If governments are always looking for more humane methods of execution, why are heroin and other opiates never used, since they are supposedly the most blissful way to pass?
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I don’t think it’s true that governments are always looking for humane methods of execution. I think politically, nobody cares. There’s no political will to make executions less painful and nobody is looking to cash in their political capital for that purpose. Same reason prisons are inhumane abominations in general.
but also no reputable doctor would ever advise on that subject, because it’s the exact opposite of the oath that they take when they receive their license.
Yeah it’s weird reading about how the injection drugs have to be half smuggled in from Mexico and are reportedly a pretty horrible way to go like, can’t you just do something like carbon monoxide and make them permanently doze off?
The optics of an execution have always been very important. It would be bad politically to have a serial killer die blissed out on black tar heroin. We no longer want gruesome executions but we don’t want an execution to seem like a reward. Also it’s very hard to get pharmaceutical companies to provide drugs for executions. That’s one of the reasons they use the cocktail they do, its about the only thing they can get their hands on.
Executions are not humane. No government is trying to make them more pleasant for the prisoner. What they do want from an execution is that it’s quick and fool-proof. The current cocktail that’s used in the American states that carry out execution by lethal injection should result in death in 5 minutes if carried out properly.
>If governments are always looking for more humane methods of execution
They’re not. Most governments have banned execution, the countries that still do it do so because they or a segment of their population likes the punishment aspect. It has to be unpleasant, that’s the entire point.
It’d be very easy to kill people by asphyxiating them with nitrogen, which would be cheap and completely painless – just restrain them in an airtight room, cycle the air out to remove CO2 but only pump in nitrogen, they’ll just go woozy, pass out, and after a few minutes die. But it doesn’t make for a very good spectacle.
It’s wrong to assume that people universally want to make execution less painful.
Countless good people die every year and many of them die painful deaths.
It’s hard to garner much sympathy for the more extreme criminals. Many believe a painless death is more mercy than they deserve.
It’s easy to come to a “nice” stance on a philosophical issue when it’s just abstract hypothetical. It’s quite different if the victim is you or someone you love. Especially since the crime is often so heinous that it’s hard imagine anyone but a monster being able to commit it
Governments aren’t looking for new methods of execution.
Most governments around the world have completely abolished the death penalty and of the rest most have restricted it crimes auch as high treason during war time and do not employ it for ordinary crimes such as murder.
The countries that continue to actually practice capital punishment are for the most part developing countries and dictatorships where human rights are not a top priority and where the fact that someone sentenced to death experiences great amounts of pain as they die is a feature rather than problem.
A third world hell hole where the new leader slowly tortures his predecessor to death in front of cameras to make a point is not going to waste much thought on how this could theoretically be made less painful.
The only countries that arguably count as developed and democratic and continue to use capital punishment are places like Taiwan, Japan, the Unites States of America and perhaps Singapore. The rest are dictatorships or places under sharia law or otherwise corrupt hellholes.
Even in places like the US capital punishment is only a thing in some parts of the country.
It is also a problem that educated people who know how the human body works, for the most part don’t want anything to do with executions.
Many doctors who value their oath would know how to make executions less painful but object to the process on principle. this is why for example the lethal injection method used in some states in the US was not designed by a practicing doctor but by a medical examiner, who mostly deals with dead bodies. This process is not working well.
Similarly pharma businesses that normally don’t have much of a conscience nevertheless refuse to get involved. mostly because they don’t want their drugs to be known as being used in lethal injections, it might scare customers off.
The electric chair was actually invented for exactly that reason to scare people of one type of electricity by the company that dealt with the other kind.
Foreign countries also don’t want to export anything that might be used in executions.
This limits anyone who wants to create less painful executions by a lack of experts and material.
On the other hand the people who want executions mostly don’t consider the pain and torture as a bad thing and are not interested in making it less painful.
The problem itself is a solved problem. we know how to put down pets without causing them unnecessary pain and in places where euthanasia is legal or at least tolerated, doctors who practice on humans also know how to help them pass on peacefully.
This is not an area where anyone actually needs to find a better solution.
It is just that the people who want to execute people don’t want to make things less painful and the people who know how to make things less painful are uninterested in helping the government kill people.
I would argue the goverments that are concerned with the humanity of executions have banned them.
The inhumane part of execution lies mostly in the waiting period. Unless ofcourse you consider burning people to death as a punishment again.
Because lethal injection already does that One of the most common forms of lethal injection is basically overdosing someone on potassium and from every report I’ve heard it’s basically just like slipping into sleep
I never really understood why this is even debated. Just shotty to the head and burn the body and move on to the next one. The “Humane” part was already out of the window once they landed themselves in jail.
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