The US is one of the most barbarous countries on Earth. Sure, there are worse – places that execute citizens in what amounts to Hammurrabi’s code – but we pretend to be an advanced democratic republic. Briefly, let’s jump down that rathole: in principle the United States is a state organized along the lines of State Legitimacy, i.e.: a social contract in which the state is allowed to enforce certain things on an otherwise independent populace, in return for the populace expecting certain things from the state. What sort of things might those be? A social safety net? Health care? Minimal pointless wars? The right of the citizen to be secure in their possessions and pursuit of happiness? Being cruelly put to death when the state follows its “due process” and eventually decides its time?
One obvious fact that the US consistently ignores is that locking someone up for life has exactly the same anti-crime effect as killing them. Unfortunately, retributive ‘justice’ does not deter criminals from repeating their crimes. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the US justice system has swallowed a deliberate inconsistency, and has been choking on it periodically since the country was founded. The 4th Amendment says that justice must not be cruel and unusual. Well, at that time, it was still plausible that a traitor or rebel (i.e.: a loser at political violence) would be broken on the wheel, drawn, and quartered. In case you don’t know what that is, breaking on the wheel is when the victim is tied out, and their joints are systematically smashed with a hammer. It’s not lethal, it’s just pain and the psychic horror of knowing that you are being damaged in a way that will never heal. It forces the sufferer to slide over into the madness of wishing for death. And then comes the “drawing” – in which a cut is made in the abdomen, a piece of intestine is looped out, and the loop is hauled out of the sufferer’s body, dragging in the dirt, and stretched as long as possible while they watch. I imagine must such sufferers have lost their minds by that point, when the executioner comes with his sword and cuts their head off. Then, the body is cut into quarters, which are dispatched around the country by messenger, to adorn the city gates of some large towns, “pour encourager les autres.”
The sad part is that, once someone has committed enough treason that they’re in line for the wheel or the gibbet, there’s no point holding back any further. May as well hang for 100 as 2. So it’s possible that this sort of cruel and unusual punishment brings a perverse incentive. It’s also worth noting that the American rebels who wrote those fine hypocrisies (in a time when a slave-owner could beat a slave to death) were traitors to England, and would have been in line for those cruel and usual punishments if their rebellion had failed. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to undestand why Jefferson and Franklin preferred to visit France than England’s green and pleasant land.
I’m willing to argue that any form of execution is going to be cruel and unusual to a victim who does not wish to die. Unless someone wishes to begin putting people to death by deadly levels of partying. But for all that the police like to make a big deal about the deadliness of heroin, oxycodone, or fentanyl, the point of those drugs is to enjoy them, get really messed up, come down, clean up, and survive to do it again another day. If you offered me a known lethal dose of heroin, I’d decline it but I’d ask for a raincheck in case my dementia suddenly gets worse.
But the real lie – the part the US justice system can’t spit out – is that it can’t decide if it’s ‘justice’ is retributive or rehabilitation. Consequently, it is neither. Retributive justice, pace Hammurrabi, does not actually ‘work’ in a meaningful way by reducing crime. It sure as hell reduces the criminal population, but it does not prevent people from losing their temper and ‘going there.’ This is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a second: punishment is not a deterrent. If it was, there would be practically no crime at all, except for the few examples who volunteered to be publicly broken on a wheel. I can’t imagine what being broken on a wheel feels like, can you? The worst injury (a fractured jaw and rotated mandible) I have ever suffered sounds like something I could shrug off compared to having all my joints shattered. The psychological damage of being permanently crippled at the pleasure of the state, as a demonstration of its power, doesn’t compute. But we must acknowledge that it is not educational it is the state retaliating and warning the rest of the population. If the idea were simply to get the wrongdoer to never do wrong again, you lock them up in a comfortable and moral oubliette like the Norwegians did to Anders Breivik. They made it clear to him that he wasn’t going to get to spread his ridiculous message while being publicly hammered in the town square; he was taken neatly off the game-board and stored in a top-shelf someplace, with a sticker on the shelf that reads “eternal loser, do not release.”
ISIS ‘justice’ – this guy is about to lose his hand for hitting someone.
Americans are a sick bunch, though. It is not enough that justice be done, someone must be seen to suffer. We like to pretend we are a first world nation, but the ghost of Hammurrabi is baked into most of the middle eastern religions descended from ancient Assyria. That’s why our executions are deliberately fucked up.
