Sarat reports that over those 120 years, 8,776 people were executed and 276 of those executions (3.15%) went wrong in some way. Lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions.
Unnecessary suffering is sadistic and hardens the heart. I don’t have strong feelings about the death penalty, but do feel strongly about incompetence. Get it right.
A 3% failure rate for something done deliberately and with few unknowns, is incompetence.
Go back to first principles. What’s the objective? To execute the convicted.
No, that’s not it. If it was, we’d do the Che Guevara style, pistol-to-the-back-of-the-head method.
The objective is something like, execute the convicted using a method that isn’t too graphic, doesn’t show obvious suffering, looks scientific, doesn’t take very long and can’t be blamed on any specific executioner.
Why is lethal injection so unreliable? That’s what we use for dogs and cats. We can’t tolerate our pets suffering, so the failure rate must be very low.
The people in charge are too squeamish or have criteria they aren’t willing to discuss.
In movies, people get shot with a tranquilizer in the arm, butt or neck, and they go down. Once the person is knocked out, administer 10 times the lethal dose of tranquilizer in the other butt cheek.
Nitrous oxide, laughing gas, is used at the dentist office as a mild sedative. Administer that until oxygen deprivation sets in.
Poison their food.
Do the research, but I bet most of the people who get a death sentence are drug users. Provide the option to self-administer their own lethal dose of recreational drugs.
I am not here to solve the problem, but to say that the problem can be solved. To kill gophers, hook a hose from the tailpipe into the gopher hole. It ain’t that hard.
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