Death Penalty

[baileyandkc]

perhaps we need an island in the Pacific to dump convicted murderers..let them forage for food and kill each other...then there's no death penalty and no taxpayer expense for those serving life...
just transport the convicted murderers in and make sure the waters around the island are extremely shark infested!

[Danielle Foxx]

Cryonics





Crazy? Fiction?

[hippifried]

Firing Squad destroys the heart
Lethal Injection poisons everything touched by the bloodstream
Poison Gas does the same thing
Electrocution wipes out everything.

These people's lives are forfeit, & they're healthy for the most part. Why not harvest the parts? Start with a lobotomy, then start taking what's needed as needed. They won't know the difference. When the vitals are gone, it's over. Think about it. You can take slices of liver forever. Kidneys one at a time. Pieces of this & pieces of that. It's all fresh. When you find a donee match for the heart, you go ahead & chop up the rest, ship it out, & start with the next one. Might as well make something about them worthwhile.

[justatransgirl]

Uhmmm... over 100 innocent people have been executed in the USA in recent years - and more were found innocent after they were executed.

Oops...

However I must say this from an experience that touched my life. A girl I once dated in high school was brutally raped and murdered by her ex-boyfriend (who was at one time my good friend) and another man. The boyfriend has spent the last 20+ years in prison. The other man was executed about 10 years ago.

In this case there was no question of innocence, though there was finger pointing between the suspects, and personally I think they both should have been executed. Three lives sadly wasted because of drugs and alcohol and the inability of men to keep their dicks in their pants.

Anyway - here's some links to the Innocence Project and Wiki for anyone who is interested.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital..._United_States

Hugs,
TS Jamie

[trish]

Firing Squad destroys the heart
Lethal Injection poisons everything touched by the bloodstream
Poison Gas does the same thing
Electrocution wipes out everything.

These people's lives are forfeit, & they're healthy for the most part. Why not harvest the parts? Start with a lobotomy, then start taking what's needed as needed. They won't know the difference. When the vitals are gone, it's over. Think about it. You can take slices of liver forever. Kidneys one at a time. Pieces of this & pieces of that. It's all fresh. When you find a donee match for the heart, you go ahead & chop up the rest, ship it out, & start with the next one. Might as well make something about them worthwhile.

This would be a boon for detective shows and murder mysteries because it provides great new plot lines. E.g. Bad guy frames good guy for murder because the bad guy needs a new heart (obviously), and the good guy is the perfect match.

[trish]

The cop on the Simpsons (is it officer Wiggens?) has said, "I'd rather see ten guilty men get a away scot free, then get up and chase them."

[SarahG]

I would rather see the penalty carried out efficiently, quickly and professionally. I see nothing wrong with an old fashioned firing squad.

The problem with firing squads is that they're routinely unreliable. Sometimes people take more than one shot to die, and in those cases you have to question whether the convicted is being subjected to unnecessary suffering.

I see nothing wrong with capital punishment on general terms, but I don't see why we have to use something that we KNOW to be unreliable to get the job done.

If we really cared about efficiency, unnecessary suffering, and cost- we would bring back the guillotine. Very fast, nearly painless way to go -but even that has had a history of mistakes. I can recall reading about one case from the French revolutionary period where someone was too fat for the guillotine machine and the blade fell on him- but because of the size of his neck, did not kill him. The executioner had to mount the machine and jump up & down on the blade to get it to slowly chop threw the victim's neck...

The Germans initially tried firing squads in their final solution, only they quickly found that it was unreliable, inefficient, and was unnecessarily draining the pscyhies of their soldiers. The holocaust of bullets (google it) killed hundreds of thousands (believe the current estimated figure is in the millions?) but there were so many instances where people were not dying in the first shot, that the Germans began to experiment with alternatives. The bean counters also quickly found that even using bullets becomes cost prohibitive under certain circumstances.

One of the alternatives they tried were mobile execution cars- basically buses or vans that would use the engine's exhaust gases to kill the occupiants locked in the back. The concept of a mobile execution machine has its advantages, especially if you're trying to kill a great number of people in far off locations... but the Germans abandoned it because of its inefficiency. As far as I know the concept of a mobile execution system ended with that concept...

Until now. The Chinese have been using firing squads to kill people by the thousands every year, and have realized that the Germans were right (engineering wise) more often than they were not... firing squads simply don't work and like the Germans, the Chinese have decided to experiment with alternatives and insodoing the Chinese have brought back the concept of a mobile execution machine.

A company in China is now taking buses and retrofitting them into mobile execution buses which are essentially nothing more than a mobile assembly line for lethal injection. 10 of these have been sold to the Chinese government so far, and the company is trying to get orders from other foreign governments (and so far, no one else has been willing to try the concept- probably because of the design's holocaust origins).

In case you're curious about ordering, the company's website is here:
http://www.jinguanauto.com/index_1.asp

If the Chinese find a mobile assembly line for lethal injection works (which in my guess, is precisely what they will find) then they're going to run into the same problem that the Germans had during their second holocaust... disposing of the bodies. A mobile execution bus may be able to quickly and efficiently kill convicted criminals at ease, but in a far off remote location a mobile vehicle will not be able to dispose of a great big pile of bodies on the go. This poses sanitation problems (its not like they can just dump a big pile of bodies in the countryside), especially if the Chinese do not first require the convicts to dig their own mass graves. Perhaps the same company will soon release a mobile incineration bus...

[SarahG]

Firing Squad destroys the heart
Lethal Injection poisons everything touched by the bloodstream
Poison Gas does the same thing
Electrocution wipes out everything.

These people's lives are forfeit, & they're healthy for the most part. Why not harvest the parts?

The potential ethical problem with that idea is that you start giving people or governments a reason to kill more people than they otherwise would... just for the body parts.

[baileyandkc]

and one of those sci fi movies where the psycho's body parts radiate evil in their new recipients, and the person receiving the body parts becomes possessed!

[JamesHunt]

Some Examples of Post-Furman Botched Executions

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/some...hed-executions

interesting the case of Allen Lee Davis who was executed for murder on May 11, 1982 Jacksonville, Florida murder of Nancy Weiler, who was three-months pregnant at the time. According to reports, Nancy Weiler, was "beaten almost beyond recognition" by Davis with a .357 Magnum, and hit over 25 times in the face and head. He was also convicted of killing Nancy Weiler's two daughters, Kristina (9, shot twice in the face) and Katherine (5, shot as she was trying to run away)

July 8, 1999. Florida. Allen Lee Davis. Electrocution. "Before he was pronounced dead ... the blood from his mouth had poured onto the collar of his white shirt, and the blood on his chest had spread to about the size of a dinner plate, even oozing through the buckle holes on the leather chest strap holding him to the chair."45 His execution was the first in Florida's new electric chair, built especially so it could accommodate a man Davis's size (approximately 350 pounds). Later, when another Florida death row inmate challenged the constitutionality of the electric chair, Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw commented that "the color photos of Davis depict a man who -- for all appearances -- was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida."46 Justice Shaw also described the botched executions of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina (q.v.), calling the three executions "barbaric spectacles" and "acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state."47 Justice Shaw included pictures of Davis's dead body in his opinion.48 The execution was witnessed by a Florida State Senator, Ginny Brown-Waite, who at first was "shocked" to see the blood, until she realized that the blood was forming the shape of a cross and that it was a message from God saying he supported the execution.49

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Lee_Davis