another botched execution

The dude probably suffered less than his victims...

the death penalty is fundamentally wrong.

Slavery was legal under the law at one time, so was segregated schools until some scofflaws ignored the law.

I have seen this happen carrying a very dead body down from a crag. He moved a lot, sucked in air, flailed his arms around etc. All this without a head. You get my point...

Yes, Ward, the system is clearly designed to maximize the life of the condemned and prolong the suffering of the survivors. Of course it is.

It's not at all focused on ensuring that the current 4% innocence rate among the executed doesn't increase. Or that death is fairly applied regardless of race (hint: it's not).

Is realizing your need for cruelty wdorth killing those innocent (and mostly black) people? About half of God's Country says HELL YES to that one.

Gee, I didn't realize that 96% of death row inmates were getting out of jail.

Activists within the legal system?

True, only the top law school grads get the lucrative gig of writing appeals for death row inmates.

True, only the top law school grads get the lucrative gig of writing appeals for death row inmates.

You might have zero sympathy for murderers, but we do not administer the death penalty equitably in this country. You are far more likely to receive it if you are poor and not white.

And how many times has DNA exonerated convicts? Plenty of people get wrongfully convicted. Kind of hard to free them after execution,..

Always seemed a little odd to me that may anti-capital punishment folks play the what-if-we-execute-someone-who's-innocent card. But, they don't seem very interested in determining whether the millions incarcerated here, many for decades or life, are actually guilty.
So it's this unspeakable horror to execute an innocent person, but putting them in an American prison for life is just fine?

A Super-topian by chance?

I also love the ubiquitous idea that we should execute the 'really bad ones who we know are guilty'. Um...everyone goes through the same trial process - and that process is not infallible in its attempt to discover how 'guilty or really bad' a person is. The idea seems to be that there is some other, better (legal) means of finding this out that we're not employing. Like some omniscient movie narrator is going to step in and call it. There isn't.

Death is final.

Tvash, it is true that no "omniscient movie narrator is going to step in and call it" and there is no way to ensure there will be a zero percent error rate.

I personally don't think the death penalty is cruel. I've got no problem executing those who are truly guilty of heinous crimes. I'd throw the switch myself on someone who really did commit murder.

These laypeople insisting that he was "sleeping because I heard him snoring" have literally no idea what they're talking about. Snoring is a sign of a compromised airway, not sleep. Additionally, chemically induced "sleep" does not ensure a lack of suffering. If he was opening and closing his mouth on his own, as a journalist who witnessed the event described, he was not very well sedated.

Bothced my arse, the bastid is dead is he not?

In 2013, 19 of the world's 195 independent countries carried out executions. Does everyone here feel privileged to be in the elite 10% along with North Korea, Somalia, China, Saudi Arabia et al?

It takes how long to run all the endless appeals for murderers? This is a failed system that has been rigged to prolong the lives of killers and sour the American people on state executions---all against the stated will of the American people and justice to the families of the victims.

Should we build another 10,000 prisons for such? And pay another 8% in taxes to house and feed the humanity-less humans that commit horrendous murders?

The problem with the capital punishment is that after it is done it is not a punishment anymore. Dead people do not suffer.

Humanity? Where was the dead as#@&%es "humanity" when he gunned down those innocent folks? Someone tried to shoot me once,, and he is long dead and worm dirt.

It's not our problem if the rest of the world places a lower value on innocent life than the U.S.

The right to self defense knows no color.

This is not a pro or con death penalty statement. But it is time to halt executions until a reliable, uniformly applied method carrying out the sentence can be found. As it is now, "capital punishment is inconsistently applied, subject to manipulation and error, morally wrong and of dubious value in deterring crime". And as of lately, they are becoming more difficult to carry out without violating the condemned's constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. It's time to reevaluate how we administer the death penalty. All I am suggesting is states using lethal injections declare a moratorium until the process can be reviewed and fixed.
TY

1. I have been anesthetized. If people trained to do this to save people could be induced to do it to produce death, the problem with this approach would simply evaporate.

Why did I mention judges, whom we are always taught to revere? They are paid by the State, same as prosecutors, and receive bonuses based on convictions!

Back in those days, the concept of "doing time" as a punishment hadn't yet been conceived. Prisons were used to hold someone until trial, or flogging, or execution, not as the punishment itself.

Assuming the 4% is correct ---this is hardly a reason to frustrate the law .

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

AMENDMENT VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

If it HAS to be done

To clarify my statement above: "If it HAS to be done..." I'm referring to a case wherein the party has been adjudged guilty and the death penalty is the sentence.

Botched...????? The dudes dead now, right? Botched to me would mean he survived....

After considerable thought: the Lethal Injection business must make the executioner "feel better" than he/she would after chopping off the head of the subject. It really is attempt to hide what is being done behind a veil of pseudo compassion. There is no moral superiority gained through this pseudoscientific method of dispatch. That's just my intellectual observation.

If there were absolutely NO DOUBT, Nada, zero, that the person being executed is guilty, I have no reservation in execution. But if the real reason is revenge, clinical death is simply too easy a fate for a brutal murderer. Hangings were public spectacles, as were beheadings with Guillotine, and were used as a deterrent to asocial behavior.

And I feel the only people deserving of the right to judge whether capital punishment is ethical or not, are the victims and families of victim of the perpetrator.

Two US men who spent three decades in prison for rape and murder, one of them on death row, have been released after DNA evidence proved their innocence.

Mentally disabled half brothers Henry McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46, were convicted in 1984 of raping and killing an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina.

Recently analysed DNA evidence from the crime scene implicated another man, who is in prison for a similar crime.

A county judge ordered the immediate release of the brothers.

Tuesday's court judgement followed an investigation by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which tested DNA evidence found at the scene.

The commission found that none could be traced to Mr McCollum or Mr Brown.

After five hours of questioning with no lawyer present......

As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party put Mr. McCollum’s booking photograph on campaign fliers accusing a Democrat of being soft on crime, according to The News & Observer.

In 1994, when the United States Supreme Court turned down a request for review of the case, Justice Antonin Scalia described Mr. McCollum’s crime as so heinous that it would be hard to argue against lethal injection.

Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who was an open opponent of the death penalty and had voted to hear the case, noted that Mr. McCollum had the mental age of a 9-year-old and that “this factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in this case is unconstitutional.”

(In later years, the Supreme Court barred the death penalty for minors and the execution of the mentally disabled.)