The least cruel method of execution?

Who cares, would you rather have your hard earned tax dollars spent by keeping them behind bars. I wouldn't.

Lethal injection followed by hanging. Firing squad is probably pretty quick, but I don't know that it's used much.

The electric chair and gas chamber are nothing short of barbaric.

Apparently suicide is much higher among people involved in executions than the rate in the wider community.

The cost argument doesn't hold water. I've seen some stat's on the costs of executing someone, and it's absolutely staggering.

I don't mind them being locked up and having their arsed reamed consistently for many years.

Lethal injection. And I note that firing squads have been pretty slow sometimes, in some cases I have heard of each executioner was so sure that another would fire the lethal round that he deliberately avoided doing so to not have it on his conscience.

The result was a very wounded man waiting for the squad to reload in the story I heard (as a child, it might be an fallacious urban legend).

The Death Penalty is expensive

Lethal Injection- I think that the others, if not barbaric, are terribly antiquated.

In the petroleum/chemical industry, we frequently have vessels under a nitrogen atmosphere. This is done to prevent corrosion, or to purge out oxygen to prevent explosive mixtures from being formed.

You have to be very, very careful around vessels with a nitrogen atmosphere. The impulse to breathe (and any distress by not breathing) is caused by a build-up of CO2 in the bloodstream, which your body can detect. Since the atmosphere is already 79% nitrogen, the human body has no mechanism to detect it. If you were to inadvertently go into a vessel with a nitrogen atmosphere, you would notice absolutely nothing wrong as you slowly suffocated.

This would probably be about as painless a method of execution as any.

I vote for the guillotine as it's very quick and very messy.

Lethal injection.

Craven said....

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I've heard several scenarios on the firing squad process. One is that only one person has a loaded gun, but no one knows which one. That way most of them feel fairly secure his shot wasn't the fatal one.

The other version has all the guns loaded except one. That way they can all harbor thoughts that their gun was the empty one.

I have a tendency to believe the second one since in the first scenario, if the guy fires an errant shot.... then you'd have a real mess on your hands.

I've seen animals killed by injection, and, though appearances can be deceiving, it appears to be very gentle (except for the process of actually giving the inravenous injection, which is almost always traumatic with an animal).

But there is no way to administer the death penalty that is not barbaric. It's an inherently barbaric institution.

Of the 42 states that have the death penalty, only 3 states (Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah) allow for the use of a firing squad. However, in Idaho and Oklahoma, the firing squad is only used as a last-ditch effort

And your neighbors in Utah are generally a charming bunch of folks, dys.

Last-ditch effort? Is that to say if the chair or injection doesn't do the job, they take them out and shoot them?

One of the chemicals used in lethal injection almost everywhere is pancuronium bromide. It paralyzes the skeletal muscles but does not affect the brain or nerves. Its use is so cruel that in some states it is a crime to use it to euthanize pets. The paralysis it induces leaves the inmate wide-awake but unable to speak or cry out as (s)he slowly suffocates. "The subject gives all the appearances of a serene expiration when actually the subject is feeling and perceiving the excruciatingly painful ordeal of death by legal injection" was the opinion of a Tennessee judge, Ellen Hobbs Lyle. She ruled its use has "no legitimate purpose."

This information was from an article in the New York Times of October 7, 2003 but I can't give you a link to it. Sorry.

Pancuronium bromide is preceded by sodium pentathol (which I've seen used in animal euthanasia), which causes unconsciousness before it causes death -- which it does, in large doses. I honestly had no idea that they used anything else.

Don't tell them when and then wait until they fall asleep. Sneak in and shoot them in the head. Painless mentally and physically.

Certainly that would be the most humane method with most of the aggressive dogs I've seen.

"A parachute not opening - that's the way to die, getting caught in a combine, having your nuts bit off by a Laplander. That's the way I want to go."

--Frank Drebin