Manner of execution

[Stella]

I'm not American but am trying to walk in the shoes of the American position on the death penalty. The latest news about Kenneth Smith, executed by asphyxiation by nitrogen gas after failing to die by lethal injection...raises the point... why not return to the tried and true methods of execution ie. gun shot to the heart or long drop hanging? Those methods that didn't fail.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/2 ... trogen-gas

[peregrinator]

I think those methods are viewed as less humane, but they also require some kind of proximate material cooperation on the part of the executioners.

[Stella]

This is how it was reported in my neck of the woods. If I faced execution, given a choice, I would definitely opt for firing squad or long drop hanging.

Alabama has been accused of torturing a man to death by forcing him to inhale pure nitrogen – the first time in the world that the method has been used to carry out a death sentence.

Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, was declared dead shortly before 9.30pm local time. He wore an airtight full-face respirator mask and suffocated.

The state said that it expected him to pass out almost immediately, however witnesses said he kept breathing for nine or 10 minutes before dying. The execution lasted about 22 minutes.

He “began to convulse, he popped up on the gurney over and over and over and over again”, said the Rev Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, who was with him in the death chamber. “It was the most horrible thing I think I’ve ever seen … He shook the whole gurney.”

Asked about the shaking and convulsing, Alabama’s corrections commissioner, John Hamm, said they were involuntary movements. “That was all expected and was in the side effects that we’ve seen or researched on nitrogen hypoxia. Nothing was out of the ordinary.” He said nitrogen gas was flowing for about 15 minutes.

There was an appeal to the US Supreme Court on Thursday night, with one final appeal lodged minutes before the execution was due to start. The court declined to halt proceedings, but they were delayed by two hours as Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal justice, wrote a dissenting opinion.

“Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before. The world is watching,” she wrote. Two other liberal justices dissented.

Smith made the “I love you sign” with his hands toward family members who were witnesses. “Thank you for supporting me. Love, love all of you,” he said. His final meal was a T-bone steak.

His death comes 14 months after he survived a first execution attempt. He was strapped to a gurney for four hours as officials attempted to insert an intravenous line for a lethal injection, first into his arm, then his neck and finally his feet. They gave up only after the death warrant expired, leaving Smith in what he described as “intense pain”.

Smith spoke of his fears at being put to death by nitrogen hypoxia in an interview with The Times last year. He admitted he was “absolutely terrified”.

His family has shared part of a diary that he had kept in the months before his second date in the death chamber at Holman correctional facility near the small town of Atmore.

“Woke up with a migraine,” he wrote just before Christmas. “Saw the psychiatrist. Discussed increased nightmares, depression, anxiety, and having trouble sleeping since getting the date [for his execution] and being on single walk [the cell prisoners are moved to in the weeks before they are put to death].”

In another entry a few days earlier, Smith said he had had nightmares about being executed.

Smith was sentenced for his part in the 1988 murder of a pastor’s wife, and received the death penalty despite the trial jury recommending that Smith and an accomplice should be sentenced to life in prison. Judges’ power to overrule such jury decisions in Alabama has since been rescinded but the new law was not applied retroactively.

Steve Marshall, Alabama’s attorney-general said: “Justice has been served. Tonight, Kenneth Smith was put to death for the heinous act he committed over 35 years ago: the murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett.”

Smith did not dispute being at Sennett’s home, but said he did not participate in her killing. His friend, John Forrest Parker, was also convicted of the murder, and was executed in 2010. Charles Sennett, the dead woman’s husband, had paid Smith and Parker dollars 1,000 each after taking out a life insurance policy on her. As the police closed in, Sennett killed himself.

“This has been a circus,” Chuck Sennett, 61, the victim’s son, said before being taken to witness the execution. “Everyone has taken their eyes off my mama. All it is, is about the hypoxia and how Kenny Smith is going to be the first one to get it, but they forgot about what he did to get that far.”

