[Phantom Hoover]

I'm pretty strongly opposed to the death penalty generally, but the way the US does it just seems... well, baffling. There are so many ways to painlessly kill people. Why not put them under sugical style general anaesthetic and then OD them with morphine or something? Or suffocate with CO2 the way we humanely kill lab animals for dissection? Why mess around with conscious prisoners at all if you're going to kill them? Bizarre.

The people backing the death penalty don't want a humane death for their victims.

[Beskargam]

I'm not opposed to people paying for their crimes with their life in concept. But the system of capital punishment in the US is stupid and ridiculous. And I don't think a capital punishment system will ever really work (i.e. 100% sure criminal is guilty). And there are so many factors that get brought into the criminal justice system already (say higher numbers of minorities in prison), that there is no point in actually using capital punishment. How we do things is stupid.

[Nuke]

people pay for their crimes with their lives all the time, just not in the way you think. you go to jail for any number of years, life automatically becomes a world of ****. you spend years wracking up psychological damage from the brutal way we run our prisons. then when you come out a felon, you essentially become a second class citizen (and if you were already a minority, it becomes worse). so you end up, at best, working a **** job with little chance of advancement. you have to meet conditions of parole, show up at drug meetings and see your parole officer, pay fines, and of course you have to pay for any court ordered treatment the judge demanded, you need to pay for transportation and you have a curfew on top of that. like i said its rigged to get you back into the prison system. i actually think 20+ year sentence and subsequent parole (at least the way we do it) is more cruel and unusual than the death penalty.

[S-99]

TBH, lethal injection is, in general, a rather inhumane way of executing people, exactly because things like that happen. I don't know why they still use this. A competent firing squad or even a good ol' hanging is much quicker and harder to mess up than lethal injection. Oh, and "gruesome" beheading with a guillotine might in fact be even quicker and less painful than those two. I only remember one case (Luis XVI of France) in which it didn't kill in one go.

I agree, by the time you'll hear the bullet, you'd have well been long dead if shot successfully in the head. For the guy who had a blunt guillotine, people probably wished him a painful death if you know what i mean.

As far as beheading goes, use an axe, not a sword. And if a guillotine, must be properly weighted and sharpened. However a bullet through the head, not a bad suggestion.

[Nuke]

i like the thrown into pit with big hungry cats method too.

[AdmiralRalwood]

i dont think euthanasia is legal anywhere in the us.

Actually, "assisted suicide" (euthanasia "lite") is legal in Washington, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico and Montana. Full-blown euthanasia is legal in California.

[Dragon]

people pay for their crimes with their lives all the time, just not in the way you think. you go to jail for any number of years, life automatically becomes a world of ****. you spend years wracking up psychological damage from the brutal way we run our prisons. then when you come out a felon, you essentially become a second class citizen (and if you were already a minority, it becomes worse). so you end up, at best, working a **** job with little chance of advancement. you have to meet conditions of parole, show up at drug meetings and see your parole officer, pay fines, and of course you have to pay for any court ordered treatment the judge demanded, you need to pay for transportation and you have a curfew on top of that. like i said its rigged to get you back into the prison system. i actually think 20+ year sentence and subsequent parole (at least the way we do it) is more cruel and unusual than the death penalty.

Yes, this is another reason I'm generally not fond of an idea of stuffing criminals in prison and calling it a day. After coming out of prison, one's life is ruined, and this makes them either end up back in there, or join a gang and fuel the ranks of organized crime. Minor criminals should go to community service (would save the community some money, too), the worst ones should be executed (via guillotine or a firing squad, lethal injection being saved to the most heinous), and those in the middle should be given physical punishment. It turns out pain is a rather effective, if crude, way to get a "don't EVER do this again" point across (source in a Polish science magazine, so excuse me for not linking it). For white-collar criminals (scammers, corporate thieves, etc.), the best punishment would probably be invalidating their credentials and fining them a lot (effectively knocking them down to a lower class, and also locking them out whatever they tried to steal from). Prisons should only be used as a temporary solution, or changed into labor camps where "community service" is done for those that are bad, but not quite warranting something worse.

[Colonol Dekker]

Replace community service with national service. but no "con platoons" Just one felon per squad of volunteers/enlisted men. Armed service tends to iron out criminal behaviour, sociopathic tendancies is a different matter.

[Dragon]

The problem is, felons come in all sizes, shapes and genders, and places they could possibly be stuffed in the military generally demand a lot of physical fitness. I can hardly see IPAC ironing criminal behavior out of anyone (in fact, probably the opposite, given what I heard of it... ), you'd have to send them into some heavy jobs (but maybe not into grunts, because then you'd be giving them guns). And even the fit ones would not want to be there, and drag down actual professional soldiers, much like conscripts usually do. Community service (I suppose you could call it "national service" if you made it large enough scale, a viable option), especially in a labor camp with a military-style discipline (possibly employing military veterans), would be a better choice. Also, this option doesn't let felons close to guns, which is something you'd probably want to avoid, too.

[Colonol Dekker]

If the directing staff and NCO's don#t want them near guns. They won't get near guns

And, they all end up the same shape

[Mikes]

TBH, lethal injection is, in general, a rather inhumane way of executing people, exactly because things like that happen. I don't know why they still use this. A competent firing squad or even a good ol' hanging is much quicker and harder to mess up than lethal injection. Oh, and "gruesome" beheading with a guillotine might in fact be even quicker and less painful than those two. I only remember one case (Luis XVI of France) in which it didn't kill in one go.

It's not for the benefit of the person who gets the injection.

