Morality and other issues of death penalty aside. We hear about botched executions quite often, even to the point that it has to be stopped and administered again. There are so many types of executions and all have trouble. Lethal injection death has about 7% botched rate.
In my mind, how hard is it to kill a person? For example people die of overdose all the time, or from breathing gasses. Dying from a carbon dioxide inhalation is described as falling asleed. People go into anesthesia where thy don`t feel a thing all the time when in surgery.
Its seems like there should be fairly easy painless and efficient method to do it, but there are still so many issues. Why?
EDIT: Carbon monoxide is what was meant, I just suck at chemistry
In: Biology
>For example people die of overdose all the time
People also survive overdoses all the time, and you don’t hear about that often because it’s less spectacular.
For practically every method of killing someone, we have examples of people surviving that or similar things. People survive accidents involving poison, electrocution, etc. all the time. The human body is surprisingly resilient, almost as if evolution had selected for creatures not instantly dying at the first sign of trouble.
Or in short: We simply don’t have any 100% reliable ways of murdering someone that’s not incredibly gruesome. Even head-off executioners can miss, or hit at a wrong angle – movies lie, it is apparently rather difficult to cut off a head.
Additionally, you hear about botched executions because they are news-worthy. There are estimated to be [around 2000 executions per year](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/international/executions-around-the-world), but only a relatively small number in countries with good news coverage, so a failed execution is a relatively rare event that is worth writing about.
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