Why do the Americans insist on using this form of ritual torture killing even when the correct drugs to make it work are unavailable? Guns are incredibly popular in America, so why don't they just put a bullet in the criminal's head? Much more humane, and a good opportunity to exercise their 2nd amendment rights at the same time.
There are other options. Decapitation and hanging are old fashioned methods that we used use in Europe before we become civilised. They are painful, but not as painful as this, and they are cheap and don't require any special drugs. Yet the alternative American method seems to be the electric chair! Again it's expensive, complicated, painful.
Americans seem to be the sort of people who if you gave them a free copy of Mac OS X that would run on any hardware they would decide to buy Windows 8 instead.
Hanging is less reliable than one might imagine; at the time, the electric chair was touted as a humane method of execution. Really it comes down to whether you buy into the idea of the death penalty or not. by the standards of American law, the DP itself can't be considered inherently cruel and unusual (because the Constitution contemplates the possibility of the death penalty being lawfully applied in the language of the 5th amendment). So all Constitutional arguments about the DP where culpability is not in question rest upon the justice or injustice of who it can be applied to (eg not minors, because they are below the age of criminal responsibility) or how it is applied - probably the easiest line to argue, because for any given method of execution it;s relatively easy to find examples of it going gruesomely wrong and you can then argue that it would be wrong to employ a method of execution where you knew in advance of such a possibility.
Obviously I am drastically over-simplifying the legal issues here.
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Why do the Americans insist on using this form of ritual torture killing even when the correct drugs to make it work are unavailable? Guns are incredibly popular in America, so why don't they just put a bullet in the criminal's head? Much more humane, and a good opportunity to exercise their 2nd amendment rights at the same time.
There are other options. Decapitation and hanging are old fashioned methods that we used use in Europe before we become civilised. They are painful, but not as painful as this, and they are cheap and don't require any special drugs. Yet the alternative American method seems to be the electric chair! Again it's expensive, complicated, painful.
Americans seem to be the sort of people who if you gave them a free copy of Mac OS X that would run on any hardware they would decide to buy Windows 8 instead.
Hanging is less reliable than one might imagine; at the time, the electric chair was touted as a humane method of execution. Really it comes down to whether you buy into the idea of the death penalty or not. by the standards of American law, the DP itself can't be considered inherently cruel and unusual (because the Constitution contemplates the possibility of the death penalty being lawfully applied in the language of the 5th amendment). So all Constitutional arguments about the DP where culpability is not in question rest upon the justice or injustice of who it can be applied to (eg not minors, because they are below the age of criminal responsibility) or how it is applied - probably the easiest line to argue, because for any given method of execution it;s relatively easy to find examples of it going gruesomely wrong and you can then argue that it would be wrong to employ a method of execution where you knew in advance of such a possibility.
Obviously I am drastically over-simplifying the legal issues here.