In [stderr] I wrote:
The lethal injection cocktail that the US states use is … odd to me. But that’s because my experience with drugs has generally been recreational, not punitive. Let me emphasize: the use we are talking about is punitive – if the State of Texas wanted to give a criminal a painless death, they could: they have plenty of heroin and buckets of prescription painkillers. The lethal injection cocktail is three drugs, which ought to make you immediately suspicious when it’s easy to cause a painless death with one.
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A barbituate or disassociative to cause unconsciousness – Sodium Thiopental(“Trapanol”), Diazepam (“Valium”), or Midozalam(“Versed”)
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Vecuronium Bromide
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Potassium Chloride
The reason I called it out as funny is because I theorized at the time, and I still stand by it, that the chemical cocktail in question is designed to be cruel. For one thing, the dissassociatives are not knock-out drugs they are tranquilizers. A knock-out drug would be Propofol, or nitrous oxide, or a lethal level dose of one of those disassociatives. “Here’s your Fentanyl, Mister Bond, farewell.” but they don’t do that. They tranquilize the victim, then hit them with Vecuronium, which is Curare – a muscle inhibitor. Under a large dose (i.e.: “lethal dose”) of curare, you die because your muscles can’t move air in and out of you and you asphyxiate. Instead they give you enough that you can’t scream or thrash about. Then they give you a direct cardiac injection of Potassium Chloride, which stops your heart muscles.
If all that goes wrong, the victim may be conscious but tranquilized, immobilized by the curare, and then get to experience a massive heart attack from the potassium choride. Then, they die. But they get to experience the terror of being trapped in their body, knowing what’s coming, being stoned out of their minds, and then a bit of extreme pain and dissolution. That sure sounds “cruel and unusual” to me. In fact, even the rituals around it are cruel and unusual. In Japan, someone who is going to be put to death lives on death row and suddenly one day, their scheduled time comes up and 6 orderlies come and grab them, hood them, and take them down to the hanging room, where they have no idea when it will happen, but their neck is broken quickly and reliably.
Is a firing squad preferable to death by lethal injection? Probably, unless you’re vain and don’t like to think of the mess bullets make out of you. Electrocution lights up all the nerves in your body and several electric chair victims have taken multiple hits to the point where their hair used to catch fire (until it was shaved) – this is some seriously cruel and unusual shit. In fact electrocution was a result of a pissing contest between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse – a marketing campaign over AC versus DC power; it is literally “death by marketing.”
And it’s all bullshit. I’ve pushed the plunger on my two dogs, and held the blue juice bag for two horses. There is no need to give the dog or horse curare even though a 150lb dog can fuck you up faster than you can blink, and so can a horse. The animal gets a strong dose of tranquilizer and passes out, then the blue juice goes in, and the are trotting over the rainbow bridge in no time at all. The blue juice is a strong dose of barbituates. The same thing humans get when they are voluntarily ending their lives. A whack of alcohol makes it even more pleasant for a human that is so inclined. So, remember: you can sit in your favorite chair, listening to Mozart’s Requiem, sip some cognac and get a shot and pass out dead. That is, for some reason, not possible for the justice system. Give me a fucking break. If it’s not barbituates and booze and Beethoven, it’s cruel and unusual.
Now, we get to see the shitshow that is US justice on full display: [nbc]
The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.
At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.
They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”
Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records, though her condition was not clear.
Wait, what?! Having tried and failed to kill her, medical aid was administered? Do they, or don’t they, want her to die?
What happens next? More unusual cruelty?
“I am not afraid to die,” wrote Pike, who has been on death row for more than three decades. “I’m only nervous about the process.”