Behind the story

The United States, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan are the only developed countries that still have the death penalty. In the UK, where the last execution was in 1964, capital punishment was finally abolished in 1998 (Alistair Dawber writes).

In 1996, 315 executions were carried out in the US, a high since the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Gregg v Georgia that ended a four-year hiatus. Twenty-nine states have either abolished the death penalty or paused executions by executive action. In 2021 Virginia became the first southern state to abolish capital punishment. Support for capital punishment has been falling for years and states have struggled to do it properly. Alabama has a record of botching executions.

Some companies now refuse to supply the drugs involved in the lethal injection. Mississippi and Oklahoma have approved nitrogen hypoxia and Idaho last year authorised the use of a firing squad in case it ran out of drugs. South Carolina has revived its electric chair for future use.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/ ... be8a4be32b

[Doom]

The older I get, the more I come to just oppose capital punishment almost entirely except in the most extreme circumstances. I would still favor executing someone like Jeffrey Dahmer because his crimes were especially heinous. I definitely approved of killing Bin Laden, and I if Hitler hadn't killed himself, I would favor executing him if he had been captured alive. But except in these extreme cases, I am more and more coming around to getting rid of it.

My reason is not at all due to compassion for the criminal, unless he is innocent of course. My concern is certainly not a pacifistic opposition to all killing. My concern is what it does to the people who carry the executions out, especially if it is clear that one specific person is responsible.

For something like a firing squad, nobody knows for certain which shooter is the one responsible for the death blow. This protects the consciences of the people involved, no one kill feel a sense of guilt because the shooter doesn't know if he is responsible or not. An even for something like a hanging, there is not necessarily any one specific person responsible, it could be set on a timer or something so that no one has to do the deed. But when it is as simple as just pressing a button, or administering an injection, I know that I couldn't do it, and if i did, wouldn't it deaden my conscience, especially if I did it over and over again?

I don't know of a way that the execution could be done humanely so that death happens quickly and painlessly, and so that no one person is responsible for doing it, so no one would have to feel any guilt about having killed someone. 1,000 different methods have been tried, and none of them seem to accomplish this.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Ten buttons. One is wired. The others are fakes.

Not a pro or con argument per se--just that it's possible to have the question of responsibility even with some modern approaches.

[Doom]

Ten buttons. One is wired. The others are fakes.

Not a pro or con argument per se--just that it's possible to have the question of responsibility even with some modern approaches.

LIke the firing squad where only one rifle has a real bullet and the others are blanks and no one knows which rifle has the real bullet, double blind.

[Doom]

The older I get, the more I come to just oppose capital punishment almost entirely except in the most extreme circumstances. I would still favor executing someone like Jeffrey Dahmer because his crimes were especially heinous. I definitely approved of killing Bin Laden, and I if Hitler hadn't killed himself, I would favor executing him if he had been captured alive. But except in these extreme cases, I am more and more coming around to getting rid of it.

My reason is not at all due to compassion for the criminal, unless he is innocent of course. My concern is certainly not a pacifistic opposition to all killing. My concern is what it does to the people who carry the executions out, especially if it is clear that one specific person is responsible.

For something like a firing squad, nobody knows for certain which shooter is the one responsible for the death blow. This protects the consciences of the people involved, no one need feel a sense of guilt because the shooter doesn't know if he is responsible or not. And even for something like a hanging, there is not necessarily any one specific person responsible, it could be set on a timer or something so that no one has to do the deed. But when it is as simple as just pressing a button, or administering an injection, I know that I couldn't do it, and if i did, wouldn't it deaden my conscience, especially if I did it over and over again?

I don't know of a way that the execution could be done humanely so that death happens quickly and painlessly, and so that no one person is responsible for doing it, so no one would have to feel any guilt about having killed someone. 1,000 different methods have been tried, and none of them seem to accomplish this.

