alt Hacker NewsI am very against medicalised punishments like this. It’s bad for medicine as a whole to be associated with it. I also think it prolongs the suffering of the person and often has things like this happen, and is mainly for the benefit of the audience not wanting to see icky blood.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
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If I had to die I want the injection because if it works right you just doze off and die. That compared to being tied to a pole and have people fire guns at you seems terrible. There is a significant chance of serious pain and suffering.
Firing squads should be making a comeback given recent Trump DOJ guidelines that break with what had been the precedent on these questions.
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
> What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again.
Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.
(Also, for many, there’s something wrong with capital punishment, to start with, but that’s a different discussion)