in what fashion? Utah executed seven people since 1976. They can leave the lethal injection mechanism in, but seems there has been some problems with it. Better for them to end the death penalty, but that isn’t going to happen. Caring about doing it right seems to be kinda positive.
I don’t see the squeamishness about methods of execution. How is firing squad or guillotine less humane than lethal injection? Both are the fastest, aren’t they? How about no death penalty at all?
If they want to do it quickly, turn the chair around facing the wall, put the barrel of a single gun loaded with a high velocity soft point bullet right on the condemned’s medulla oblongata and pull the trigger. As instantaneous as a death can be, 100% effective, and entails less suffering than any of the methods we’ve ever actually used.
For centuries, we’ve gone out of our way to devise methods of execution that simultaneously produce a gratifyingly gruesome act of necro-voyuerism for the witnesses, that’s a horrible experience for the victim and yet somehow still provide a hypocritical pretense of ceremonial ritual to distance everyone involved but the victim from the moral degeneracy and plain awfulness of what’s happening.
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Interesting cultural tidbit. Thanks.
Each option is more gruesome than the next only because in our heart of hearts we know it is all just so plain fucking wrong, a weak-ass surrender to our most repulsive and primitive selves, a regression to the coarse beasts we’ve been trying to rise above ever since the first civil thought crossed a homo-sapien mind.
Death by stoning, but let he who is without sin…
Are there no Catherine wheels in Utah?
They need some historians to enlighten them.
The distance factor is somewhat new since into the 20th Century, we had public executions. There was a concern until recent times to have the public involved, the belief being that this would provide moral suasion. Thus, statements of the condemned to the crowd was invited. From ancient times, watching people die did have a voyeur value but the distance factor is a shift.
Anyway, yes, execution was never just about condemned, and this factors in when determining what is “cruel and unusual” punishment too.