Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      28
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Fact: when we sentence people to death we get it wrong one time in three

      Fact: executing someone is more expensive than keeping them in prison for life

      • TopShelfVanilla
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        22
        ·
        1 year ago

        Ah, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s lots of inexpensive, humane ways to dispatch a human. How methods like electrocution and lethal cocktail injection were decided on is difficult to understand. Nitrogen, though, is probably the nicest way it could be done. Relatively cheap too, and with zero chance of failure.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s not the method that’s expensive, it’s the appeals process, supposedly to stop innocent people from being executed. And even with all of the appeals, innocent people have still been executed.

        • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Human medical experimentation on prisoners is cruel and unusual in and of itself. However well you personally think execution by nitrogen would go (and I doubt you’d volunteer), people on death row have a right to know we’re not trying novel execution methods on them. Maybe if what we’re doing doesn’t actually benefit anyone more than prison would and is considered so barbaric that European manufacturers won’t supply us with the drugs we need to do it, we should stop.

          The mania for execution led Arizona to refurbish its gas chamber and reverse-engineer a Zyklon B equivalent.* That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. How about you?

          *https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents

          • TopShelfVanilla
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            5
            ·
            1 year ago

            There’s no experiment necessary in proving nitrogen as a silent and painless killer. Scuba divers have done all of the experiments for us, mostly by accident.

            Imprisonment is barbaric.

            If someone has done something so bad that they should be locked up for life then they should be dispatched not kept as some kind of morbid pet of the state. If you murdered a bunch of people (mass killing of serial style) you need not waste any more of our air. If you rape you should be killed too. If you’ve gotten yourself on death row fuck your rights.

            • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              1 year ago

              If you imprison an innocent, they can be freed. Execution takes away that possibility. And we have absolutely, provably, executed innocent people. I hope that never happens to you, but if life were a play, it would certainly make for some dramatic irony.

              • TopShelfVanilla
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                If you kept an innocent man imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life then you were a thousand times more cruel than had you executed him. I would prefer death over rotting in prison hoping to find the last shred of decency in the american judicial system that had already imprisoned me. All of your arguments are romantic and foolish.

                • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Romantic? Ffs…

                  Would you accept giving someone a choice between life in prison and death?

                  If you think prison’s worse than death for an innocent person, feel free to ask people who were exonerated after decades in prison if they’d rather have been killed.

    • LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Shitty take. There are more than two options here, and suggesting otherwise is using an either-or fallacy as a bad way to try to win an argument.

    • hoshikarakitaridia
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Opinion 👆.

      Fact: punishments can be reversed, if the punished stays alive. Any percentage of unjust executions is irredeemable. Also, there is a lot of evidence that abolishing the death penalty either does not affect the crime rate, or it has a positive effect (see link below).

      More opinion: executions have no place in a society that highly values human rights because killing people is the exact opposite of humane. If you think prisoners are monsters and you could never end up in there, watch a documentary about it. If you see what some ppl went through, you know how easy anyone can end up there.

      https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT50/015/2008/en/

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      That’s as silly a comment as “if you think Native Americans were wronged, give your house to one,” something else I’ve heard people say. Societal wrongs are not solved by individuals.

      Somehow all the countries that don’t allow capital punishment find ways to deal with extremely violent people and don’t have murderers running amok.

    • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Kinda funny that you label the comment you replied to as opinion and then proceeded to dress your own (shitty) opinion up as fact.