Being on death row for 30 years, in the US, is cruel and unusual punishment. Especially since they could just put her permanently in a suite at the Trump Tower and let her live the rest of her life, un-newsworthy, un-suffering, and with plenty of chance to think things over. I am not actually sure if the Norwegian method is un-cruel and usual: Breivik is doomed to spend the rest of his life thinking about what a fuckup he is. His big “thing” was racism regarding immigrants; I’m sure he must suffer constantly from the awareness that he’s a worse fuckup than Stephen Miller. In fact, if they ever are able to put Stephen Miller in front of a court of his peers, I hope they don’t hang him like they did the SS officers at Nuremberg – send him to Norway and let him be Breivik’s roommate. (I kid, I kid)
They had asked the Supreme Court to halt Pike’s execution, saying she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler. Being held down and strapped to a gurney, they wrote, was likely to create “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”
Here’s another problem. Pike’s actions were definitely outside the pale, cruel, and seriously fucked up. But it’s possible to make a good argument that since none of us have free will, anyway, she was conditioned by her experiences as a child to not understand other people’s autonomy and right to live pain and violence-free lives. Of course that argument would not work in the US, because in spite of its protestations otherwise, the US’ legal system is deeply tainted with christian/jewish/muslim ideology regarding souls and free will (neither of which appear to be real when examined as evidence) – we are comfortable with the idea that someone may be deranged and therefore dangerous, yet somehow Pike, who mutilated a classmate at age 18, was in her right mind? The reason I keep mentioning Anders Breivik is because the Norwegians neatly dodged the question of whether the fellow was insane or not – it didn’t matter: pernicious ideology or insanity, he’s going in a box on the top shelf and most of the world will only remember him when his heart stops from natural causes.
Meanwhile, keeping a prisoner in a permanent Super-8 oubliette hotel room would cost about $90,000. The US government wastes that kind of money without even noticing it, let alone thinking about it. And think how much money the US is currently spending, trying to deport hispanic citizens out of the country, then covering it up and defending it legally.
I don’t know why I am belly-aching about this. The US is a fucked-up place, and everyone knows it. The justice system is a fucked-up part of a fucked-up place and in fact the current administration made it worse. The social contract in the US has been broken repeatedly 1) when the state decided it could kill its people, 2) when the state decided to break its own laws in the 4th amendment, 3) when the state decided to incarcerate and deport citizens who were going about their legal business, 4) when the state decided to shelve due process and cover up ICE agents murdering civilians. When a state breaks the social contract enough, we call it a “failed state” and yee-haw chucklefuck congresspeople start talking about regime change. The US can’t even hold accountable a president who was convicted of massive fraud but managed to squeak over the election line and declare himself immune. Now, he’s doing it again. Who has done more damage to the body politic? Ha! That’s a trick question: you should not compare wrongs. Send them both to the oubliette.
Only one minor point on which I have to disagree:
Hardly anybody gives much of a shit about whether justice is done or not.
As for this:
I mean, where the fuck do you even start? You’re killing the woman, you can’t pretend you care about her distress about the process. I would think that the primary cause of “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” would be the whole bit about knowing you’re being killed.
Ah, what can you expect from people who are in the grip of a religion that on the one hand says “Thou shalt not kill” and on the other tells them to mete out capital punishment to people who curse their parents or commit adultery or some such things. That necessarily leads to a serious erosion of empathy (which, although the alleged founder of their religion exhorted them to practice empathy, is nevertheless considered “woke” and therefore something to be avoided).
I wonder why they look forward to the second coming of Jesus. Perhaps to nail him to the cross again?
…saying she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler.
If this is true, then the governor should have, at the very least, commuted her sentence from death to life. I’m all in favor of personal responsibility and punishment for serious crimes, but there’s no way someone could go through that sort of atrocious mistreatment and come out a fully sane and responsible adult. The system did its job and convicted someone who was found to have committed murder; but the governor could/should have stepped in and shown a tiny bit of mercy here.
Of course, that would have meant a Republican admitting that raping kids is really bad; which might not have gone over so well with certain other folks in his cult…
I continue to be mystified by the way capital punishment is carried out. I don’t favor it at all, but even if I did, I don’t understand why it must be done the way it is.
I have heard different arguments about this, but the basic take seems to be that the person being executed must be aware and awake at the moment of death, to fulfill the idea of “punishment.” It’s not enough just to kill them. And, for some odd reason, it’s not enough to say something like “I’m going to give you this knockout shot and you’re as good as dead because you’ll never wake up.” And so, rather than just put them to sleep before technically finishing the job, they have to fuss around with this ridiculous procedure.
I also saw, in some instance now mostly forgotten, the argument that the reason we cannot just euthanize them the way we would an ailing pet is that it would be contrary to the idea of human dignity! You’re about to kill a person you deem so bad they don’t deserve a moment more of life, and you’re worried about some abstract notion of dignity?
