Alabama suffocated a man to death in a gas chamber tonight after starving him so he wouldn't choke on his own vomit as they did it. And this was deemed perfectly legal by multiple courts in the vaunted American legal system.
That's what happens when you value institutions over people.
I totally get the impulse, but breathing in nitrogen wasn’t the thing that would harm him. It’s just lack of oxygen, which holding your breath isn’t going to help.
Legal execution is fucking sickening, It’s horrifying that we did that to him.
It is about vengeance and also about not perpetually providing room and board for someone who lost their rights when they decided to take someone else's rights to life away.
Edit: why would they have an inalienable right to life, even if it is a meager life in prison, if they decided they can takeinnocent people's lives for their own deranged reasons?
That's easy to answer. Justice is not perfect, and sooner or later you will execute an innocent person. We know this has happened in the UK, because DNA evidence proved that the person couldn't have been there, and they would have been released had they not been executed.
Death is final and you don't just respawn at your bed, so this is the worst possible outcome. Abolishing the death penalty avoids this terrible situation, and yes it means you keep people like this alive until their natural death, but it also maximises the chance that new evidence can be found that proves that person didn't in fact commit the crime.
Sure I'm sympathetic to that argument. I've recently looked up lists of some of the people that most likely were found innocent post execution.
But what if we had stricter criteria. What about the people we are absolutely certain, with witnesses and camera footage, are guilty of murder? I'm specifically thinking of people like Nikolas Cruz, a school shooter who killed 17?
That's the dilemma. The thing is, when we last executed an innocent, we believed we had absolute incontrovertible proof. We have always known a death sentence to be final.
Maybe this argument will win the day: The value of human life is so high, and the execution of an innocent is so terrible, that we convert the death sentence to life imprisonment for the benefit of all those that will later be proven innocent. And yes this means some genuine criminals will live, but that is a better price to pay than executing even one innocent. The death penalty will ALWAYS have some collateral damage, and the only way to avoid that is to abolish it.
In Cruz's case of course another significant aspect is the lack of sensible gun control. But you Americans value guns more than you value kids, and until that changes you'll be stuck with your Cruzes. Killing Cruz for a systemic failure is no solution.
There are tons of things I would see the state spend money on rather than literally killing people. In the case of this, maybe mental health help for the victims.
Well one way to lower it is to settle law around the death penalty it seems. And they attribute part of the cost to battling chemical manufacturers, which could be moot with how cheap and easy it is to acquire nitrogen or even carbon monoxide.
Also if it's 70,000 a year to house an inmate... if an inmate is jailed for 20 years before death, total cost is 1.4 million. If an inmate is jailed at 20 and lives for another 60 years, that's 4.2 million.
So taking out a very young inmate would theoretically save the state about 3 million if they live until a natural age. Ted Kaczynski lived until 81 and absolutely deserved death.
Well one way to lower it is to settle law around the death penalty it seems
Or you could just not kill people.
Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present system ($137 million per year), the present system after implementation of the reforms … ($232.7 million per year) … and a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty ($11.5 million).
The poor woman was interrogated for 5 hours straight by police into confessing her "crime", while pregnant with twins, after which she was sentenced to death (still alive btw, lawsuits still ongoing and sucking up taxpayer money, even 13 years later.). One of the influential things in her death was the District Attorney who was attempting to be reelected on a "tough on crime" platform.
Cameron County D.A. Armando Villalobos was running for re-election and seeking a “win,” and is now serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion.
Of course, you made an argument about "what if we require really, really hard evidence"... but what evidence is greater than a confession? What if evidence is fudged? There can never be a guarantee, and we should design our systems to account for human error... or malice.
Prison should be a place to rehabilitate people first, and a place to remove dangerous people from society second. Not a political platform, like the death penalty is so often.
The death penalty is the ultimate form of virtue signaling. An expensive way to remove someone from society, when life in prison would have the same effects, relatively. Everybody dies eventually, no need to waste money on killing people early when we could be spending money on keeping people alive.