[Stella]

My reason is not at all due to compassion for the criminal, unless he is innocent of course. My concern is certainly not a pacifistic opposition to all killing. My concern is what it does to the people who carry the executions out, especially if it is clear that one specific person is responsible.

In countries that have abolished the death penalty, it's due to the sense of 'collective' responsibility for the execution. You can always find individuals in the community without compunction who'd carry out the job unmoved. But in a democracy, we're groomed to feel like we are all part of this action.

That's obviously there in the US considering the debate and moratoriums that have occurred over the years. The problematic argument for the DP in my opinion is the belief that it is a divine right rather than a service for the common good. A thing that should be withheld if it doesn't serve the common good.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

why not return to the tried and true methods of execution ie. gun shot to the heart or long drop hanging?

Because they don't work reliably either, at least not in terms of humane killing.

[Doom]

I just provided what I think is the strongest argument, not necessarily for abolishing it, but for putting restrictions on the death penalty for only the most heinous offenders.

But for me, the strongest argument for retaining it is that abolition of the death penalty is often based on a secularist belief that this life is all we have and therefore death is the worst possible punishment, and the real motivation is a complete lack of belief is the concept of any kind of punishment at all. This is why many countries that abolished capital punishment in the '60s and '70s followed up by abolishing life imprisonment in the '90s and '00s. There are several countries in Western Europe today in which no matter how heinous your crime, or how old you are when you are caught, 25 years is the MAXIMUM sentence you can ever be given. Imagine someone like Jeffrey Dahmer getting caught and convicted at age 25, and getting the maximum sentence of 25 years when they would have to release him at an age when he could resume his crimes. And there would be nothing anyone could do about it because he would have served the maximum penalty under the law.

This is not a slippery slope argument, I am saying that for many, the real motivation for abolishing capital punishment is an opposition to the concept of punishment, to them the abolition of the death penalty is just the first step in eliminating the concept of retributive justice entirely.

As Wittgenstein put it "An argument is not like a taxi cab you cannot pay it off and get out when it has taken you only so far as you wish to go.'

The standard argument against capital punishment is "the state cannot take someone's life" but life imprisonment is still "taking someone's life" all the same, and the same argument applies when fully accepted the logic of the position seems inescapable.


There is another argument that I find convincing which is that if the goal is the possible rehabilitation or redemption of violent criminals, well, the death penalty is often the best way to accomplish that. As the saying says "There is nothing like the prospect of an execution to focus the mind." It is not uncommon for prisoners approaching execution to finally admit guilt after years of denying it and even expressing remorse. Is it always real or just a fake out in a last-ditch effort for a commutation or a pardon? God only knows, but it does happen, and for many the prospect of death is the only way it would ever happen.

[Stella]

why not return to the tried and true methods of execution ie. gun shot to the heart or long drop hanging?

Because they don't work reliably either, at least not in terms of humane killing.

The long drop hanging method was perfected in Britain prior to abolition of the DP. Adjustments were made according to the persons physique, to be virtually fool proof.

[Stella]

But for me, the strongest argument for retaining it is that abolition of the death penalty is often based on a secularist belief that this life is all we have and therefore death is the worst possible punishment, and the real motivation is a complete lack of belief is the concept of any kind of punishment at all. This is why many countries that abolished capital punishment in the '60s and '70s followed up by abolishing life imprisonment in the '90s and '00s. There are several countries in Western Europe today in which no matter how heinous your crime, or how old you are when you are caught, 25 years is the MAXIMUM sentence you can ever be given. Imagine someone like Jeffrey Dahmer getting caught and convicted at age 25, and getting the maximum sentence of 25 years when they would have to release him at an age when he could resume his crimes. And there would be nothing anyone could do about it because he would have served the maximum penalty under the law.

