The news is that lethal injections are legal, but required a retry. GP asked: So why not a firing squad? Them retrying might be less cruel than reinjection.

Agreed. Mock executions are considered to be a form of torture. Botched executions are perhaps even worse, given the actual physical pain and severe risk of brain injuries being inflicted.

Because in the cases where we've used nitrogen gas we've observed people suffering. Nitrogen works if the victim breathes normally. But people naturally won't do that when you put the murder mask over their mouth and nose.

Doze off and die is not what happens.

I think you have that the wrong way round. The injection is far more likely to cause intense pain and suffering due to the lack of medical professionals being involved (it's not a medical procedure). The drugs are often obtained from "dodgy" sources and so the dosage can't be determined due to the variability of the drugs. The lack of medical professionals will often mean that the injections are poorly administered (e.g. missing a vein).

I was just reading a Reddit post from a veterinarian and the protocol for euthanising animals is far better than that used for lethal injections - notably pre-meds are used to sedate the patient and prevent breathing issues and panic.

A bullet or two to the head is far more effective and reliable. The only downside to lethal shooting is that it looks too barbaric to observers.

Sounds more like they to be in a mental hosptial than a prison.

> Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?

I didn't say there shouldn't be consequences. I just think that executing someone who committed a crime when they were effectively a child is kind of upsetting. I do not see how you extrapolated that I think it's "normal childhood indiscretion" out of what I said.

Did you read to the part of the article where they mentioned the trauma she had gone through since being a toddler was “almost impossible to grasp”? It’s easy for me to think that if you pick a model citizen today, go back in time and put them through the same struggles, they would not fare much better in society than Christa. And yes I know going through a hardship doesn’t justify cruelty to others, but again she was, by all reasonable measures, a child at the time. The world she experienced throughout all of her formative years gave her nothing to hold on to. She did not fail us any more than we failed her first, and now she’ll be punished for it.

I would rather we don’t have the death penalty at all, but if that’s off the table then I would probably do the cutoff at wherever the medical community says adolescence is done.

The US legal system allows for a great deal of time to be spent appealing death penalty cases, which usually takes years. Most people who support the death penalty support it happening much more quickly than decades after the sentence was passed.

I mean I’d rather live for 32 years than have them quickly do everything and kill me at 20.

> I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them

There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.

The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.

> Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.

What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.

Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.

If you'd like to understand the imperfection more concretely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...

There's not really any need for sophisticated arguments, it's a constant shit show and we should abolish it for the simplicity.

I guess that or go full on Judge Dredd.

The state has a monopoly on violence. In exchange for this great power we expect great responsibility. A state that is flippant with its use of violence signals something to its people. I believe that even if there are zero incorrect convictions that the state should use the minimum of violence to improve the safety of the populace. The death penalty (as opposed to lwop) does not protect anybody from crime. It does not deter people. Its only function is vengeance. And when the state uses violence in vengeance it degrades society.

Yeah most death penalty cases are massively more justified than most modern wars, especially from the perspective of the individuals involved.

> What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?

Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.

It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.

Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.

Well, they can’t kill someone who is dead so they have to save her. Duh.

It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.