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

Because society (at least the parts that support the death penalty) want the process to appear as humane as possible, and there is no ethical way to experiment with methods of execution to determine if they are effective and appear humane.

(I do not say “is humane” because the knowledge that you are about to do is traumatic, regardless of how it happens – except maybe natural death at the end of a long life, which this is not.)

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