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It’s Time to Bring Back the Guillotine

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« on: May 11, 2014, 07:15:54 am »

‘Botched’ Oklahoma Execution Proves It’s Time to Bring Back the Guillotine

finally getting some news...story really has nothing to do with Rev, but the guillotine is being talked about in being used for executions .

Last night, Oklahoma was scheduled to execute two individuals. The second execution was to be of a man who raped and murdered an 11-month-old girl. That execution never took place because the first execution—that of a man who was involved in the murder and burial alive of a 19-year-old woman who walked in on a robbery—ran into some difficulties. The state was using a new lethal injection cocktail and, it seems, the poor murderer suffered a bit before expiring of a heart attack.

I want to highlight two reactions to this “botched” execution. The first was an absurd bit of moral lunacy, the second a more nuanced and interesting question.

The moral lunacy first: Anti-death-penalty advocates seized on this instance to post charts such as this one that purport to show the United States is just as bad as China and Iran because we execute criminals and they execute criminals and all executions are obviously the same. The suggestion that the United States taking decades to execute first degree murderers and Iran hanging gays from cranes and China murdering political dissidents is in any way similar is an idiotic bit of false moral equivalence, one that proves the deep unseriousness of a certain segment of the anti-death penalty contingent.

The second reaction—revulsion that the state would engage in “cruel and unusual” punishment by having the subject of an execution suffer before he expires—is a bit more reasonable and something that we should address. It is, of course, worth noting that Oklahoma in all likelihood did not intend for this poor murderer to suffer a bit before he died. As such, the constitutional worries seem moot. And, frankly, as someone who believes that the death penalty serves as retribution rather than deterrence,* I have a hard time getting upset when someone as disgusting as the condemned suffers a bit before expiring. But as a general matter and a basic principle, I don’t think the government should be in the business of intending to make people suffer horrifically before they die.

So how do we minimize suffering of the condemned? Our biggest problem as a society is that we have decided bloodlessness is a suitable stand-in for lack of suffering (and a way to protect the sensibilities of those who support the death penalty). Well, the pursuit of a bloodless execution seems to have backfired pretty badly here. And there’s evidence that previous lethal injection cocktails weren’t much better. Allow me to propose a rather radical alternative: the guillotine.

There are other, less dramatic, ways, of course. Hanging and firing squads would probably be quicker and more painless than lethal injection or the electric chair. But the guillotine really seems to solve everyone’s problems: It was designed to deliver an efficient, quick, and painless death. It performs that task admirably. I understand the irony of a reactionary such as myself embracing the Terror’s preferred method of execution, but one must give credit where it’s due.

If we’re going to do something—and a large number of Americans and American states are pretty committed to performing executions—we ought to do it right. And “right” in this case means a quick and painless death. I can’t really imagine any reasonable objections to a widespread adoption of the guillotine.

*For what it’s worth: I believe the studies that show the death penalty does nothing to deter crime yet support it anyway, as I believe there are some crimes so heinous that there can be no forgiveness from society. This plays into my whole theory of the judicial system, which is that we should imprison fewer nonviolent offenders, rehabilitate those prisoners who can be rehabilitated, and severely punish the rest. I also think we should probably execute fewer people and heighten the standards of evidence required before an execution can be obtained, but that’s a post for another day.

http://freebeacon.com/blog/botched-oklahoma-execution-proves-its-time-to-bring-back-the-guillotine/
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« Reply #1 on: May 11, 2014, 07:34:17 am »

May 4, 2014 4:00 AM
Kafka and the Guillotine
In the hands of our bureaucracy, execution becomes arbitrary, dehumanizing, time-consuming.


You had one job, executioners.

As Mike Hashimoto of the Dallas Morning News points out, it is difficult to feel very much sympathy for the men who killed 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman — who was abducted, tortured, shot twice, and buried alive by a crew of goons attempting to collect a debt from a third party, three men who took the time to **** one of Ms. Neiman’s friends along the way. One of those men, Clayton Lockett, died what certainly seems to have been a fairly horrible death as the result of a botched attempt at lethal injection. If the English language has a precise word for the unintended death of a man that occurs while one is trying to kill him, I do not know what it is. Strange to say, the closest description I can think of is “negligent homicide,” which surely can’t be quite right in this case.

