Nine months after Kenneth Smith’s botched lethal injection, state attorney general has asked for approval to kill him with nitrogen

  • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    Human medical experimentation on prisoners is cruel and unusual in and of itself. However well you personally think execution by nitrogen would go (and I doubt you’d volunteer), people on death row have a right to know we’re not trying novel execution methods on them. Maybe if what we’re doing doesn’t actually benefit anyone more than prison would and is considered so barbaric that European manufacturers won’t supply us with the drugs we need to do it, we should stop.

    The mania for execution led Arizona to refurbish its gas chamber and reverse-engineer a Zyklon B equivalent.* That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. How about you?

    *https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/28/arizona-gas-chamber-executions-documents

    • TopShelfVanilla@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      There’s no experiment necessary in proving nitrogen as a silent and painless killer. Scuba divers have done all of the experiments for us, mostly by accident.

      Imprisonment is barbaric.

      If someone has done something so bad that they should be locked up for life then they should be dispatched not kept as some kind of morbid pet of the state. If you murdered a bunch of people (mass killing of serial style) you need not waste any more of our air. If you rape you should be killed too. If you’ve gotten yourself on death row fuck your rights.

      • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        If you imprison an innocent, they can be freed. Execution takes away that possibility. And we have absolutely, provably, executed innocent people. I hope that never happens to you, but if life were a play, it would certainly make for some dramatic irony.

        • TopShelfVanilla@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          If you kept an innocent man imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life then you were a thousand times more cruel than had you executed him. I would prefer death over rotting in prison hoping to find the last shred of decency in the american judicial system that had already imprisoned me. All of your arguments are romantic and foolish.

          • PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Romantic? Ffs…

            Would you accept giving someone a choice between life in prison and death?

            If you think prison’s worse than death for an innocent person, feel free to ask people who were exonerated after decades in prison if they’d rather have been killed.