Methods of Capital Punishment

I’m sure a lot of people who OD don’t have pain, but I’ve also heard a lot of stories from people who have OD’d and survived and it was not always a peaceful experience for them. Maybe those are meant to be scare tactics for people to avoid trying drugs? Idk. But it’s not the way I would choose for myself.

I think the inhumanity is part of the appeal for so many who support capital punishment.

I think state-sanctioned execution shouldn’t be a thing, but ignoring that, the method of execution itself should not be the punishment, the punishment is the knowledge that your life is going to be terminated outside of your control, at another’s hands. The method itself should not be unnecessarily painful. Ideally, the person would be made unconscious before being killed, and the execution should be a method that is 99.9% foolproof. And the person should remain fully unconscious until confirmed dead.

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I think it would be better to view capital punishment not as “punishment” so much as the ultimate conclusion to a determination that you cannot safely be a part of society, that there is no hope of redemption for you, and therefore there is no point in expending resource to sustain your life.

There is no reason to be unnecessarily cruel in acting upon that assessment.

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people react differently to the same drug. My MIL had some weird and very unpleasant reaction to morphine, and had to plan surgery to avoid opiates. Another guy I know had a valve replaced in his heart and discovered after they did the surgery that he had some horrible reaction to opiates, and couldn’t take them. (I think they paradoxically increased his pain.) He said that having his heart literally wounded was extremely painful.

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I can take opiates, but I can’t take OTC cough syrup, which is a closely related drug. It gives me dysphoria and disassociation. “Well, my cough is under control. But I can’t concentrate enough to work, I can’t sleep, and I feel like shit.”

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I also think that we are a wealthy enough society that we don’t ever need to kill someone. We can afford to keep them imprisoned, apart from society. I, also, object to the death penalty. I feel like it might be the only viable choice for a very poor society, but we have no such excuse.

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These are necessary conditions for capital punishment to be permissible IMO. So, in today’s day and time in the US, not permissible.

I am generally opposed to the death penalty, but most of my objections are related to the imperfections and biases of our justice system.

I am opposed to most of the instances where the death penalty has been handed down as a sentence, but I can see it being retained for exceptional cases and subject to being as-certain-as-possible of guilt (a materially tougher standard than “beyond reasonable doubt” might be).

In such instances, I think an argument could be made that certain forms of execution would be more humane than (for example) life in solitary confinement in a supermax prison.

If there were some sort of 100% effective way to simply banish a person out beyond the limits of society (e.g. a habitable remote island, a habitable planet), I’d be in favor of eliminating the death penalty and using banishment instead…but that may be an artifact of having read too much of certain kinds of fiction in my formative years.

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This is how you get Khan. Do you want Khan???

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Cool. This thread seceded from the other one! That Southern Professor was right!!

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The above closely matches my view.

Escape from New York!

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Snake Pliskin? I heard you were dead.

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One can build up tolerance to opiates really easily. Partly why people who relapse on opiates can OD really easily, because they’re under the impression that they had to do the amount they used to do, when that’ll be a lethal dose for their now sober self.

I’m not particularly afraid of death, and I celebrate people who commit suicide and make that decision for themselves.

But I won’t go so far as to impose death penalty on people. Death needs to be voluntary.

Reports of @Snake 's demise are greatly exaggerated

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I’m jealous.

I buy ketamine for this effect

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There seems to be majority support in the US for the death penalty, at least according to the poll I looked at below. I thought it might be a situation where the public’s attitude was different than the politicians.

interesting, I thought the US was against the death penalty for the most part

Even a majority of Canadians support the death penalty despite it being abolished here in 1976. Pierre Trudeau was PM then. He was an advocate of liberal social policies.

I find this kind of argument compelling in a lot of ways.

Where i think it might go wrong is that a lot of the important evidence is not necessarily physical in nature, but instead concerns what was in the heart of the convict.

An easy example might be a cognitively impaired person. If your IQ is 60, how does that impact your moral culpability?

But this seems to apply to some degree in every case.

So then how do we carve out the standard of evidence needed? I think it is safer to simply not execute anybody.

I guess there is an argument that permanent solitary confinement is even worse than the death penalty. We might give people like that a choice.