Government is, in Max Weber’s famous formulation, a regional monopoly on violence. The word “violence” has connotations of malice, but George Washington had it right: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force.” And, certain platitudes notwithstanding, there is a time for violence: It was not the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves, but General Sherman. It was not reason that defeated Hitler nor eloquence that keeps us safe in our beds at night. As Jonah Goldberg puts it, it isn’t the law that keeps the peace — it’s the sheriff that keeps the peace. The modern Western theory of the state is based in the pessimism of Thomas Hobbes, alongside whom Niccolò Machiavelli sounds like Norman Vincent Peale, and it holds that the sovereign must be invested with the exclusive right to commit violence, the alternative to that being general violence, bellum omnium contra omnes. Regardless of one’s opinion about capital punishment — and men such as Mr. Lockett make it something close to impossible for a less than saintly man to maintain a sincerely consistent opposition — there is nearly universal consensus in the Western world that if any person or entity in society is to have such power, then it should be the exclusive license of the state. At its most fundamental level, the purpose of the state is identical to the purpose of its characteristic tool, the military: to kill people, to destroy the things people make, and to take prisoners.

But as the horrific scene in the death house in McAlester, Okla., shows, government is not even particularly good at its most basic task. Never mind building a simple e-commerce site to facilitate the sale of health insurance, 222 years after the first use of the guillotine in France we’re getting worse at carrying out executions rather than better. Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, the highwayman whose neck was the terminus of the guillotine’s maiden voyage, had it easier than did Mr. Lockett. The adoption of the guillotine was very much a political gesture: The French reformer Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin — who did not, despite the eponym, invent the guillotine — proposed a number of measures to the revolutionary assembly, intended to make killing citizens a more democratic undertaking. The use of the sword for beheadings was seen as an unseemly holdover from the habits of aristocracy, and the principles of the time required that there be no discrimination by class or rank among the victims of the Revolution. The idea of state as machine precedes Maximilien de Robespierre et al. by many generations, but there has never been another machine that so perfectly expressed the plain facts about the state employing it.

The guillotine was enthusiastically welcomed by Charles-Henri Sanson, who was employed in his family’s dynastic occupation, serving as the royal executioner in both possible senses of that phrase. After ensuring that Louis XVI would have no place to set a crown, he continued his occupation as high executioner under the Revolution. His hobbies including playing the violin and dissecting his victims, and his argument for adopting the new machine would have given a less bloodthirsty regime some cause for meditation: He predicted that the rolling headcount was about to increase dramatically, and that the traditional tools of the trade, to say nothing of his own shoulders, were not up to the future labors of French democracy. He himself performed nearly 3,000 executions and oversaw many more, including his journeyman son’s professional triumph in the matter of Marie Antoinette. The guillotine continued to be used until 1977, when Hamida Djandoubi became the last man to be executed in France by any method. Mr. Djandoubi, a Tunisia-born Marseille pimp with a wooden leg (his own having been lost in a landscaping accident), seemed to be a man fated for another kind of amputation. He strangled a woman to death and went to his reward, and a short time later the Mitterrand government abolished capital punishment, sending chief executioner Marcel Chevalier into retirement after only two jobs as the boss. M. Chevalier went to work as a letterpress operator, another moribund profession.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/377183/kafka-and-guillotine-kevin-d-williamson
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« Reply #2 on: May 11, 2014, 07:35:13 am »


Bring the Guillotine Back to Death Row
A quick, painless, gruesome way to carry out capital punishment


If I were governor of a state that executed prisoners I'd declare a moratorium for my entire tenure. I wish that the United States would stop imposing the death penalty. I nevertheless find myself nodding along to Sonny Bunch's case for reintroducing the guillotine, a response to the botched execution of a death-row inmate in Oklahoma.

He argues that America has made its executions bloodless to protect the sensibilities of those who support the death penalty, with less humane killings as a result. (The electric chair. The gas chamber. Lethal injections. All have had horrific problems.)

Bunch writes:

    The guillotine really seems to solve everyone’s problems: It was designed to deliver an efficient, quick, and painless death. It performs that task admirably. I understand the irony of a reactionary such as myself embracing the Terror’s preferred method of execution, but one must give credit where it’s due.

