You see stories of people getting accidentally electrocuted in everyday life and dropping dead instantly, why aren’t electric chairs engineered with that amount of power?
In: 68
Electricity kills you quite randomly. Sometimes it stops your heart, sometimes it doesn’t. There have been cases where people survived touching high voltage lines with their face and skin burned off.
The amount of power required to guarantee immediate death is basically the amount needed to cook/evaporate you. It would get very messy that way, with no recognizable corpse left. At that point you could simply drop a truck on people for the same effect.
A moderate voltage is more dangerous immediately than a high voltage. This is because a high voltage zap will essentially defibrillate your heart; it stops entirely for a second and begins to beat again. Whereas a moderate voltage won’t stop your heart but can introduce an arrhythmia, which stops it from pumping, leading to very rapid death.
Note: this only applies to very short shocks. High voltage is of course much worse if the exposure is longer, as it quickly fries your tissue.
>You see stories of people getting accidentally electrocuted in everyday life and dropping dead instantly
Likewise, there are stories every day of people being electrocuted who don’t die. [90% of people struck by lightning actually survive.](https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html#:~:text=But%20the%20odds%20of%20being,all%20lightning%20strike%20victims%20survive) Guess you could say that electricity isn’t as efficient of a killer as it is made out to be.
It was designed to be more humane than hanging, but not too humane, in accordance with the amount of vengeance demanded by Americans in the late 1800s.
Lethal injection was developed to be more humane than electrocution, but still, not too humane, in accordance with the amount of vengeance demanded by Americans in the 1980s.
Also: nobody involved really cares enough!
It’s not like we don’t know how to kill someone quickly and humanely! But most pro-death penalty people don’t really care how people are executed because they think they’re all iiredeemable scumbags who deserve to suffer. So they sort of say it’s humane to placate the squeamish (“it’s just an injection!”) but don’t want to put any effort into actually doing it humanely (because murderers need to be punished!).
I’ve always wondered why we don’t use nitrogen asphyxiation. It’s a real danger for people who work around liquid nitogren.
The reflex for breathing is caused by a build up of CO2 in your lungs, not lack of oxygen. If you put someone in a room and replace the atmospheric air with Nitrogen, that person will simply get light headed and pass out and then eventually expire from lack of oxygen. Nitrogen is cheap enough to make artesian ice cream with.
Seems like a pretty harmless way to go about executing someone from every perspective (except for the actual murder part).
Electric chairs were incredibly effective, provided that the equipment and training was performed to specification. So now ask yourself….at what prisons are death row guards and executioners trained to a high standard? And who has the most engineer qualified electric chair?
The same problem exists with lethal injection or hanging. If the people doing the job are not properly trained and drilled with the appropriate materials, it turns into a shit show more often than it should.
The electric chair should be reserved for people like Bundy, who bragged and lied about why he drug young girls into the woods before strangling them and ineffectively mounting them with his tiny organ. They did the procedure right in Florida. They taped his mouth. They taped his eyes. They stuffed all sorts of cotton balls up his butt. They wet the sponge on top of his head, strapped the contact to the top of his head, and they let him have it with all sorts of juice. He didn’t last long and mess was minimal.
All that said, i am opposed to the death penalty in most cases because the system of justice in this country has been fucked up since the founding. Prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct, inaccurate eye witness perceptions, and various other issues have convicted far too many people of capital crimes for me to be satisfied with a jury deciding a particular loser should bite it.
unfortunately, the extreme exceptions make me reluctant to advocate a total ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Death:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Fred_A._Leuchter,_Jr. very good documentary on this. My prof was in it.
People rarely die instantly from electrocution.
Anyone in the trades has had to sit through safety videos of them describing how you go when you get hit with high current.
People will ignite when a breaker box blows up in their face and live long enough to reach the hospital.
For someone to drop dead on the spot the current has to cross your heart. Left arm to right leg, or reverse, is the quickest way, or arm to arm but if you are sweating it will carry across skin before you finally go.
The electric chair is killing you by cooking your brain, not by stopping your heart, and depending on the paths the current takes to get to ground that can lead to a very long, painful death.
Oh no! We accidentally melted this serial child rapists face off totally by accident! Anyways… Whos next on the list? And could somebody please get the hose?
I joke, but the cruelty was kind of the point. Electrocution replaced hanging in 1888 as it was more ‘humane’, or at least that was the excuse given. The very first electrocution was a horror show and it certainly wasn’t the last example of cruel and unusual punishment via electrocution. The fact that it was widely adopted after the first botched attempt tells you what you need to know. To answer your question, they don’t kill people instantly because they’re not supposed to. Making it more instant would be a waste of electricity.
You’ll never find an assisted suicide method that uses electrocution despite how ‘humane’ it is supposed to be. Oxygen displacement is generally considered painless and peaceful.
Latest Answers