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
The process of a medical execution has been made more complicated than it could be out of the desire to make it look clean. Last time I checked, there were three chemicals involved – one to kill, one to paralyze so they don’t thrash like they’re in horrible pain, and one to anesthesize so they (as intended, anyway) aren’t in any actual terrible pain. Not that they could complain while they’re paralyzed.
If you use gas, the inmate could hold their breath out of the predictable desire to stave death away, which would just drag it out and make it look less clean. Apparently there’s been such a case recently.
https://apnews.com/article/nitrogen-execution-death-penalty-alabama-699896815486f019f804a8afb7032900
Add to that the already-stated issues with doctors and drug companies trying to keep away from it alll.
Carbon Dioxide asphyxiation is horrific and it is illegal to kill research animals this way. You are thinking of carbon Monoxide
I hear some places are switching to nitrogen for executions but frankly the execution process is so expensive that it would be better to just leave them in jail until they die
Because you gotta some sort of weirdo to be doing that. I’m guessing very dumb or extremely intelligent, I doubt a normy could handle it. So like overthink it or just straight be clueless
I just want to add that the human body is pretty resilient. Even in the days of Hangings, beheadings, Guillotines, and Firing Squads you’d have plenty of executions that would be considered “botched” by today’s standards.
Many good top comments I won’t echo explained various issues. An unmentioned aspect is spectacle. You wrote “morality and other issues of the death penalty aside” but there is no way around it. There is no justification for executions, they are a circus. This limits options. Can’t go too gruesome but also can’t have it look like the victim enjoys their last moment.
Almost nobody with the skills and knowledge necessary to ‘properly’ perform an execution is willing to help execute people, the medical principle of ‘do no harm’ has changed a bit but certainly still applies here.
Executions are the most severe punishment possible. The power that be don’t care so much about the process (hanging, fire squad, electrocution, beheading, stoning, drawing & quartering) as the end result and the witness’s & executioner’s experience.
I’d prefer we issue a fentanyl patch to the condemned and give them a window of time to use it, Record the death for those who need to see.
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