    If we’re going to do something—and a large number of Americans and American states are pretty committed to performing executions—we ought to do it right. And “right” in this case means a quick and painless death. I can’t really imagine any reasonable objections to a widespread adoption of the guillotine.

I can imagine one objection: that the guillotine is barbaric.

But to me, that's a point in its favor. Let's have no illusions about what we're doing when the state carries out the killing of captive prisoners. I imagine support for the death penalty would decline rather quickly once heads started rolling.

That's not what Bunch intends. He explains why he favors the death penalty:

    I believe the studies that show the death penalty does nothing to deter crime, yet support it anyway ... there are some crimes so heinous that there can be no forgiveness from society. This plays into my whole theory of the judicial system, which is that we should imprison fewer nonviolent offenders, rehabilitate those prisoners who can be rehabilitated, and severely punish the rest. I also think we should probably execute fewer people and heighten the standards of evidence required before an execution can be obtained, but that’s a post for another day.

But a prisoner can be kept alive without forgiving him for his crime. And locking a man away for decades with no hope of ever being released is arguably a more severe punishment than death. On its own, this case for the death penalty isn't enough.

One powerful case against the death penalty is its irreversibility.

Here's another argument against it: Even if there's a case where there's absolute certainty that the condemned is guilty, the execution still requires an executioner. Insofar as in individual takes on that role, he does damage to himself. (It's no accident that firing squads are organized so that no one knows who fired the fatal shot.) And insofar as the executioner acts on behalf of society generally, he undermines that most crucial moral norm, the inviolability or sanctity of life.

This punishment isn't worth the costs it imposes on us.

So let's bring back the guillotine—and once it forces us to confront the barbarity of needlessly killing people who pose no threat to us, let's abolish the death penalty. Countries without the death penalty get along just fine, and I don't think Americans will be able to stomach it once they look it squarely in the face.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-bringing-back-the-guillotine/361569/
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« Reply #3 on: May 11, 2014, 07:35:57 am »

On the death penalty: Bring back the firing squad, the guillotine, and the gallows
If we're going to support a brutal policy, let's be honest about it


This week, the state of Oklahoma put a man named Clayton Lockett to death, after months of legal wrangling. As you may have heard, it did not go well. The fiasco may not change our fetish for state-sanctioned executions, but at the very least it should change our approach to capital punishment. No more injections that hide behind a screen of modern medicine — bring back the the firing squads, the gallows, and the guillotine.

Some background: European chemical manufacturers have stopped selling lethal injection drugs to the U.S., so Oklahoma came up with its own jerry-rigged ****tail. That sparked a long-running legal battle between Lockett and another prisoner and the state, which refused to disclose the source of its new drugs. It turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis last week, when the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a stay of execution so it could examine the legality of the state's secret injection law.

In response, Gov. Mary Fallin (R) announced that she was directing the state executive to carry out the executions anyway, and a Republican member of the state legislature introduced impeachment proceedings against the Supreme Court members. Eventually, in a brave stand for the whole rule of law thing, the court backed down and rescinded its order.

Using an experimental death ****tail obtained in secret by a pack of cartoonishly reactionary incompetents, the execution went about as well as anyone could have expected. According to this gruesomely riveting eyewitness account, Lockett was flopping around and moaning and convulsing in obvious agony. He tried to get up and even got a few words out. After more than 30 minutes, his heart finally gave out and he died.

Americans may cherish violent state punishment, but they sure are prissy and cowardly when it comes to facing the reality of that preference. If it's really so necessary for a person to be put to death for certain crimes, then let's stare that fact square in the face.

Advocates of lethal injection (which is now by far the most common way to execute people) originally argued that it was a more reliable and humane way to kill someone than previous, more primitive methods. We now know that the opposite is true. Lethal injections are botched at a rate of 7 percent, more than any other method and over twice the average.

The Lockett disaster ought to permanently put to bed the idea that injections reduce pain. Since the typical death ****tail tends to prize speed over anesthetic effect, there were serious questions about the pain inflicted by the standard mixtures even before Oklahoma broke bad and seemingly cooked its own batch.

