“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”
Pretty compassionate way to kill a person.
Once again, the Law in the south is brutal.
Every day you wake up and think, “There’s no way America can get even more fucked up than it was yesterday”.
And every day some asshole says “wanna bet…watch this.”
USA, USA, USA!
Ah yes, state sanctioned… murder… great…
State sactioned torture and murder. This was no execution, this was torturing someone to death.
Removed by mod
2edgy4me
Says his religious advisor, who is against the death penalty.
Complain that execution is wrong, not that the method was unpleasant.
Another reason not to visit the place
I don’t support capital punishment.
But hypoxia in humans is well studied. Unless they were using monumental stupid gas like CO2 (which triggers your breathing reflex) then the problem wasn’t the method, in principle.
I wouldn’t put it past a execution supporter to fuck it up somehow, though.
I mean if they on death row. Just hang them.
Look. Execution is inhumane. You can’t make it gentle, peaceful, or nice. All you can do is make it quick, which it sounds like they failed to do here. But if the good people of Alabama aren’t comfortable with someone struggling for half an hour and then dying, they shouldn’t execute people at all.
That said, the person quoted in this article is the executed’s spiritual advisor. If I was Smith’s spiritual advisor, I’d also be claiming the method was inhumane, violent, and awful. The reality is that it’s a lot more cruel that Smith went back into the execution chamber despite them botching the job the first time than that they half-assed the nitrogen asphyxiation. It was an untested method, but every method of execution has a first person to be executed with it.
If your society is bickering over which way it should kill the condemned, you’ve already ceded the moral high ground. We have already solved execution, and we’ve had it solved for decades, even centuries arguably. Hanging, firing squad, electrocution, beheading, lethal injection–every method has its proponents and detractors, but every method is to the same end. If you’re too squeamish for what happened in Alabama, an alternative method of killing people isn’t going to fix that for you. The solution is staring you right in the face, and it’s life without parole.
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it. You can’t expect people to follow, “do what I say, not what I do.”
It’s cruel, it’s a reflection of our morals. The death penalty is not a deterrent for murder. The death penalty is hypocrisy. The death penalty is for an unserious society.
But the death penalty is just a symptom of a greater chronic illness we suffer from. We’ll just continue to kill ourselves until we find a cure for the disease.
I want to preface this by saying I am against the death penalty.
The argument
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it.
really falls apart when you consider all the other things the state is allowed to do that would be otherwise illegal. The simplest comparison is imprisonment but there are dozens of others.
I think you are onto something. The cure will be found when nobody is left. /S
I will also preface this by saying I am 100% against the death penalty. The fact that we could put an innocent person to death for what I see as zero gain makes it very hard to convince me otherwise.
However:
The state tells you murder is illegal. Except when the state does it.
Murder is by definition the illegal killing of someone. Unless I’m mistaken, every state has some law on the book that allows you to kill someone, at least in the case of self defense or the defense of another when it’s reasonable to believe there is imminent danger to one’s life. And the defense of the DP is that it’s “defending” society against these criminals. It’s BS, but your point is also incorrect.
The cure is education. Unfortunately they are killing that, too.
Good education is so underrated, yet so difficult to actually get, especially with these silly book bans and stuff which only serve to narrow students’ perspectives
This is kind of a silly argument. The state is not a person. When they fine you money, it is not identical to someone stealing from you.
The state doesn’t intentionally murder innocent people. Your argument is invalid.
By your logic, then it’s okay to murder people I deem not innocent. Got it.
The state does not care whether they are innocent as well, and that callousness is just as bad from the eyes of people living in a civilized society…
Civilian murderers also have justifications for their actions. I accept those justifications just as much as I do those of the State murderers.
Since 1973, at least 196 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. Source
Only situation I’d accept a death sentence is if a person indisputably poses a credible threat to other peoples lives, even while imprisoned.
Essentially, anybody previously convicted of murder who then proceeds to (beyond any doubt) attempt murder again. At that point it’s not about punishment, it’s about protecting human life.
Barbaric.
I’m waiting for the witch trials to restart in the US.
I wonder how long Elizabeth Sennett struggled to live after Kenneth stabbed her to death. May she and her family rest in peace knowing justice has been served.
IDK about you guys, but in raising our kids we believed it was important that they know where meat comes from. So when slaughtering poultry the kids help out. Maybe apply the same thing here?
If you support capital punishment, then you must sign up for firing squad duty. If less than 50% of voters sign up for firing squad duty, then the death penalty is abolished.
Talk is cheap, conscience is expensive!
So they fucked it up and then there’s a real gem in the article. The jury voted to give him life without parole. A judge overruled that jury to give him the death penalty anyways.
There are no more laws. Only the whims of judges.
