[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

The term Skybird is "cruel AND unusual".

All death is cruel, or at least can be argued by lawyers to be such, however lethal injection, hanging, firing squads or any other traditional methods of executing criminals in our history is by no means "unusual" and there your argument falls flat.

You are right, August, that piece gave me quite a time to think about. However, In the excerpt from wikipedia I highlighted in red this part (following is a longer quote than before):

The use of the word and (instead of or) has been held to have some significance. Cruel punishments are allowable as long as more than one court system applies the punishment. Similarly, unusual punishments are permitted so long as they are not cruel, although some lawyers would argue that any unusual punishment is cruel. Thus, for example, three strikes laws have been upheld by the Court as not conflicting with this clause, because even if they are unusual, they are not cruel (in the sense that there is no physical torture).
The Eighth Amendment forbids some punishments entirely, and forbids some punishments that are excessive when compared to the crime.
In Furman v. Georgia (1972), Justice Brennan wrote, "There are, then, four principles by which we may determine whether a particular punishment is 'cruel and unusual'."

• The "essential predicate" is "that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity," especially torture.
• "A severe punishment that is obviously inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion."
• "A severe punishment that is clearly and totally rejected throughout society."
• "A severe punishment that is patently unnecessary."

Continuing, he wrote that he expected that no state would pass a law obviously violating any one of these principles, so court decisions regarding the Eighth Amendment would involve a "cumulative" analysis of the implication of each of the four principles.

when summarizing it all, I came to the conclusion that despite the debate about the word "and" (curel and unusual), as indicated by you and the author of the wikipedia entry, there nevertheless seem to be consensus that torturing somebody to death is fulfilling both conditions.

what remains is the question to what degree suffocation is degrading to human diginity and by it's quality is equal to the pain implemented by intentional torture. Last year, so says a German blog, death candidates in Missouri and South Dakota reached a court ruling that this form of execution is scratched from the list of execution methods that are considered constitutional, because the reliabilty of one or two of the three involved agents to succeed in the purpose for which they are used already was at doubt. However, courts in Florida, Kentucky and Texas ruled differently, saying that a certain ammount of pain does not automatically cause a method of execution to be classified as "verboten". Last decembre, the dying of Angel Diaz in Florida lasted longer than half an hour.

I did not understand how that can be brought into congruence with what has been written about execution and torture in the part from wikipedia above.

Anyway, I see no reason why people should be executed with unneeded pain and suffering (which includes years and years of waiting, hoping and dissappointment, btw.) even animals do not take pleasure from the suffering of their prey, they kill to eat, and that's it. some of mankind's societies reserve the right to kill as a legalized form of retaliation. But doing that with more cruelty than needed is inhumane, barbaric, and reminds me strongly of pleasing the cheering crowds in the circus maximus. And I must say that is too cheap for me.

So when there are death penalties, and they are confirmed from highest instance - why can'T one just go and have the person shot the same day or week? For me death penalty is no penalty anyway, only a removal of a person. I oppose the idea of death as a penalty, but I take legalized preemptive killing in case of certain types of crimes into account. For example if big fishes of weapon and drug smuggling, cartell bosses, and the like, must be expected to rule their business from inside the prison, or could be the reason of kidnappings in order to have them released.