Judge Stephen Reinhart once wrote that "hanging is incompatible with society's evolving standards of decency." I say that when it comes to capital punishment, those standards are a crock. People are simply unnerved by the thought of someone's body being broken by force. Much better to keep the violence invisible, to mask the pain with sedatives, and to pretend it's all part of some medical procedure.

I, for one, would rather be hanged than go through the torture Lockett endured. His death was the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment, and it's one of the many reasons lethal injections should be abolished immediately as a moral stain on the country, not to mention a source of growing horror and disgust among our cohort nations.

I imagine the torture-apologist wing of the conservative movement would be wholeheartedly in favor of returning to more overtly violent executions. Sarah Palin could be its spokesperson.

But the big, muddled middle of America isn't quite ready to see itself that way. Many might support the death penalty in the abstract, but not in its details, not if it involves driving bits of metal through the bodies of the condemned, snapping their necks, or slicing their heads off. If that does make you recoil, then perhaps it's time to consider not killing them at all.

http://theweek.com/article/index/260808/on-the-death-penalty-bring-back-the-firing-squad-the-guillotine-and-the-gallows
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« Reply #4 on: May 11, 2014, 07:47:34 am »

Guillotine Revival Movement Gains Momentum

When things began to go terribly wrong with Clayton Lockett's execution in Oklahoma the other day—when instead of drifting gently off into unconsciousness and death, Lockett began to moan and buck on the gurney—one of the first things the officials did was lower the blinds over the window through which observers peered into the death chamber. Because after all, people shouldn't have to witness a man suffer as the state is killing him, right?

Lockett's execution was hardly the first botched one we've had, particularly with lethal injection, a process prison officials seem extraordinarily incompetent at implementing properly. But for whatever reason, it has brought about a more substantial debate about the death penalty than we've had in some time. And as part of that, it looks like my semi-serious advocacy for the return of the guillotine is finally gaining momentum. It already has endorsements from Conor Friedersdorf and Sonny Bunch, with more sure to follow.

Frankly, I've never bought the argument that the death penalty violates the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." Unusual, maybe—it has become not just unusual but unheard of in democratic countries (the nations with the highest number of executions last year were, in order, China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. of A.). But cruel? It seems that spending your life in prison is far worse than being executed. Though Lockett was in obvious pain for three-quarters of an hour before he finally expired, that pain couldn't possibly match the extended agony endured by the tens of thousands of people we put in solitary confinement, where the lack of human contact literally drives them insane.

But back to our execution methods. It does seem that as the killing techniques have evolved, what we've called more "humane" methods are not about minimizing the suffering of the condemned, but about minimizing the gruesomeness of the spectacle, so that we can perform the execution without feeling like barbarians. It's not about them, it's about us. We did away with the firing squad in favor of the electric chair, even though the latter involves a lot more suffering, and why? Well, it involves just pulling a switch instead of actually pulling a trigger and sending a bullet hurtling toward a man's heart. And there's no blood splatter on the walls.

But the electric chair is pretty awful to watch—the body convulsing in obvious torment and all that—so we went to lethal injection. And despite the fact that we're perfectly capable of knocking people out before surgery and gently putting a beloved pet to sleep, the geniuses who run our prisons can't seem to do it without putting the condemned through substantial pain.

So if you recoil from the idea of the guillotine, ask yourself why. It's fast, foolproof, and essentially painless. If you were going to be executed, wouldn't it be near the top of your list for ways to go? You can't argue that Clayton Lockett would have met a crueler end had his head been lopped off than what he actually went through. We could even come up with a more contemporary version, like a fast-moving saw blade that separates your brain from your body in a fraction of a second.

The visceral objection you have to that thought is not about the suffering of the one being executed, it's about how you'd feel watching it. The guillotine, with its blood and severed head, would make us feel uncomfortable about what we're doing when the state executes someone in our name. It would make us feel barbaric. As well it should.

