Overdose of diamorphine is fairly effective, especially if administered with a euphoric, but that would make prescribing many painkillers impossible (and requires a qualified doctor to prescribe and a qualified nurse to administer).

Slow hypoxia isn't a particually horrible way to die, but suffocation / drowing is horribly painful. The problem of hypoxia is its very slow, and executions have to be witnessed.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

As for death row, well if you are guilty of a murder then it is hard to sympathise.

Jamie raises the key point; the person you are today is rarely the person you were a decade ago. This is a fundamental problem with the death penalty. You can't rush it through because taking away someone's life requires due diligence to be thorough and rights of appeal to be exhausted but if you execute someone a decade or longer after the crime was committed, they may to all intents and purposes have become a "different" person. To me, it's one of many reasons why the death penalty just doesn't work.

Of course it's hard to sympathise with a murderer but believing the death penalty is wrong doesn't require you to be sympathetic. It simply requires you to believe that it's an ineffective and even immoral form of punishment. The purpose of the law surely is to protect society? It has not to the best of my knowledge been demonstrated conclusively that the death penalty helps to achieve that. Until there is conclusive proof...while there is even a shred of doubt...I don't think the state should go around killing people.

Sydenham by birth. Selhurst by the Grace of God.

Jamie raises the key point; the person you are today is rarely the person you were a decade ago. This is a fundamental problem with the death penalty. You can't rush it through because taking away someone's life requires due diligence to be thorough and rights of appeal to be exhausted but if you execute someone a decade or longer after the crime was committed, they may to all intents and purposes have become a "different" person. To me, it's one of many reasons why the death penalty just doesn't work.

Of course it's hard to sympathise with a murderer but believing the death penalty is wrong doesn't require you to be sympathetic. It simply requires you to believe that it's an ineffective and even immoral form of punishment. The purpose of the law surely is to protect society? It has not to the best of my knowledge been demonstrated conclusively that the death penalty helps to achieve that. Until there is conclusive proof...while there is even a shred of doubt...I don't think the state should go around killing people.

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The victims of the murderers are certainly not the people they were a decade ago. Scrap all the endless appeals, allow them one and if that fails, go ahead. Society is protected by removing a killer from its midst and saving money avoiding long prison sentences.

Edited by derben (22 Jun 2015 12.19pm)

Jamie raises the key point; the person you are today is rarely the person you were a decade ago. This is a fundamental problem with the death penalty. You can't rush it through because taking away someone's life requires due diligence to be thorough and rights of appeal to be exhausted but if you execute someone a decade or longer after the crime was committed, they may to all intents and purposes have become a "different" person. To me, it's one of many reasons why the death penalty just doesn't work.

Of course it's hard to sympathise with a murderer but believing the death penalty is wrong doesn't require you to be sympathetic. It simply requires you to believe that it's an ineffective and even immoral form of punishment. The purpose of the law surely is to protect society? It has not to the best of my knowledge been demonstrated conclusively that the death penalty helps to achieve that. Until there is conclusive proof...while there is even a shred of doubt...I don't think the state should go around killing people.

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Protecting society is the key. State sponsored retribution is totally unacceptable. Even if execution, painful or otherwise was shown to reduce murder, it is still morally wrong in my view and that is one reason why I don't support the death penalty.
Death sentence aside, rehabilitation of murderers is a very difficult thing to quantify. Many so called rehabilitated criminals have gone on to commit more crime. What percentage risk, if such a thing could be measured, is acceptable to risk the public safety ? This is a very difficult balancing of the individuals rights against the majority. I would argue that a murderer effectively gives up his right to equality on the matter of rehabilitation but I can understand that others would disagree.

Edited by TheJudge (22 Jun 2015 12.30pm)

The US was founded largely on a basis of slavery, with a large percentage of its population having been transported to the US illegally. The existing population were almost exterminated by incoming migrants. With the white population often having come from the rather 'unliked and persicuted' religous groups of Europe.

White Supremacy in the US, was all but the law for most of its history, and that runs deeper in some states than the others.

I wouldn't imagine the US to be remotely multicultural, but more of a liberalised seggregationist country, in which poverty and prejudice have propergated that historical factor expedentially through the generations.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

The number of release, non-mental health patient prisoners, released that go on to commit another murder is actually lower than the number of people wrongfully convicted of murder.

Murderers have the higest level of rehabilition in the criminal justice system, because most of them occur due to sequences of events unlikely to reoccur.

Of course one could argue that putting a man in a 10-8 foot cell for 15 years, against his will, dangling freedom in front of them for decades, before then arbitarily forcing them to listen to a list of crimes, before strapping them down to a table infront of 12 people, before killing them could be argued to be borderline sociopathic.

The old British Hangman, Pierpoint regarded the US Military hangings to be unnecessarily cruel, due to the time they'd take justifying killing the man (reading his offences, certain statements) etc, meant the guy could be stood on the trapdoor, noose around his head for about 10 minutes (He prefered the no mess about English approch where they'd dropped as soon as possible).

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]