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.”

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.

1. A barbituate or disassociative to cause unconsciousness – Sodium Thiopental(“Trapanol”), Diazepam (“Valium”), or Midozalam(“Versed”)

2. Vecuronium Bromide

3. 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.