If we're going to keep the death penalty, we should be honest about what it's for. It isn't for deterrence, and it isn't for justice. It's for vengeance. We can try to make it "humane," and we can draw the blinds when the truth of it comes uncomfortably close the surface. But that won't change what it is.

https://www.freespeech.org/text/guillotine-revival-movement-gains-momentum
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« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2014, 07:55:24 am »

So this was what this talk in OK was all about...
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« Reply #6 on: May 11, 2014, 03:40:30 pm »

It's interesting that you mention this, because the local talk radio guy on the station they listen to at work said the exact same thing. You can even go on the station's website and find a podcast of him talking about it...
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« Reply #7 on: May 11, 2014, 05:58:37 pm »

It's interesting that you mention this, because the local talk radio guy on the station they listen to at work said the exact same thing. You can even go on the station's website and find a podcast of him talking about it...

what was the guys name? and station?
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« Reply #8 on: May 18, 2014, 06:42:22 am »

‘More humane’: US Senator proposes return of firing squads to execute criminals

A Republican senator is advocating the use of firing squads as a form of execution in the USA, after a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma in April. Paul Ray from Utah says his proposal would be a more humane form of execution.

The Republican plans to introduce his suggestion at his state’s next legislative session in January. Similar plans have been floated in Wyoming and Missouri, but were never passed. However, the senator from Utah may have better luck in trying to get his bill passed as the state has a history of using fire arms for executing criminals.

In 2010, Ronnie Lee Gardner was put to death, with five police officers using .30 caliber rifles, which was the last execution to take place in Utah. "It sounds like the Wild West, but it's probably the most humane way to kill somebody," Ray said, speaking to the Associated Press.

Utah had eliminated the use of fire squads to carry out executions in 2004. However, those given the death penalty before that date had the option of choosing it. Gardner, who was sentenced to death for shooting a Salt Lake City lawyer in 1985 decided on this option.

He became the third person to die by firing squad since the US supreme court reintroduced the death penalty in 1976, following the Gregg v Georgia ruling. Since its reinstatement, lethal injection has been the most common use of carrying out the death penalty; however, it has come under criticism in recent months.

Persistent shortages of traditional barbiturates have led states to experiment with different combinations of lethal drugs, sometimes with grotesque consequences.

In the most recent high profile case, Clayton Lockett’s vein collapsed and he died of a heart attack more than 40 minutes after being administered a lethal injection.

Therefore Ray is proposing the use of firing squads, which will also be much cheaper and says, "The prisoner dies instantly. It sounds draconian. It sounds really bad, but the minute the bullet hits your heart, you're dead. There's no suffering."

"There's no easy way to put somebody to death, but you need to be efficient and effective about it," Ray said. "This is certainly one way to do that."

Opponents of the proposal say firing squads are not necessarily a foolproof answer.

"It's possible an inmate could move or shooters could miss, causing the inmate a slow and painful death," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington, DC based Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

thats why you want the guillotine.

"The idea is that it would be very quick and accurate but just a little movement by the person could change that," he said. "Things can go wrong with any method of execution."

http://rt.com/usa/159732-firing-squad-utah-senator/
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« Reply #9 on: May 23, 2014, 07:03:34 am »

the trend back wards... we are almost there...

Tennessee brings back the electric chair

As the rest of the nation debates the feasibility and humanity of lethal injections against a backdrop of scarce drugs and botched executions, Tennessee has come up with an alternative: the electric chair.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event prisons are unable to obtain the drugs, which have become more and more scarce following a European-led boycott of drug sales for executions.

Tennessee lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the electric chair legislation in April, with the Senate voting 23-3 and the House 68-13 in favor of the bill.

Tennessee is the first state to enact a law to reintroduce the electric chair without giving prisoners an option, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that opposes executions and tracks the issue.

"There are states that allow inmates to choose, but it is a very different matter for a state to impose a method like electrocution," he said. "No other state has gone so far."

Dieter said he expects legal challenges to arise if the state decides to go through with an electrocution, both on the grounds of whether the state could prove that lethal injection drugs were not obtainable and on the grounds of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Republican state Sen. Ken Yager, a main sponsor of the electric chair measure, said in a recent interview that he introduced the bill because of "a real concern that we could find ourselves in a position that if the chemicals were unavailable to us that we would not be able to carry out the sentence."

The decision comes as lethal injection is receiving more scrutiny as an execution method, especially after last month's botched execution in Oklahoma.

In that case, convicted killer Clayton Lockett, 38, began writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow after he had supposedly been rendered unconscious by the first of three drugs in the state's new lethal injection combination. The execution was halted, and Lockett died of an apparent heart attack 10 minutes later, authorities said. They later blamed a collapsed vein, not the drugs themselves.

