Do ex-South Carolina death row staff support death penalty?
thestate.com
thestate.com
"when they asked the warden, Robert Ward, if they could take a break from execution work, he said they could lose their leadership roles if they didn’t do it, the men said. ... So they kept going. They both valued their managerial roles and needed them to support their families."
They did it for the money and status.
They chose to do other people's dirty work in a corrupt and utterly indefensible system. No one forced them to be killers. This is what people are like.
[0]: https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost [1]: https://www.golocalprov.com/news/maximum-security-prisoners-...
And no longer wrongful death penalties
- an inmate living the remainder of his natural in prison instead of being killed today
- a society not having killed a person in an act of state-sponsored revenge
Question; if, upon finding a defendant guilty of a severe enough crime, they were instantly and automatically transported to a foreign island not under the control of the state, would the government have a duty to deliver food and other amenities to them? That is to say, are the people of a nation morally obliged to provide for people that they no longer want to be part of their community? If your answer is no, and no other country will take in the person found guilty of the crime, then what is the government supposed to do? If your answer is yes, that's quite a strange position to me. It prioritizes the needs of criminals above that of law-abiding citizens (as, with rare exceptions, a law-abiding citizen is unlikely to have their physical needs met in such a manner by the state). Why should your tax dollars go towards the care and housing of a person who has proven themselves eager and able to murder you if the opportunity arose?
Also, you have either misunderstood or altered my premise. Regarding the first part, It's not that the life of an inmate has no value; my premise is that said life costs more to preserve than the education and healthcare that could be provided to dozens or hundreds of people for every year that said inmate languishes in prison. I'm comparing the QALY's of a prisoner with others. Life imprisonment as an intervention fails to maximize social utility and fails at the task of killing fewest people because, after all, (regarding the second part) everything that a government does kills people. A state that spends 2 billion dollars on housing death row inmates is choosing not to spend that money on improving its education, infrastructure, social programs, healthcare systems, and everything else it can do that save lives. Hence why I mentioned the identificable victim bias; people on death row feel more like victims than the hundreds of people that will freeze to death in the streets because of a lack of housing, or when wildfires consume their homes, or because higher taxes and regulations have stalled out the economy and left them destitute and hopeless. They are killed by neglect rather than direct action, but they are dead all the same.
The American prison complex is an inhumane travesty, and life imprisonment is one of its worst failures. It is the worst compromise possible between those who see the system as fundamentally reformatory, and those who see it in talionic terms. It is maximum punishment at maximum cost.
What is the point of keeping a human behind bars for 50, 60 years?
Especially in a clear-cut case like a mass shooting. Those guys are still alive, behind bars, forever, unless they shoot themselves when they are done.
S/he should be the one to follow through on the state mandated and sanctioned death of one of its people. They are the head of the state after all, with the power to stay the execution.
There’s also something deeply unseemly about a method of execution that is quite painful but designed to make the executioners feel better about what they’re doing. If we’re going to execute people it should be via firing squad, which is honest about what is happening and much less painful for the condemned. If we’re not comfortable with that, well then maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all then.
Abducted, raped, tortured and killed? Bring out the rack.
But then I am also okay with the death penalty for rape, but SCOTUS has already ruled that one out.
My main concern in making sure there was a fair trial and that the conviction was correct - replacing death with life in prison is not a substitute for a fair trail.
Asphyxiation by another gas such as helium is generally considered to be "better" as far as I understand – it creates a feeling of euphoria for the subject.
This is not an endorsement of any method of execution, I'm strongly against the entire idea.
I don't know exact details, but because of the chemical structure of helium, it binds to red blood blood cells without causing the body panic, like CO2 and others would.
Your brain doesn't stay conscious too long without oxygen, so it's pretty quick once you start breathing it in.
But being painless is not really the point. The fact that lethal injection is painful is a feature in the minds of those who advocate it.
First, humans can't actually detect Oxygen. We can detect CO2, largely because the build up in our blood makes it more acidic, but we can't actually tell how much Oxygen is in the air or in our bodies. The negative feeling of holding your breath isn't caused by insufficient air, but the buildup of CO2 in your blood due to metabolism. As such, humans actually can't detect an oxygen free room, as long as it isn't full of CO2 (we'd notice that).
Second, part of how we absorb gas is via the difference in gas pressure between our blood and the air. When the partial pressure of CO2 in our blood is higher than the air, it diffuses out, and when the partial pressure of O2 in the air is higher than our blood it tends to dissolve into solution. In an Oxygen free environment any O2 in our blood not already bound up by Hemoglobin rapidly diffuses away, robbing us of O2 faster than holding our breath and cell metabolism normally would, resulting in loss of consciousness very quickly.
The combination of these is why it is advised you never enter an Oxygen free environment without a self contained breathing apparatus. Industrial reports are littered with tragic stories of multiple people entering an N2 or Halogen environment to rescue their friends, only to perish themselves.
Helium doesn't react to anything chemically without a shit ton of energy.
Still wouldn't ease my conscious if I was holding the gun, personally.
Why not hanging? Or beheading? Those seem pretty honest to me.
Beheading works, but requires a lot of specialized equipment and what not. Meanwhile a firing squad doesn't really require any special equipment and training above and beyond what the judicial system already has available.
But that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there were a market for guillotines they would be readily available too. They are not hard to make.
I understand that system becomes vulnerable to bad-faith actors who can use PR and other means to turn public opinion against US interference to then get away with whatever they want.
But I also believe it is important.
> The governor is always listening through a phone when people condemned to die in South Carolina take their last breath. During 13 of the state’s recent executions, the Commander was on the line with the governor.
Sitting in your office hundreds of miles away is nowhere near the same as being in the room, looking the condemned in the eyes.
Executions have a long history of being a public event and fun/exciting/scratching a human morbid itch and satisfying cravings for justice (putting aside the innocence / false positive question for a moment) and I think a contemporary audience may exhibit some of the same historical reactions and behaviors
I would be disappointed. I would also be surprised. I think there's a reason executions aren't public any more, and I think it's because we have largely evolved beyond the point where most of us can take pleasure from watching another person die. I think this is the reason that the reality of industrial meat production is such a closely guarded secret. If people knew what happened behind those closed doors they'd eat a lot less meat.
The documentary, Mr. Death, by Errol Morris (who also directed Fog of War) comes to mind. Well worth a watch for anyone who doesn’t mind the gruesome topic, which I’m guessing is anyone reading this comment. It chronicles the rise of a private citizen and jailhouse worker who decided he could improve the electric chair —- despite having no background at all. Eventually he was advising on all sorts of execution methods.
"[T]here are many people who faint when they witness an execution. I don't know why they come and watch if they don't have the stomach for it. Me? I sleep very well."
"There are no drawbacks for my social life."
"I successfully trained my son Musaed, 22, as an executioner and he was approved and chosen," he says proudly.
"Sometimes [my family] help me clean my sword."
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/06/saudiarabia.fe...
Not that dressing up in a black hood and hanging people would necessarily be less traumatic, but maybe we'd think differently if there was a cultural continuity of hangmen hanging people which we were all casually aware of as a consequence of growing up and learning about the world.
> The film is based on the life of Britain's most prolific hangman, Albert Pierrepoint (played by Timothy Spall), from the time he is first trained for the job and accepted onto the list of the country's official hangmen in 1932 until his resignation in 1956.