I may have mentioned this before, but this all reminds me of a private grammar school I attended for a while. Various infractions were noted, and if you accumulated enough over a week, you were condemned to the “penalty squad” on the otherwise free Saturday mornings. This involved a public calling out at assembly and a set time of walking aimlessly around the tennis court. But if a non-penalty squad student was seen to be watching them, he’d be put there too, because somehow or other, it violated their dignity to be actually watched!
I know this is separate in some way from the issue of this particular person and whether she deserves the death penalty or not. I don’t think the death penalty makes any sense anyway, and firmly believe that any number of wrongful executions, no matter how small, offsets any number of deserved ones, no matter how great. But even if you disagree with that part, the way it’s done is just bonkers.
The death penalty is never justifiable, ever. There are always bloodthirsty ghouls who will pipe up, “But what if there is no possible doubt that they are guilty?” and list some scenarios in decreasing order of plausibility / increasing order of desperation. The response in each case must be, “No. Never.” The stakes are simply too high.
The state exists to protect the welfare of civilians, a job which is better done on a collective basis than an individual one. That is fundamentally incompatible with holding the power of life and death over individuals. Because if we decide, even for a moment, that there is someone it is OK for the state to kill, under certain circumstances, then they can twist that until none of us is safe.
Whatever safeguards you might think you have created to prevent an innocent person from being executed, it will always be possible for someone — especially someone with all the resources of the state at their disposal — to devise an elaborate conjuring trick that would convince an audience that the conditions had been satisfied in full. And you can never be sure that sometime in the future, a less-benign government will not frame you for a crime in order to kill you.
@Marcus – I don’t have anything to add the the discussion, but would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts so coherently.
Sunday Afternoon@#6:
I don’t have anything to add the the discussion, but would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts so coherently.
Thank you!
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the victim suffered the worst possible outcome predictable by my scenario.
I have not yet seen an exact description of what she was given but it has been described as “two lethal doses of sedative.” That is obviously not entirely right. If they were following the old style drug cocktail, she’d have also gotten the paralytic. What if the sedative was not lethal (some sedatives aren’t!) and the curare made her unable to breathe, so she suffered brain damage from anoxia?
If that is what happens, I must repeat myself: she’d have been high as a kite but would have also been aware that she was unable to breathe. Can you imagine the terror and disorientation? The old school executioners liked their victims to be fully conscious, so they could appreciate the horrible significance of what was being done to them – but I also can’t imagine what it would be like to be tripping balls and find myself unable to breathe. Something is horribly wrong, nightmarishly wrong, evilly wrong.
I also don’t know if they tried to finish her off with an intercardial injection or not. And, she might have been able to hear the executioners panicking.
This is one of those “Mary Queen of Scots” botched executions. In Mary’s case the executioner missed her neck and made a split in the back of her skull. The good news for Mary is that probably stunned her. It then took another chop at her neck, and some sawing to get her head to come off.
The current story is that Pike is alive and was taken to the hospital where they apparently attempted to rescue her – why – so they could kill her again later? The whole concept of this situation is buggered beyond belief: if they wanted her dead, some brave executioner could have held her nose and put a plastic bag over her mouth. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to be an “executioner” you need to have the courage to kill someone, for flaming fuck’s sake. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Cops are perfectly happy to shoot someone, just ask for volunteers. Then fire the volunteers for being horrible people.
Here is a fun thing I wish would happen. And, if I were a billionaire, I’d make sure it did happen: any of her relatives or friends should sue Tennessee for gross negligence, pain, and suffering. After all, the premise of an execution is “not cruel and unusual” – but not only was this cruel and unusual, it was done wrong and she’s now brain-damaged. She may, in fact, be so brain damaged that they effectively killed the person who committed the crime. Obviously, from the reporting, they were incompetent – they had no fall-back plan, they had no response capability, they didn’t have anyone there who knew anything to do. If she had stopped breathing because of the curare, someone should have immediately either a) shot her or b) started artificial respiration. The ‘justice’ system in Tennessee is so incompetent that they should be forced to pay massive damages. In fact, it was (by definition) done deliberately; it was attempted murder. They’d have been fine if they had managed to commit murder but their attempt may have turned their victim into a vegetable. It should be possible to make the potential liability so expensive that they stop the death sentence.
Matthew @4: I’m not really up on the history or the arguments here, but I remember reading somewhere that more recent forms of execution — hanging, firing squad, beheading, electrocution, lethal injection — were each considered, at various times, to be more “humane” and “painless” means of killing. And they were adopted as a more “civilized” alternative to earlier forms of torture and slow, painful killing.