But concerns about lethal injection also have risen at a time when Tennessee and many states — including Oklahoma, Missouri and Texas — obtain execution drugs in secret from unidentified compounding pharmacies. Death penalty opponents say the secrecy raises the risk of something going wrong.

Haslam's signing of the electric chair bill Thursday also came on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a rare last-minute stay of an execution for death row inmate Russell Bucklew in St. Louis. The justices directed a lower court to take another look at the case.

The Supreme Court did not specify its reasons, leaving open the question of whether the ruling shows a growing weariness of lethal injection in general or trepidation specifically about Bucklew's medical condition, which affects his veins.

As for the electric chair, a Vanderbilt University poll released this week found that 56 percent of registered voters in Tennessee support its use, while 37 percent are against it.

Previous Tennessee law gave inmates who committed crimes before 1999 the choice of whether they wanted to die by electric chair or lethal injection. The last inmate to be electrocuted was Daryl Holton, a Gulf War veteran who killed his three sons and a stepdaughter with a high-powered rifle in Shelbyville garage in 1997. He requested the electric chair in 2007.

A provision to apply the change to prisoners already sentenced to death has also raised a debate among legal experts.

Nashville criminal defense attorney David Raybin, who helped draft Tennessee's death penalty law nearly 40 years ago, has said lawmakers may change the method of execution but they cannot make that change retroactive. To do so would be unconstitutional, he said.

Tennessee has 74 prisoners on death row. Sidney Porterfield, who at 71 was the oldest inmate on Tennessee's death row, died of natural causes this week. Nine others have died of natural causes since 2000, while one committed suicide. Six inmates have been executed during that time frame, the most recent in 2010.

Billy Ray Irick, who was convicted of murdering a 7-year-old Knoxville girl he was babysitting in 1985, is the next death row inmate scheduled to be executed, on Oct. 7.

Thirty-two states have the death penalty, and all of them rely at least in part on lethal injection. Fewer than a dozen regularly carry out executions, among them Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia and Texas, which leads the country. The federal government also uses lethal injection but rarely carries out executions.

The Supreme Court has never declared a method of execution unconstitutional on the grounds that it is cruel and unusual. It upheld the firing squad in 1879, the electric chair in 1890 and lethal injection in 2008.

The court made it clear over the years that the Eighth Amendment prohibits inflicting pain merely to torture or punish an inmate, drawing a distinction between a method like electrocution and old European practices such as drawing and quartering. The Constitution prohibits "unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain," the court said in 1976.

Nonetheless, U.S. states and the federal government have updated execution methods several times in efforts to find more humane ways to put condemned criminals to death.

First used by New York State in 1890, the electric chair was employed throughout the 20th century to execute hundreds and is still an option in eight states. Since 1976, 158 inmates have been executed by electrocution. It was considered humane when it was first introduced but has resulted in many horrific executions over the years.

In 2000, Florida switched from the electric chair to injection after bungled electrocutions raised concerns that the state's death penalty would be declared unconstitutional.

- See more at: http://www.onenewsnow.com/ap/united-states/tennessee-brings-back-the-electric-chair#.U384wyihFyI

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« Reply #10 on: May 25, 2014, 08:12:04 pm »

what was the guys name? and station?

Alan Cox on WMMS
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« Reply #11 on: April 11, 2015, 05:27:01 am »

Oklahoma passes bill to allow nitrogen gas executions

Oklahoma is one step closer to becoming the first state to allow executions by nitrogen gas after the state Senate on Thursday passed legislation legalizing the method.

The bill was unanimously passed 41-0.

The law, should Gov. Mary Fallin sign it, would make death by nitrogen gas the preferred method of execution if lethal injection drugs are not available or are found to be unconstitutional.

The use of nitrogen gas causes a person to black out and eventually die from lack of oxygen.

East Central University criminal justice professor Michael Copeland told KWTV-TV in Oklahoma City that the use of nitrogen gas is humane.

"You don't have to worry about supply problems and doesn't require the assistance of medical professionals," he said.

Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol -- specifically its use of midazolam, a general anesthetic -- is scheduled to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court after what critics are calling the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.

