Botching Executions

I just saw a news article about a botched execution in Oklahoma (link below). That is inexcusable. There are many ways to kill someone painlessly. Many people will take that story as a reason why capital punishment should be banned, but it is just an example of people not knowing what they are doing. Personally, I think there are people who have lost any right to live through their crimes, so I believe that capital punishment is appropriate in many cases.

More than two hundred years ago, M. Guillotine thought that executions were inhumane, so he built his device. It is known that when blood pressure falls drastically the brain loses consciousness instantly. That is what Guillotine knew and is why his device worked well. A heavy, sharp blade falling several feet will cut through any neck, and the person will lose consciousness before the nerve impulse can get from the cut to the brain.  There might be twitching from ganglia firing, but death would actually be within a fraction of a second. There would be no need for medical tests to determine whether the victim was dead; the head would be in a basket a few feet from the neck.

If people want to avoid the necessity of cleaning up all that bloody then there are effective and reliable chemical methods that would be painless. An overdose of heroin would take a few minutes to kill, but the person would be feeling quite nice, especially if there had been earlier, lesser doses injected to get the person into a comfortable condition.

What is with the mixtures of a variety of chemicals? One is supposed to do one thing, then another to do something else, and so on. Massive overdoses of many drugs will result in unconsciousness and death.

I realize that humans are almost as hard to kill as cockroaches, but there are many ways to quickly and painlessly kill both. If the cost is a consideration, then the guillotine would be quite cost effective. There would be a few thousand dollars for construction costs, but they wouldn’t require specially trained people, just someone who could put the neck in the slot where the blade will hit it. Using injections of heroin or barbiturates would just require someone to fill an IV bag and put a needle into a vein; it wouldn’t even need to be a clean needle.

You’d think that a country that could get people onto the Moon could kill someone quickly and painlessly. There are many other methods that I haven’t mentioned but that are more effective and faster than that collection of drugs that some states are using.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/04/30/oklahoma-tries-stanch-execution-fallout/Zkx2AlsEbesZsscblgW9CI/story.html