And offhand I’m guessing that the “fussing around with ridiculous procedures” you speak of are how state executioners maintain the pretense that their state-sanctioned killings are “just” and “legitimate.”
She may, in fact, be so brain damaged that they effectively killed the person who committed the crime.
Or, if she’s still alive in a brain-damaged state, she may be suffering a lot more than she would have if they’d just given her life without parole.
Oops, forgot to add “…with or without still remembering or comprehending why she was being punished.”
Raging Bee@#11:
Oops, forgot to add “…with or without still remembering or comprehending why she was being punished.”
Is that a “fate worse than death”? To me, it would be, but then dementia runs in my family and I have my share of brain damage – mild enough that I’m still me (i.e.: “the asshole you know as Marcus Ranum”) and I am able to remember what happened. But imagine waking up every morning with the worst ‘brain fog’ ever and having to try to reconstruct your context – always coming up with suffering and loss of self.
And since we’re on the subject, what the republicans are doing with Mitch McConnell is absolutely evil. He’s not there. He’s a fucking muppet. He’s less aware than Tom Cotton. Parading him around as a mannequin to get votes makes my vision shade over with red, like my berserker (ok, annoyed Norwegian fishermen) ancestors. I suspect that they are going to gradually replace pieces of him with wax effigy and continue to claim that he’s able to vote. If you don’t hate the republicans – ALL of them, because they are all in this – there is something wrong with you.
I’ll trot this old couple of things out again, as I usually do when this subject comes up:
1. there should be a national referendum on the death penalty, with two questions:
(a) do you support the right of the state to execute people who are incarcerated? (wording to exclude e.g. ICE agents shooting citizens on the street in broad daylight in front of cameras – we’re asking only about people who are already in custody, tried, judged, found guilty and sentenced – people the state has 100% in its power).
(b) given that the justice system is, provably and without possibility of counterargument, fallible, and given that this means that, inevitably, sooner or later, this means that an innocent person will DEFINITELY be executed – do you, personally agree to be the first person wrongly executed?
Anyone voting NO/NO is fine, we’ll count your vote.
Anyone voting NO/YES needs some help reading and understanding, so they’ll get that.
Crucially anyone voting YES/NO doesn’t get their vote counted, because they demonstrably haven’t thought it through – what they’re saying in (a) is that they support the death penalty, but ONLY FOR OTHER PEOPLE… but that wasn’t the question, so your answer doesn’t count.
Anyone voting YES/YES, well done for standing by your principles. Your vote will count, and you will be executed with a bullet to the back of the head as you leave the voting booth ACCORDING TO YOUR LEGALLY EXPRESSED WISH.
And then we run the referendum again the next day, after a severe uptick in the national average IQ. Rinse and repeat as often as the people voting NO/NO can keep a straight face.
(2) The US death penalty, like (I think) most, is not justice, it is theatre. It’s not aimed at the executionee, it’s aimed at the audience of bloodthirsty animals who constitute the citizenry.
I first came to this conclusion a long time ago, but it was brought into sharp relief a few years back when some companies who had been supplying lethal injection drugs decided that hey, maybe that’s not a great PR look, and cut off the supply. And states worried about how to execute people.
We are fragile creatures. We are not difficult to kill. I am a chemical engineer. I’ve been responsible over my career at many levels for activities that could easily kill a person, fairly quickly and often entirely painlessly. One of the most dangerous things I’ve done, and had others do, is confined space entry. Often on chemical plants you want things not to blow up. To avoid any source of ignition mixing with fuel and oxygen and blowing up, you remove all sources of ignition. But because you can never be 100% sure you have, you also make the atmosphere oxygen free, most often by simply filling the space with nitrogen. It’s colourless, odourless, and very cheap. But this is incredibly dangerous. Walk into a silo that’s full of nitrogen and you won’t have any indication there’s anything wrong, you just… go to sleep. And your buddy sees you fall, and comes to get you, and he goes to sleep too. People die like this in the process industries all the time. Survivors report no distress or pain, just loss of consciousness.