After receiving an injection including midazolam, Lockett had convulsions and reportedly tried to speak and lift his head even after doctors declared him unconscious. It took him 43 minutes to die after the injection.

The Supreme Court has stayed three Oklahoma executions pending its ruling, slated to take place in April.

Executions in the United States have undergone some changes in recent years after states started running out of the essential lethal injection drug pentobarbital. The European Union in 2011 voted to prohibit the sale of the drug and seven other barbiturates to the United States for use in torture or executions.

Now states are being forced to use new drug cocktails, scramble to restock their stores of drugs and review their lethal injection policies.

In March, Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert signed into law legislation that allows the state to use the firing squad for executions if lethal injection drugs aren't available.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/04/09/Oklahoma-passes-bill-to-allow-nitrogen-gas-executions/2701428617988/?spt=hs&or=tn_us
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« Reply #12 on: April 11, 2015, 05:29:02 am »

Utah approves firing squad if lethal injection unavailable

Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert signed a bill Monday that allows execution by firing squad if lethal-injection drugs are not available.

The new legislation comes amid a nationwide shortage of the drug cocktail used to carry out lethal injection, forcing states to come up with alternate methods to carry out executions. Utah has eight inmates on death row and has not carried out a lethal injection since 1999. The state has no supply of lethal-injection drugs.

"We regret anyone ever commits the heinous crime of aggravated murder to merit the death penalty and we prefer to use our primary method of lethal injection when such a sentence is issued," a spokesman for Herbert, a Republican, said in a written statement. "However, when a jury makes the decision and a judge signs a death warrant, enforcing that lawful decision is the obligation of the executive branch."

In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have pulled back on sales of the drug mixture, saying they are uneasy about the use. The U.S. Supreme Court is also considering challenges from death row inmates who question the drug use in Oklahoma.

In 2004, Utah repealed the use of firing squads, with the exception for people sentenced to death before the law went into effect. The last execution by firing squad happened in 2010.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2015/03/24/Utah-approves-firing-squad-if-lethal-injection-unavailable/2161427187206/#ixzz3VLoGgk1Q
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« Reply #13 on: April 29, 2015, 05:09:32 am »

SCOTUS To Hear Case Against Lethal Injection

 Death penalty opponents, intent on trying to inhibit states from administering capital punishment, are hoping the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the state of Oklahoma’s use of midazolam as the first drug in its three-drug cocktail used for lethal injection. The state has been relying on midazolam because drug manufacturers, pressured by death penalty opponents, no longer make available drugs previously used; first sodium thiopental, and later pentobarbital, both of which were effective in putting the condemned prisoner into a deep state of unconsciousness before the next two drugs were administered. According to the Mayo Clinic, midazolam, also known as Versed, “is used to produce sleepiness or drowsiness and to relieve anxiety before surgery or certain procedures.”

Because there have been three cases in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona in which midazolam proved ineffective in rendering the inmate totally unconscious, and thus unaware of the pain caused by the following two drugs, capital punishment opponents argue that using midazolam constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which would violate the Eighth Amendment.

Robin Konrad, arguing for the inmates, wrote in her brief, “A protocol using painful lethal drugs is unconstitutional unless the prisoner is first properly administered a drug that reliably ensures a deep, coma-like unconsciousness throughout the execution. Midazolam cannot serve that purpose.”

Oklahoma Solicitor General Patrick Wyrick dissented, noting in his brief, “Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol does not present a substantial risk of severe pain and cannot be considered cruel. The record evidence indicates that a large dose of midazolam produces a level of unconsciousness sufficiently deep to render persons insensate to even extremely painful stimuli.” He added, “This case, under the guise of a narrow attack on a single method of execution out of many, is a full-throated attack on the ability of the sovereign states to carry out the death sentences issued by their citizens.”

The Oklahoma case from April 2014, in which Clayton Lockett was injected with 100 milligrams of midazolam but regained consciousness during the administration of the second and third drugs, was investigated, and the results found that the execution went badly because technicians did not properly insert the needle into Lockett.

Last week, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed a bill permitting nitrogen gas to be used if lethal injection was not available.

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/scotus-hear-case-against-lethal-injection
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