Immediately afterwards, I learn from the heroically undiscouraged campaigner Abe Bonowitz that tomorrow Tuesday Oct. 10 is also World Day Against the Death Penalty.
__________
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Innocent people have definitely been executed in the US, sometimes with the full support of the US Supreme Court.
Capital punishment decreases the international prestige of the US. I think the only other industrialized country that still executes people is Japan, which executes about as many people (in proportion to population size) as the US does.
Capital punishment in the US demeans Christianity here, while it also is an establishment of religion, as I noted earlier. It also decreases the reputation of the states (mostly in the southeastern US) that practice it.
The cost of executing someone is exorbitant, much greater than locking them up for life. The money often comes from a county’s school budget.
Capital punishment denies black, brown, and poor people equality before the law. Almost never is anyone who can afford private counsel executed.
There are several more arguments, but this seems like enough for starters.
Heroin would not be a suitable agent for celebrating the American civil sacrament, and street heroin is of uncertain composition. It’s being displaced by fentanyl, also unsuitable for this purpose.
One possible route would be for individual states to manufacture pentobarbital, a fairly simple organic synthesis (read Wikipedia, in English and in German, for the details).
Better to de-medicalize it. As I said before, the believers in this hideous auto-da-fé are much more proficient at shooting people.
Doctors will not countenance execution with pharmaceuticals because the Hippocratic oath says “First, do no harm.”
There have been several agonizingly prolonged botched executions with chemicals.
The number of people condemned to death, living on death row, and then exonerated, in the US since 1973, has now, I believe, reach 195. All those were innocent people who could have been executed. The number of actual miscarriages of justice of this kind is uncertain and perhaps higher.
For what it’s worth, it’s apparently pretty easy for someone not addicted to overdose on heroin. How many tons per year are seized by police? Enough, I would think.
“it should be easy to humanely execute with today’s anesthesia drugs” Dream on. Drug manufacturers have explicitly prohibited using prescription drugs to kill people with. And many victims of capital punishment have inaccessible veins, so the executioner (who usually has no medical background) pokes around with a needle, sometimes for hours, to try to find a vein. (Very few health professionals are willing to participate in America’s civil sacrament.)
Americans who believe in capital punishment are nearly always evangelical Christians, so that capital punishment in the US is an establishment of religion, prohibited in the “Bill of Rights” of our Constitution.
Believers in capital punishment know how to shoot people. If we must have capital punishment in the US, let’s do it with firing squads. Plenty of highly proficient executioners are available.
Bob Dylan once said, “You can be so vile that even your father gives up on you but God in heaven will never give up on you.”
In other words, it’s up to God to determine who should live or die.
That being said, it seems to me it should be easy to humanely execute with today’s anesthesia drugs.
Never take your own revenge. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord, I will repay. Book of Romans, I think.