TIL the design of the guillotine was intended to make capital punishment more reliable and less painful in accordance with new Enlightenment ideas of human rights.

I’ll take guillotine over hanging any day

I believe it's still among the most reliable tools for the job and actually quite humane. Just a bit messy.

I'm not for capital punishment (because there is always a chance justice failed), but if you are going to do it, might as will do it in a way that is quick, accurate, reliable, will cost little, and have few complexities. Lethal injection is a mess. Electrocution is ridiculous. Hanging is not super reliable. Gunshot it not quick. Maybe we need guillotine 2.0. Like, if we were to create a modern version of it, what would it look like? What would be the improvements to the design? Hell, there is probably a simulator on Steam for this question already. lol

The modern version just made the news. Death in 20ms by the abyss
Well, I suppose you first need to consider what's doing the work on a guillotine; as far as I can tell it's only using gravity to drop the blade. So we'd want to reduce any friction caused by the rails, it'd be easiest to upgrade to aluminum and get some sort of ball bearings or something to keep it as low as possible. Obviously we want a sharp a blade as possible - considering our lack of sustained killings it might be best to move to a one use blade mechanism to keep it pointy since we probably don't have to worry about durability with sustained beheadings.

Hmm, after that we should probably try to introduce more energy into the system since we're still just using gravity. Adding more weight would probably help but wouldn't ever make it go faster than terminal velocity. Maybe the cheapest option would be spring-loading the top of the guillotine so after the lever is pulled it shoots down. Or if you want more future-y could try to make some sort of magnet railgun to propel the blade down at increasingly fast speeds.

For the bottom it seems pretty good, though you'll want to make sure you have the executioner line up the blade to be in-between the vertebrae (gotta try and make it as swift as possible). Then maybe add a pillow, because it doesn't look super comfy there.

It was way better than some drunk guy in a hood with a dull axe. I think I remember reading about some teen who suicided themselves with a homemade guillotine in the woods. I don't know why I'm mentioning that.

I wouldn't be surprised if the botched execution of Mary Queen of Scots was the motivation for the guillotine: https://allthatsinteresting.com/mary-queen-of-scots-execution

What else did you think the guillotine was? Like it's not talked about alot but if you get beheaded it didn't always go well or in one swing.

Most execution methods are, and it never works out as clean and civilized and painless as is claimed. Miscarriages of justice also happen. I'm glad my jurisdiction doesn't use death penalties any more, and can only hope humanity manages to consign the idea to history someday.

It makes for a faster, more efficient execution. This was not what its creator had intended... he just wanted to take executioners too drunk to feel guilt or aim precisely out of the equation. I think he went to his grave regretting his invention, as it was so frequently used during the French Revolution that dogs and cats would lap up the spilled blood.

Now we have lethal injections where it takes hours to die and they're in pain the whole time. How about we don't kill people?

So it's a bit of a privileged position to say that.

Has nobody committed acts against you that you could defend yourself from if they were dead?

Yeah there were some very botched beheadings.