Why are there so many botched executions?

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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

27 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Very few companies want to be known as the company that supplies lethal injections, so they don’t have access to the best.

Virtually no doctors want to be involved in administering lethal injections as it violates their Hippocratic oath to do no harm, so the procedure isn’t performed under medical supervision or with people properly trained for the task often.

It’s easy to kill. It’s hard to kill in a way that’s deemed foolproof, painless and ethical that can get approved and get through the mountains of very necessary red tape. The lethal injection as is has been made the best possible option in the court of public opinion compared to other options due to its perception of being the most ethical. The reality of it not so much in the way it’s done. But the public image of it is what seems to matter most, and the public image of it people want to see is someone just going to sleep, even if that’s not the reality.

As you say, there are probably more ethical ways. But imagine the news headlines of “prisons want to make gas chambers?!” Even if it were more ethical, the public perception would get skewed, making changes is incredibly hard.

Disclaimer: tried to be as unbiased as possible, I’m not advocating for or against the death penalty in this post.

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