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Originally Posted by dda
Is it just me or does it strike anyone else as a bit bizarre that we are wringing our hands over the possible pain of a person that we are killing?
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Not really. It depends on why you want people to be executed. If this is some righteous infliction of anger on the wicked then I suppose it doesn't really matter. But if the death penalty is simply removing people from society in a permanent sort of sense then it makes sense we would want to make it as painless as possible. Tangentially I would say I view torture as worse than murder in most cases.
Obviously the act of killing someone is pretty much always going to be cruel no matter how it's done (then again, I'd say the same about long-term imprisonment) - the issue here is whether it's
unnecessarily cruel. Lethal injection should intuitively be the easiest way of administering a painless death but obviously they might be doing something wrong (or I maybe misunderstanding what's going on). If you were determined to kill people then I'm sure the combined weight of America's medical community can invent a way which is as painless as possible.
On the death penalty as I've said elsewhere I couldn't practically support it given the possibility of mistakes which exist. If you could somehow (magically) remove that possibility then I see no problem with executing people (I doubt it's necessary very often, especially in sane, healthy societies). Of course the death penalty isn't much of a deterrent, but then again neither is prison (seemingly). The most violent brutal murders seem to be carried out by people who are either bizarre nutcases or are in utterly ****ed up situations anyway and in such cases I'm not sure it makes sense to talk of deterrents.
I'd tend to agree with Nod that I don't see the point of imprisoning people for 40 to 50 years, spending literally millions of pounds on individuals who will never be released (sometimes this is explicit) and who (because of the way prison seems to operate) will never be able to contribute anything back to society.
I don't really understand the view of death some people have where (say) it's preferable to force feed Ian Brady than to let him die (presumably so he can go on suffering more or something). That seems much more cruel to me than in giving someone an injection which ends their life.