If you just want someone dead, you could put them in a comfy cell and flood it silently with nitrogen. It’s not pleasurably (unlike e.g. morphine overdose) but it’s also no painful. You just die. It’s 100% reliable, and we know this because of the death rate of people to whom it has happened accidentally. I have never found (and I have looked) an argument against using N2 as an asphyxiant in executions that doesn’t boil down to “but I want it to hurt” or “but I want a *show*”. The problem pro-execution people have with it is that it’s boring. Which tells me all I need to know about their morals.
I’ve made only one online comment regarding the “still alive after she was administered two lethal injections” headlines, and I’ll repeat it here: Americans don’t seem to understand what the word “lethal” means.
re sonofrojblake@13:from Equal Justice Initiative
https://eji.org/issues/nitrogen-suffocation/
“Anyone voting NO/YES needs some help reading and understanding, so they’ll get that.”
Don’t underestimate the seriously depressed demographic
@14: The scenario there was very different to the one described by sonofrojblake. The key thing about nitrogen hypoxia is that it can be completely painless as long as you don’t know it’s happening – for example if you walk into a room full of nitrogen without realising it. In the Alabama case, they strapped him to a gurney and put a mask on his face, so he knew exactly what was happening and was struggling against it. From your own link:
They wanted to make a show of it, and they wanted him to know what they were doing to him as they were doing it. That’s where the problems came from.
@sonofrojblake, #13: Just have a vote every time, “Should this person be put to death?” If there is unanimous agreement, the person is executed. If there is at least one dissenting voice, all those who voted for the death penalty are put to death instead.
re Dunc@16: So what scenario could an execution with nitrogen be carried out where the condemned would not be aware of the situation? That would be the issue because as long as the person was aware of the surroundings, they would feel the effects of the asphyxiation. I suppose the suggestion would be to knock them out with a sedative in an airtight room, then replace the air with pure nitrogen.
I get the impression that maximum security cells are pretty close to airtight as it is, and people need to sleep, so you could just flood their cell with nitrogen one night and they’d just never wake up.
The thing is that you don’t feel that you’re being asphyxiated, because the breathing reflex is driven by the level of CO2 dissolved in the blood, not the level of oxygen it’s carrying. As long as you can still breathe the CO2 out, you just feel like you’re breathing perfectly normally until you pass out from hypoxia.
Note that I’m still opposed to the death penalty in all cases, the point here is just that if you really feel you must kill people, there’s much better options available.
@blurizlagirl, that’s a nice idea but I’ve known a few contrarians who would not bother to evaluate the case but would always vote no in the hope of killing some of their neighbors. The more open and shut the case, the more neighbors you can eliminate. And if the voters in question have that possibility in mind, the death penalty would be effectively abolished anyway.
re Dunc@19:
Agreed. I think Marcus’ proposal of using an overdose of something like heroin would do the trick. And there is no shortage of that in police lockups. No need to go to the trouble of asking drug companies to supply a lethal dose of anything.
Clearly™ God™ does not want her dead.
Would they really dare to go against His™ will?
@chigau
OK, God™ doesn’t want her dead. He™ just wanted her to suffer and possibly end up as a severely disabled person, maybe a vegetable.
Who pays for all the care she now needs? Is the state of Tennessee happy with this outcome? Bad PR, people fired and high costs. Can’t be what they were hoping for.
M’thew@#23:
Who pays for all the care she now needs? Is the state of Tennessee happy with this outcome? Bad PR, people fired and high costs. Can’t be what they were hoping for.
In the long run the taxpayers of the state of Tennessee will wind up paying a lot of money. Maybe they’ll set the next one up as pay per view so at least the worst people in the country will pay for it.
chigau@#22:
Clearly™ God™ does not want her dead.
I couldn’t help but think of all the various medieval saints whose mementoes (and dried body parts) intruded on my childhood. There was Saint Foy de Conques, which was a pilgrimage spot near where I spent my summers as a child. I remember all these horribly bad medieval artworks (is that redundant?) of the saintly young lady being grilled alive over a fire, and a dove coming down from heaven with some rain, that caused them to delay her execution until they could behead her. Oh yeah, she was 12. The miracle that was accomplished was several observers became christian. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
A lot of people I’ve talked to, both in person and online, still subscribe to a basically retributive concept of justice. From that point of view, suffering is a necessary part of justice – if a criminal made others suffer, he or she must be made to suffer for justice to be done. I don’t agree with it, but that’s a very common view.
@springa73@#26:
Yeah. Hammurrabi’s code makes sense, and seems obvious until you think about it and then it’s, “whaaaa???”