There are alternative methods, of course.
The system of administering lethal injections in the United States has come under fire, with Florida halting executions as California ruled that its methods risked causing pain to death-row inmates.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush ordered Friday a suspension of all executions while a review of how lethal injections are carried out takes place following the agonising 34-minute death of an inmate earlier this week.
The decision came as a judge in California ruled that the state’s system for carrying out lethal injections — the most widely used method of execution in the US — was unconstitutional.
A significant chunk of the industrial West has disallowed capital punishment. The American electorate wavers forth-and-back from decade to decade. Is it time for solid judicial leadership?
why all the concern for a person who obviously didn’t concern themselves with the pain and torture they put their victim through or the victims family.
just line them up and shoot them dead is dead. I have no sympathy for murderers, think before you act, dont act and then ask for sympathy
Kinda funny how much consideration is given to the convicted in such incidences. Yet we seem to forget how much emotional and physical pain and suffering they put their victims through in the commision of their crime.
Using one .50BMG round, dead center mass, instead of an injection, would prevent any condemed from lingering i would think.
It wont be long and the convicted will be sueing the judicial system for convicting them. The system is broken.
It always amazes me that the pro-death-penalty advocates tend to have the same morals and values of the murderers they seek to execute.
There is something poetic about that….
Pro-lifers usually argue that one should not take another human life (even if that human is only a clump of cells). They argue that only God may do so. I find it odd that the same group tends to be pro-death penalty. Is Christianity about revenge or compassion? What would Jesus say? Hypocrites.
The rest of the modern world has moved beyond the revenge mentality. The U.S. has not, and the hillbilly, anti-intellectual cowboy crowd that dominates the U.S. population will probably assure that it stays that way.
Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s famed hangman deserves a mention here.
Found on
“Ironically, he was an opponent of capital punishment. The reason for this seems to be a combination of the experiences of his father, his uncle, and himself, whereupon reprieves were granted in accordance with political expediency or public fancy and little to do with the merits of the case in question. He had also been forced to hang James Corbitt on 28 November 1950; Corbitt was a regular in his pub, “Help The Poor Struggler”, and had sung “Danny Boy” as a duet with Albert on the night he murdered his girlfriend in a fit of jealousy because she would not give up a second boyfriend. This incident in particular made Albert feel that hanging was no deterrent, particularly when most of the people he was executing had killed in the heat of the moment rather than with premeditation or in furtherance of a robbery. But Pierrepoint kept his opinions to himself on the topic until his 1974 autobiography, Executioner: Pierrepoint, in which he commented:
“I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people…The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.”
I can’t remember where I read about it, but there was said to be a condemned man once going to his execution, and his last words before the event were:
“This will certainly teach me a lesson.”
I suppose that some would say, “Who cares. Now we don’t have to deal with the sonofabitch anymore”. Perhaps so, but a question still nags at me: Did it really do that for him, wherever he is now?
#4. The following argument [embodied in posts #1 and #2] fascinates me: murderers don’t care about the suffering they cause, why should we care about the suffering we cause?
Aren’t we supposed to be better than the murderers? Capital punishment advocates generally characterize it as justice rather than revenge, but that argument is telling – since it shows the desire to lower society to the level of the murderer and have our revenge.
An eye for an eye seems fair.
I have no sympathy for a person who has killed several people. I do not care that they had to suffer for 3 or 4 days even before their lethal injection took hold.
The fact is the American prison system is not such a bad place to stay, don’t get me wrong its no club med, but its also not such a bad experience that you feel your life is over when you get sent to one. You get cable TV, time to workout, and 3 meals a day, all in a tax payer subsidized climate controlled facility. Not such a bad thing when you look at how other people around the world are living.
Until you can guarantee that the murderer will spend the rest of his life doing hard labor, with not chance of ever getting out, then I will support the death penalty. If you are truly honest with yourself you will also admit that their is no way you can ever guarantee that.
An eye for an eye mentality just leaves a room full of blind, toothless men…
#10 — sitting here at the lunch table with kin who set-up the “cable TV” system for our state pen, I have to suggest you’re relying on talk radio pundits for your info.
This cable TV system allows 3 channels — chosen by the administration of the prison.
Ok you bleeding heart liberals I will let you pay for his imprisonment for the next 50 years and for all his legal appeals and law suits he files.
then I wont complain at all if we don’t execute them you can pay if and I will shut up
If you dont want to pay for it then shut up and lets do the world a favor and free up some oxygen and rid the planet of those wastes of natural resources
The system isn’t broken. The California judges are.
THese anti execution people don’t care about execution they worry about losing the money they get from p[rotesting.
I like the picture! The French have it right! Let the heads roll!
Would make a great cable network! Welcome to Saturday Night Dead!
seriously….
There are murder cases so heinous that I dont see how anyone can not support their execution. Certainly child murders would fit that category.
“Judicial leadership” now there is a concept we need. Lead by a bunch of unelected guys with lifetime terms. And if we like their ideas on this subject we’re bound to like their ideas on the next one. I mean really bound.
as a nation the USA is in great company when it comes to capital punishment…China and Iran. The rest of the civilized world got rid of the death penalty decades ago and have much lover murder and violent crime rates. killing people is wrong by the individual or the state.
I’m not especially tweaked by the topic; but, I guess I have to nudge folks once in a while who don’t need their opinions to be grounded in reality.
#13 — unless you can find some serious judicial source that says things have changed, the fact is — that lifers consume fewer tax dollars than do cons dealing with the death penalty. That is where all the appeals clump up.
#5
> The rest of the modern world has moved
> beyond the revenge mentality.