It's for appearing more "humane" to the general population... after all it's "just" a needle, nothing barbaric like an axe or firearm or :gasp: noose, right?

As you rightly point out it's rather idiotic and still barbaric ... i.e. what the rest of the civilized (non US) world has been saying for decades.

[666maslo666]

It boggles my mind that in this day and age there is even a debate about how to execute people. General anesthesia has been known for a century or two. Problem solved.

If you are going to kill people in revenge the least you can do is to do it properly..

[Dragon]

It's not for the benefit of the person who gets the injection.

It's for appearing more "humane" to the general population... after all it's "just" a needle, nothing barbaric like an axe or firearm or :gasp: noose, right?

As you rightly point out it's rather idiotic and still barbaric ... i.e. what the rest of the civilized (non US) world has been saying for decades.

Yeah. TBH, my biggest problem isn't with the execution causing pain (some people, and I'm using the term loosely, deserve a painful, slow death), but with people who claim it's "humane" and get horrified by other methods, including firing squad and beheadings (still used in Saudi Arabia, and from what I've heard, a pretty clean way of execution if done well). Let's not deceive ourselves about it. Either the execution is supposed to hurt, and then lethal injection isn't a bad choice, or it is supposed to be painless, and then we're just better off cutting their heads off.
I'm not sure how precisely Saudis behead people, but it'd be very funny (if you're into that sort of humor) if it turned out US could learn from Saudis, of all people, how to execute people in a painless way.

[The E]

Yeah. TBH, my biggest problem isn't with the execution causing pain (some people, and I'm using the term loosely, deserve a painful, slow death), but with people who claim it's "humane" and get horrified by other methods, including firing squad and beheadings (still used in Saudi Arabia, and from what I've heard, a pretty clean way of execution if done well).

No. The entire point of the criminal justice system is to impose a measure of impartiality on the process of meting out punishment for a given crime, making sure that the severity of the punishment is determined by the facts of the case, not how enraged the public is over it.
As such, and bearing in mind that human rights are a thing that everyone enjoys, not just those who haven't been convicted of a crime, it is the duty of the criminal justice system to make sure that if punishment is necessary, it isn't unnecessarily violent, or painful. If you have a system that uses the death sentence, that means that death should be quick and undramatic, not drawn out.

[Scotty]

As such, and bearing in mind that human rights are a thing that everyone enjoys, not just those who haven't been convicted of a crime,

I think this is actually a point where I'd have to disagree, in terms of extreme cases.  When someone commits a crime of the magnitude that would normally warrant the death penalty, they essentially flagrantly disregard the social contract that exists in order to safeguard and extend those human rights.  Such outright contempt for human rights demands a punishment that fits the crime.

[Lorric]

(some people, and I'm using the term loosely, deserve a painful, slow death)

I am surprised to hear this from you Dragon. The type of people you are thinking of should be killed I think, providing we're absolutely 100% sure they were the one responsible, but not in revenge, but to protect the rest of us from these monsters due to the threat they pose. We should make the death as quick and painless as possible because we are better than them. It would be done because we had to do it, not because we wanted to. Because these people were such an immense threat.

[karajorma]

The entire criminal justice system is built on the theory that it is better that one hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man goes to jail (hence reasonable doubt, etc), so why is the execution system built on the theory that they're probably guilty, so **** them?

[Colonol Dekker]

I feel the price of freedom is eternal vigilance etc.

[Dragon]

As such, and bearing in mind that human rights are a thing that everyone enjoys, not just those who haven't been convicted of a crime,

I think this is actually a point where I'd have to disagree, in terms of extreme cases.  When someone commits a crime of the magnitude that would normally warrant the death penalty, they essentially flagrantly disregard the social contract that exists in order to safeguard and extend those human rights.  Such outright contempt for human rights demands a punishment that fits the crime.

I agree. That is exactly what I was talking about. We can talk about morality and "being above things", but there are cases in which human rights can and should be suspended, because the one in question is hardly a human, clearly displaying extreme contempt for the very things that make us human. They are few and far between, but such horrible cases do exist.
That said, I don't think a special provision for them is really necessary. Let's not forget those cases are rare, and in practice, a painless death kills them just as well. Even if there are people who'd fully deserve a painful, horrible death, it's probably impractical to go out of our way to provide this option. Also, I don't think that in our society the judge would actually have the courage to declare even the most evil person inhuman. Even if everyone silently thought that, speaking it out loud is a wholly different matter, and it's though to find someone with enough courage to do it in public, in person.

I am surprised to hear this from you Dragon. The type of people you are thinking of should be killed I think, providing we're absolutely 100% sure they were the one responsible, but not in revenge, but to protect the rest of us from these monsters due to the threat they pose. We should make the death as quick and painless as possible because we are better than them. It would be done because we had to do it, not because we wanted to. Because these people were such an immense threat.

See above. "Regular" death penalty is about removing a threat to humanity, however there are cases that go far beyond that. It's hard to imagine right until it happens. Good things it's so rare.

The entire criminal justice system is built on the theory that it is better that one hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man goes to jail (hence reasonable doubt, etc), so why is the execution system built on the theory that they're probably guilty, so **** them?

Note that actually getting a person executed is, from what I've seen, rather difficult. When someone is handed off to execution system from justice system, it's imperative that they are proven beyond any doubt to be guilty. When we're talking executing people, we're generally assuming they've been very definitely proven guilty.

[Lorric]

See above. "Regular" death penalty is about removing a threat to humanity, however there are cases that go far beyond that. It's hard to imagine right until it happens. Good things it's so rare.

Why do you want to make them suffer? What is the purpose?