fun!

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The problem with the goal of killing as quickly and painlessly as possible is that the process has to be pretty to be palatable. Can't put a 5.56mm in the temple. Too messy.

So the weak-ass PC answer is drug cocktails, electric shock, poisonous gas or something that otherwise doesn't visibly damage the body all that much.

Again, I'm perplexed at how people so foaming-at-the-mouth for the death penalty want it done in a "he just went to sleep" manner.

 

The fact is killing people is messy and, as those of you with any experience in that know, even the things that usually work well can go wrong.

If we as a nation decide that executions are necessary than we are obligated by the laws to make non-torturous.
That doesn't mean they have to be pretty.
We only go the pretty route to make the people doing the killing feel better.
I'm sure if we used the guillotine and people got to see the head drop into the basket there might be a 'drop off' in the call for executions.