I really don't think from all I've read that the motive for abolition is 'anti punishment' in some way. It seems more a reflection of the squeamish sensation of blood lust. In Britain when executions were public, the State took measures to dampen down the excitement the crowd got when a hanged persons body jerked and writhed. Their legs and arms were securely tied. That's when the long drop was created so that death was instantaneous. Still then at the end of the 19th century executions were made to be private with only the prison governor as a witness. Execution of prisoners does seem to tap into a base aspect of the human being that isn't a positive for society.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

why not return to the tried and true methods of execution ie. gun shot to the heart or long drop hanging?

Because they don't work reliably either, at least not in terms of humane killing.

The long drop hanging method was perfected in Britain prior to abolition of the DP. Adjustments were made according to the persons physique, to be virtually fool proof.

Engineers: We've made it fool-proof.
Universe: Here's a bigger fool.

[Doom]

It is surely no accident that there was never any move to abolish capital punishment until after a country became secularized and atheism became a major movement, nor is it an accident that the initial movement came largely from atheists such as Clarence Darrow. The correlation between secularization and the abolition of capital punishment is very strong, it first started being abolished in the most secular nations, which is why the United Stats the only country in the Western world where more than 1-2% of the population still practices some kind of religion, is also the only one that hasn't abolished it yet.

[JanetM]

If I faced execution, given a choice, I would definitely opt for firing squad or long drop hanging.

I defo wouldn't ever choose any form of hanging. In the event that you don't die immediately, even if it "only" takes a few minutes, those few minutes can be some of your longest as you suffocate to death.

[Stella]

It is surely no accident that there was never any move to abolish capital punishment until after a country became secularized and atheism became a major movement, nor is it an accident that the initial movement came largely from atheists such as Clarence Darrow. The correlation between secularization and the abolition of capital punishment is very strong, it first started being abolished in the most secular nations, which is why the United the only country in the Western world where more than 1-2% of the population still practices some kind of religion, is also the only one that hasn't abolished it yet.

I’m not convinced of the delineation between the ‘good old’ Christian society and the secular society when apportioning blame for modern trends. There was a lot more going on than the rise of atheism at that time in Europe. The movement to separate Church and ruling bodies was happening; a very positive move to divorce the force of the gospel from politics of the day. The English Bill of Rights was established to curtail the power of the Monarch and direct the government to serve the people and their rights above all.

There was the development of international law and the concept of ‘inalienable rights’ that apply to all people equally. That illuminated the correlation between people with little to no rights in society and prevalence of crime in those groups. I know that in Australia, that is the primary thing that factored into abolition of the DP. It just wasn’t fair and it was religious people that were involved in DP activism.

[Stella]

If I faced execution, given a choice, I would definitely opt for firing squad or long drop hanging.

I defo wouldn't ever choose any form of hanging. In the event that you don't die immediately, even if it "only" takes a few minutes, those few minutes can be some of your longest as you suffocate to death.

It doesn't bear thinking about.

[ProZak]

Violent criminals have no qualms remaining violent in prison, committing violent acts including murder while incarcerated.

[Doom]

Violent criminals have no qualms remaining violent in prison, committing violent acts including murder while incarcerated.

Against both guards and other prisoners. Murder in prison often aided and abetted by guards who look the other way when a particularly heinous prisoner is likely to be dispatched, along with prison rape, are two crimes that happen often. I've never seen anything on the matter one way or another on the issue, but I would be very surprised if the guards weren't in on it when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison. He was left alone, unsupervised, with a very violent prisoner who had expressed his disgust at Dahmer's crimes, and Dahmer apparently had a reputation for making jokes about his crimes in front of other inmates, which inspired a great deal of outrage both from the guards and other prisoners. All the guards had to do was walk away for a few minutes confident that Dahmer would be dead by the time they came back.

The usual way to control an extremely violent criminal is solitary, which has its own ethical problems.

[Vern Humphrey]

I can defend capital punishment in theory (why should a man already serving a life sentence not kill again? What more can you do to him?)

I cannot defend it in practice. It's too capricious, takes too long, and has little effect on others who may commit crimes.)