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
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.)
Medical professionals don’t get involved because it’d be against their moral and ethical code (see: the Hippocratic oath).
Drug manufacturers will not supply the drugs because of global supply chains and the fact that the death penalty is illegal in many countries, so it’s just not good for business for them.
Without access to any of the skills and infrastructure of the medical profession, lethal injections are effectively prepared and administered with the same level of skill and quality as your neighbourhood meth lab.
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.
When it comes to lethal injections, no medical professionals are involved. Doctors make a big deal of “do no harm” and murdering people violates that. So the prison just has the guards figure out how to kill people with drugs.
Now the first injection is supposed to put the victim to sleep for a peaceful and humane death. But it turns out it’s just a paralytic and the prisoner feels all the pain and is conscious until their death. The first drug is just so the people watching don’t have to watch the victim scream in pain.
The second drug is supposed to cause a cardiac arrest to kill the victim. Where both these drugs go wrong is that the guards suck at actually hitting a vein. Majority of the time, they shoot it straight into the muscle, which causes immense pain, but doesn’t actually kill the person. So the guards often have to keep getting more drugs and more syringes and they just keep poking the poor guy until they finally manage to kill them, or someone decides it’s finally time to dust off the old guillotine.
Often times, the process can take 45 minutes to multiple hours to pull off. Imagine the witnesses just sitting there, bored out of their minds while the guards just fuck around with syringes. It’s supposed to be a catharsis for the victims of the crime, but it’s often just a shitshow.
The funny part is, the guards could probably go to gen pop and look for someone with a history of injection drug use to help them out. Say what you will about heroin addicts, but they’re probably the best people available to perform the lethal injection.
Anyway, any country using the death penalty should honestly just switch to firing squad or a guillotine, they are far more humane. Frankly, shooting the victim with napalm is honestly more humane than the lethal injection. Both methods cause unimaginable pain, but the napalm has a much higher success rate of actually killing the victim after a few minutes.
Bit of a guess but I bet the people that work with death penalties arent the same people that dedicated their life to studying medicine.
Those people are busy getting paid to put people under for surgury.
Want to point out carbon MONOxide is described as falling asleep. Carbon dioxide poisoning is actually the horrible painful asphyxiation because our bodies know the level of carbon dioxide in our blood and actually causes us pain to get to a more oxygen-rich environment. Carbon monoxide is known as the silent killer because it is tasteless, odorless, and colorless, we need tech to know it is there.
>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.
Physician Medical societies (professional, and geographic area specific) and medical boards (state specific) will revoke your license and membership if you participate in the death penalty. So even if the physician supports the death penalty, they would ruin their careers over performing it.
Lots of nurse societies are the same.
So you are stuck with amateurs “practicing” a skill. An additional problem is potassium hurts, even when you have a well placed IV. Patients complain of stinging and burning even with 20meq which is a very small dose. I can’t imagine the pain of lethal doses.
And the electric chair is barbaric torture and has no place in society.
As far as lethal injection goes, Jay Chapman, the person credited with the first 3-drug protocol for lethal injection, is often dragged out for comments on the current state of the procedure. In an interview with Human Rights Watch he said: “The question [of the drugs] being administered properly, that never came up in my mind. I never knew we would have complete idiots injecting these drugs. Which we seem to have.”
Your body actually really does not want to die and killing it without brutalizing it (like decapitation) is harder than you’d think. It takes very specific amounts of certain meds to make it happen right. Add onto this that the people trying to do it aren’t doctors and don’t know how the body works like a doctor does and you end up with methods that barely work being done poorly. Like the AWFUL N2 asphyxiation that was done a few weeks ago.
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