Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Skybird
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):
...
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.
|
Like other contentious issues, the institution of lethal injection as the preferred execution method is an attempt at making death less distasteful to witness. Like putting a favored pet down the idea is that criminal just goes to sleep and that's it, except as we now know in certain cases like Diaz's, death did not come so quick. To me that just means we should change the cocktail to something that insures relatively instant unconsiousness as was originally intended.
It's funny though that you should mention Angel Diaz as he is like a poster boy
for the death penalty as much as he is for changing the method employed.
In 1978 he murdered the director of a drug rehab organization by
stabbing him 19 times while his victim slept, for which he was sentenced to a paltry 10-15 years and put in the general prison population. This gave him the time and opportunity for escape and a year later he murdered again. Now the death penalty might not be a deterrent to first offense crimes but I firmly believe that had Angel "
Papo la Muerte" Diaz been put on inescapable death row for the first murder his second victim would still be alive today.
If a person proves themselves willing to kill for fun and profit then the death penalty will ensure that person never gets the chance to do it again and that IS deterrence.