So I can understand a drug to knock a person out and then a drug to kill them, but then why a drug in-between to also paralyze them?
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The sleep agent is generally effective and well tolerated when it’s administered by a trained anesthesiologist or similarly trained doctor who knows how to administer it and what adverse reactions can occur.
But doctors aren’t the ones administering the sleep agent or the other drugs involved in the lethal injection. About 7% of lethal injections in the US have been botched and several even failed to kill the condemned prisoner at all. Your “it should be easy” theorizing isn’t worth a bill of beans when you look at how often those executions are screwed up. When performed properly, a lethal injection should be as close to painless as possible. It’s often not performed properly.
There are much better methods of executing a condemned prisoner if we are going to have executions at all. Considering how often our justice system fucks up, I don’t trust our courts to only execute guilty people, but that’s a separate issue.
Fun fact: there has never been a botched execution by firing squad in the US.
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If you were actually five, I don’t know if there is a good way to explain it, but here’s an attempt
Capital punishment can be quite unpleasant, no matter how you do it, and it is done in front of people, so we found a way to make it look better, for the viewers, even if it isn’t any better for the person
To add to other answers it will also stop you breathing which ensures you still die if they mess up the dose of the last drug.
When you have surgery and your under general anesthesia they give you something to paralyze you too. I had the WORST experience finding this out. When they bring you out of it they first bring you out of the paralyzed state then wake you up. Well they did it backwards with me once and I thought I was going to die! I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I got really panicky and told the doctor I can’t breathe!!! He just “oh you’ll be ok”. Well fuck that! I.CAN’T.BREATHE!!! Fix it!!!
My issue with the death penalty is that money buys freedom, there are evil persons and deserve the death penalty. Using lethal injection, a paralyzing agent to stop the victim from flailing about in muscle convulsions cause by the drugs to end life. Perhaps a better way or better drugs?
A paralyzing agent can be used to induce respiratory depression (have their lungs stop working). Another way to push someone towards death
The official reason is that they thrash about when they’re unconscious. But there’s lots of evidence to suggest that the drugs to knock the person out don’t work as well as they’re meant to, so the paralytic is to hide the fact that it hurts like hell. Some people like me are against any fo of execution. That’s fine. Some people, unlike me want painful executions because “they deserve it”. That’s fine too. What’s not fine is the whole “we’re all going to watch someone be killed but we’re going to be civilized about it”
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