Sorry but I disagree. Only countries that do not metered life sentences have moved beyond the revenge mentality. The pain inflicted by life incarceration is equal to or greater than the pain of execution. Execution is pain inflicted over the course of 30-40 minutes. Life incarceration is pain inflicted over the course the criminal’s life time.
#10
Research Pelican Bay and then tell me that prisons are nice places. Remember that criminals that would have been sentenced to life imprisonment are going to go to maximum security prisons not minimum security country clubs.
It should be clear to everyone that life imprisonment is as much an act of revenge as capital punishment.
I have no real compunction about executing someone actually guilty of murder with special circumstances. My biggest objection to the death penalty has always been that too many people on death row are not actually guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. Former (Republican) Governor George Ryan did a pretty gutsy thing when he commuted the death sentences of 167 people sentenced to die in Illinois, but some of those people have since been exonerated of the crimes that put them on death row.
I agree with Gov. Ryan when he said, “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.” Sometimes eye witnesses lie about what they saw, and other times they lie about their degree of certainty about what they saw. Sometimes confessions to capital crimes are even coerced by police. And just as a guilty person can be acquitted if he has a dream team of lawyers, an innocent person can also be found guilty if his lawyer slips up, is even slightly incompetent, or tempers his defense because he doesn’t believe in the innocence of his client.
After the death penalty is carried out, the time limit for redressing any mistake or injustice expires. Instead, convicts should be sentenced to watch TV with nothing but religious programming so they merely pray for death 😉
When the death penalty was repealed in Canada, the legislators were no doubt influenced by the appreciation that, of the people hanged in the previous decade, about half were innocent.
24..that pro-murder thing is there to counteract the anti-abortion crowd. Otherwise we’d run out of places to build apartment buildings.
The USA is unique and cannot be readily compared to “western industrialized countries.” The freedoms made possible here allow some to make bad decisions. We need the ability to take care of those who make awful decisions and are beyond rehabilitation.
IMO we should both require a special extra investigation for death sentences to prove guilt to a higher standard than normal, and limit appeals to something like two. Be sure, and be fast.
Some bleeding-heart liberal once said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Don’t worry – on social issues, conservatives almost always lose in the end as countries move toward more modern views. However, the conservatives do a service in keeping the pace slow enough for the institutions to keep up. At one time the issue was slavery, then women’s rights, then abortion, then gay rights. Now we debate execution of prisoners and gay marriage. Eventually, the first will be abolished and the second will be allowed. You see, the conservative rock slowly gets eaten away by the progressive river. The process is slow, but inescapable.
#27
Capital punishment will not be eliminated because of twisted “progressive” movement, nor because of philanthropic feelings towards criminals nor because of the false claim of it representing the moral high ground as liberals/progressives would like to believe. In fact, I would bet that the vast majority of Americans believe that criminals that commit heinous crimes should be executed. No, none of these sit-around-the-campfire-singing-kumbayah reasons will have anything to do with eliminating capital punishment as the liberals would like you to believe. The reason capital punishment may eventually be eliminated is because the ugly truth is that it costs more to successfully prosecute and execute a person than it does to stuff them away in a tiny cell and torture them for life.
#4, well said. Ugly, but true.
I love it when judges just make things up out of thin air. If feeling pain is the constitutional standard for what is “cruel and unusual” then being put to death would have been just as unconstitutional back in 1789 because I’m pretty sure they didn’t have such niceties as anesthesia to administer beforehand. Whether or not you agree with the death penalty, this ruling is absurd.
If standards have changed, then change the law to reflect them. But judges shouldn’t be just making things up as they please.
I’m pro-life…..and anti-death penalty. I also think that sometimes people do things so awful, that there should be some way to exact revenge(because thats what it is after all) that is meaningful.(read…painful)
If *life* meant life, and not 10 years or 7 years or 25 years, then we could get rid of the death penalty and know that people will pay the almost highest price for their crimes. The prisons for killers and child molestors should be a prison, not even 3 channels on their t.v.’s….how about no channels. How about visits once every 6 months. How about the needed caloric intake to maintain life and no more. How about digging ditches, then refilling them, then redigging them for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for their entire term behind bars, how about 1 magazine a month, how about 2 letter in and 2 letters out a month, how about fast tracking appeals, then no more?
Make *life* in prison mean something, and see how many of those on the street talk about doing 20 years standing on their heads.
Pay the guards enough that bribes won’t mean anything, so the drugs will stop…..in other words, make their time just as close to **death** on Earth as possible, without actually killing them.
There is no logical reason to have a death penalty at all anymore. Every argument that hasn’t been disproven, are logical fallacies, mostly fallacies of tradition (we have always had capital punishment in the past and its in the constitution) or fallacies of emotion (they deserve to die for their crimes).
Is it a deterrent? Nope. The US is the only country in the Western Hemisphere with a death penalty, and our crime and murder rate is just as bad as countries without the death penalty.
Is it cost effective? Nope. Numerous reports have been released saying the cost of court time for automatic death penalty appeals outweighs the cost of incarceration for life.
Is it for Justice? Nope. If it were just, how come African Americans, who make up 10% of the population, make up half the population on death row? How come males are far more likely to get the death penalty than women for the same crime? And over 90 people put on death row in the last 25 years were later exonerated, a possibility more likely since if you are innocent, you are not likely to accept a plea bargain to a lesser offense.
Is it moral? The Pope doesn’t think so, nor do most liberal protestant churches, nor do most secular humanist organizations, nor does any western nation outside of the US. The second largest country outside the US with a death penalty is Iran.