Why not hanging for carrying out the death penalty?

lobosrul5 said:
The former would be quite expensive. And the condemned is taking the place of an actual astronaut, or a space tourist ($$$). I think that'd be my preferred way to go actually. Spaced, with a nice view of Earth. You die from suffocation, and apparently the lack of pressure is not that painful.
Click to expand...

But then if haunting rules apply your ghost will be stuck floating in space or in orbit, and rarely will you get a chance to scare people there.
 
theprestige said:
Such elaborate nonsense.
Click to expand...


Agreed. Just kidding, obviously.


There are assisted suicide organizations that seem to have figured out a simple and reliable method for a peaceful passing, that anyone can carry out with common over the counter items and a single sheet of basic instructions. And without, mind you, the active involvement of the medical community.

Why not just do that?
Click to expand...


Yep, my thoughts exactly. What I suggested upthread. (Although I don't know if the suicide firm I mentioned employs doctors. I'd expect they do, considering it's quite expensive, apparently, plus I don't suppose it would be legal if they didn't have doctors and nurses and whatnot.)
 
TragicMonkey said:
But then if haunting rules apply your ghost will be stuck floating in space or in orbit, and rarely will you get a chance to scare people there.
Click to expand...

Yeah but can you imagine how much fun being a ghost would be in the ISS?! You could like go to dinner with the astronauts, everyone is floating naturally anyways, so they take no notice of you... at first.
 
TragicMonkey said:
But then if haunting rules apply your ghost will be stuck floating in space or in orbit, and rarely will you get a chance to scare people there.
Click to expand...


That'll provide another elaborate plot for a Ring spin-off, to explain how, via satellites and all, the creepy crawly plops out of the TV screen and drags itself to you after you've watched the movie clip and heard the voice on the phone.
 
zooterkin said:
Is there any method which is?
Click to expand...

Nitrogen gas, I would say.

I'm pretty sure, as I think I already said, that, as they are currently implemented, the electric chair and lethal injections are much less humane than hanging.
Click to expand...

Electric chair is definitely barbaric. I haven't really looked into lethal injection, there should be a way to do that humanely, but details matter.
 
Which should be a good reminder to all the skeptics out there.

Just don't answer the phone when it rings after watching a Trump presidential ad.
 
JoeMorgue said:
//Total Hijack//

I wrote a horror short story a few years back, a 1st person confession from a guy who was a member of an underground group of off the book executioners, sent clandestinely by the government to prisons to perform secret executions of prisoners.

The twist was he would be taken to the prisoner's cell while they were asleep and perform a lethal injection on them. The whole point was the idea that being executed wasn't cruel, seeing it coming was. So it was decided it was better of prisoners just went to bed one night and never work up. In the story most "natural cause" deaths of prisoners are death row or in prison for extreme crimes are really secret executions carried out by this secret organization. The public "They know it is coming" executions are only used to keep the ruse up and generally saved for really extreme cases that it is felt are worth the extra pain and suffering of seeing their death coming.
Click to expand...

I think it was Larry Niven that did a short story about a similar approach - a convicted person if they survived something like 24 hours in a booby-trapped apartment would be pardoned . The story has the man (think he'd ran a red light 3 times) avoiding the poisoned food, electrocution, the timer goes off that announces the 24 hours are up, he goes to the door grabs the door handle and it shoots a poison into his hand and kills him. The timer went off at 23:59 minutes.
 
TragicMonkey said:
There's another element involved: personal feelings and cultural taboos about mutilating the body, living or dead. Personally I'd rather take a few seconds to die by hanging than be instantly crushed by a large weight. There's more dignity in hanging. It doesn't leave such a gross corpse behind.
Click to expand...
True, but isn't it a little odd to say you deserve to be killed but deserve to preserve your dignity? I know there are cultural taboos and all, but if you're actually being executed by people who think execution is appropriate, who should give a flying expletive what you think? You're the author of your own indignity, or would be if your killers are right.

Of course the indignity and stress and terror a person faces as he goes consciously to his certain death is the whole point of the operation, really. It's another instance of totally incompatible ideas trying to coexist. You can't inflict the confrontation with certain death humanely. If you really want to do it humanely, don't tell him exactly when it's going to happen, sneak up and shoot him or drug him and kill him in his sleep.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Ohhh noooooooooooooo. Not this argument. Yes, I think it is. Lt Barclay was right!

It would be exactly the same as being atomized by a powerful explosion, then an exact duplicate of you created with your memories intact right before that moment. Its not you. Its a copy of you.
Click to expand...

And kinda sucks for the people that believe in undetectable souls.

I think that was the original idea for the Doom franchise of games...

A government project, on Mars, developed a portal technology.

But it turned out that the process detached the soul from the body, so people came back, different.

As the experiments increased, some of the people came back possessed.

Then things started coming out of the portals...
 
Darat said:
This thread was sparked by this article:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/01/18/alabama-nitrogen-execution-death-penalty

The article is about an upcoming execution in which they are going to use nitrogen suffocation to kill the prisoner. It's a method never used before, and it does seem - like the article says - entirely experimental.
Click to expand...
Mmm... experimental other than the people who died from being dumbasses while ripping whippits ;)

It should be a pretty painless way to go, and unless they get crazy with it, it should also be fairly inexpensive. Nitrogen displaces oxygen, while providing a nice giddy feeling.

Darat said:
If you read the article, you'll see that there are a variety of methods proposed or being used yet I see nowhere is using hanging. It's been used for centuries, carried out properly it is instantaneous, we know how it works, there are even hangmen in some countries that could give hands-on advice.

So, my question is why all these weird and experimental execution methods when there is a perfectly good method they could adopt? What is the reluctance to use hanging?

(Thread isn't meant to be about the punishment of the death penalty itself, not interested in a debate about whether it is right or wrong in this thread.)
Click to expand...

So far as I can tell, the reluctance to hanging is that it is often done poorly. We're not supposed to torture prisoners, and by extension those being executed as criminals. A properly done hanging snaps the neck resulting in a very quick and efficient death... but a poorly done hanging results in the person slowly suffocating and choking over a long period of time.

Firing squads always seemed reasonable to me... but that has additional complications as well. A clean shot is quick, a poor shot is painful and slow.

Personally, I don't see why we don't use the same methods used for euthanizing our pets. Sedative, followed by a nervous system depressant. Quick, painless, non-traumatizing to everyone involved. They just go to sleep and never wake up again. It's also inexpensive, which is a bonus in my view.

Electric chairs have always seemed like a horribly inhumane thing to me, as well as being needlessly costly.
 
bruto said:
True, but isn't it a little odd to say you deserve to be killed but deserve to preserve your dignity?
Click to expand...

Perhaps, but there's a different argument for doing it that way. Namely, whatever the prisoner deserves, the executioner (who is presumably innocent) deserves to carry out their duty humanely, that to do otherwise takes an unnecessary toll on them. And I think that's the correct approach to take, if we are to have executions at all.
 
Daald said:
But the health care community doesn't possess some arcane knowledge that they closely guard from anyone else.

Get some people to take a couple of classes on how to insert IVs and buy the necessary drugs which there should be an abundance of for legitimate use. The executioners don't need to be trained to the standard of a healthcare professional. They are aiming to be a failed healthcare professional after all.
Click to expand...

I am curious whether veterinarians would take the same position. We euthanize pets out of mercy pretty regularly... but we also euthanize animals that present a risk to humans as well. I don't see that the argument is materially different when it's a human being executed for presenting an incurable risk to society. Then again, I also don't see that the argument is any different when it comes to euthanizing humans out of mercy either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom