The way we do lethal injection is weird and over-engineered anyway. They use three chemicals to do what we routinely do to dogs with one, and even then it could be done quite humanely with just a sealed room and a tank of nitrogen.
It's weird to discuss humanity when you're talking about taking someones life without their consent as an act of revenge.
Also it could be argued the guillotine is more humane since the death is instant. The chemical injections just feel "cleaner" since the executioners wearing a lab coat.
There's also the whole bit where you know for a long time in advance that you're going to get your head hacked off by a machine versus just laying down and going to sleep.
Another poster referenced Michael Portillo's documentary on the subject. He did extensive research into different methods of humane euthanasia, and landed where you did.
However, his conclusion after asking why it wasn't done that way is that people actually do want convicts to suffer.
You don't even need CO, any inert gas other than CO2 will do as long as you remove the oxygen (nitrogen is convenient as the atmosphere is already mostly nitrogen)
> the body thinks it's oxygen so there's no sense of being asphyxiated.
CO does compete with O2 which kills you, but the reason the body doesn't react is it basically doesn't react to anything other than CO2 blood levels. You can asphyxiate with argon, butane, nitrogen, helium, krypton, etc… and not realise it as long as CO2 partial pressure doesn't rise.
CO is dangerous because you don't need to remove the O2 from a room to be lethal.
All the other gases cause asphyxiation by taking the place of oxygen in the air. So once you leave the room, you'll be fine.
CO is dangerous because it takes the place of oxygen in the blood and it has a stronger attraction to hemoglobin than oxygen. So get enough CO in your blood and your organs suffocate, even if you are put in a pure O2 environment right away.
Carbon dioxide is probably "better". There is an interesting (and I think rather controversial) BBC documentary on this presented by a former Conservative MP. I don't have a link to it, but you can search for "Michael Portillo How to kill a human being".
Carbon dioxide is terrible for this, blood CO2 (or blood acidity really) is what the body reacts to to decide it's suffocating, hypercapnia is a horrible thing to die from.
The body notices "suffocation" through detecting carbon dioxide levels. Simply replacing oxygen with another inert gas (like nitrogen) does not trigger the suffocation response in the body and so you essentially just exhale all of your oxygen and go hypoxic. People react differently to hypoxia, some people just pass out while others get the giggles before they pass out. Then you die.
You would not even know it is happening most likely.
This is why confined spaces are so dangerous and governed so strictly by OSHA. A lot of times you will pass out within one or two breaths if you inhale something with very low oxygen levels (<15%) and then you die and anyone who follows you in to rescue you dies.
I don't see any comments on the question of whether a commercial entity has legal standing to control the use of products it sells. A commercial entity relies on the legal system to enforce any restrictions, so this amounts to a question of whether the public should facilitate and subsidize the political wishes of a commercial entity. I think not, just as the taxpayers should not be subsidizing inadequate wages paid by companies like Walmart.
Export laws, being enacted and enforced by a government, are a different matter, of course.
I'm strongly opposed to the death penalty, for both moral and practical reasons. This story is another reminder for me on how the functions of government have been co-opted for private gain. This kind of thing makes everyone poorer.
The article is highly misleading in this respect. The restrictions are contractual and imposed upon Pfizer's distributors/resalers. State governments must also certify that purchases won't be used for executions. Likely the only consequence for violations is being blacklisted by Pfizer.
The original press release[1] states:
> Pfizer’s distribution restriction limits the sale of these seven products to a select group of wholesalers, distributors, and direct purchasers under the condition that they will not resell these products to correctional institutions for use in lethal injections. Government purchasing entities must certify that products they purchase or otherwise acquire are used only for medically prescribed patient care and not for any penal purposes. Pfizer further requires that these Government purchasers certify that the product is for “own use” and will not resell or otherwise
provide the restricted products to any other party.
> Pfizer will consistently monitor the distribution of these seven products, act upon findings that reveal noncompliance, and modify policies when necessary to remain consistent with our stated position against the improper use of our products
in lethal injections. Importantly, this distribution system is also designed to ensure that these critical medications will remain immediately available to those patients who rely on them every day.
A barbiturate (a drug that acts as central nervous system depressant, i.e. sodium thiopental or propofol) in combination with a muscle relaxant. Death cause: oxygen deficiency, within seconds.
The Secretary of the Treasury is currently a Democrat. While I don't think he's taken a position on the death penalty, Democrats tend to be anti-capital punishment and this would be a pretty bizarre way to thumb your nose at a Democrat. Even Democrats who claim to be pro-death penalty would likely privately be happy about this.
Assuming the worst of people, that seems like a pretty good reason to do it: the democrats in office are happy because you're hindering death penalties, but they don't risk political backlash because they didn't order/do anything, Pfizer did.
This is the opposite of showing cajones. Manufacturers of these drugs have been sued because their drugs were used for executions. So this is a attempt to avoid liability.
It probably has to do with the speed of upvotes or percentage of upvotes per viewer. It pretty rapidly has gone to +17. There does seem to be some kind of "upvote recency" component to the algorithm. Older upvotes stories drift down and newer quickly upvoted stories drift up. I doubt there is a conspiracy (except for those employment posts that can't be replied to).
This happens routinely on weekdays too. Number of points is not indicative of something appearing on the frontpage. I don't know what is though, which makes me suspicious of hidden agendas.
Views are calculated into front-paging?
I thought I read somewhere that successful front-pagers have an increased weight to their posts being frontpaged.
And "rate of upvotes" matters a lot. So maybe these 3 upvotes were given within a second of each other.. ?
Do you disagree with; abortions? The wars in Iraq? The animals in shelters are euthanized? People who oppose the death penalty?
Regardless, your condescending tone is insulting. And, I'm not entirely sure what to say in regards to your comment that people who oppose the death penalty have a mental illness.
neither fetuses nor pets are people, and not everyone in the US is any more in favor of war, and even those who are might feel killing is only justified when absolutely necessary.
Life in prison accomplishes the same thing, but is cancelable if the person turns out to have been innocent.
That begs the question. What defines being a "person" other than being alive and being human? Fetuses are clearly both, so you have to add a third restriction. Finding one that works is challenging. It can't be self-awareness because then babies aren't people. Viability outside the womb is a dividing line that will soon be obsoleted by technology.
The long-term justification for abortion will likely have to be rooted in ideas of justifiable homicide (self defense, collateral death during war, etc).
> The long-term justification for abortion will likely have to be rooted in ideas of justifiable homicide
Not at all. Don't define an unborn fetus as a person.
You staged the setup with a question, then only included qualifications that inherently would also include an unborn fetus: alive and human. I say we must include having been born as a requirement to be a person.
The definition of a person no longer includes the unborn. An unborn fetus is an unborn fetus, it is not a person until it is born. There, I just solved your pre-arranged problem.
My question wasn't rhetorical, it was an invitation to offer additional requirements for being a person on top of that the two I presented and think about the merits of those requirements.
Making the third criteria be "being born" works to exclude fetuses, but scientifically it's completely arbitrary. There is pretty much zero developmental difference between a fetus about to be born and a newborn baby. So what's the logic of defining one as a person with a right to life and the other not as a person, other than legal convenience? Frankly I think it's just the byproduct of cognitive dissonance: we want abortion to be okay, but we want killing newborns to be not okay, but the scientific fact is that both are just potential but not actualized sentient self-aware humans.
You sound a bit like one of the engineers you sometimes argue with here. The kind of engineer that wants some area of law to be a black and white rules based system where everything is decided based on a perfectly clean application of logic.
But you know that's not how society works. And it's not how the law works either. There are tremendous grey areas in which rules try to balance competing interests in a way that ends up being, more or less, fair. This balance is based on ideas of messy humans and the culture we've built up over thousands of years. It's not cognitive dissonance when we end up with a rule that is bases on more than the precise scientific inputs. It's just the way our law and culture works.
I'm not saying we shouldn't balance peoples' interests. I'm questioning the background assumptions against which we're doing that balancing. I think "fetuses aren't people because they haven't been born" is a weak assumption.
Don't get me wrong: I think the interests of the mother outweigh the interests of the fetus. Not because fetuses aren't people, but because killing people or allowing them to die is something we do all the time to serve various societal interests.
The logic would be cultural heritage. Birth has always been seen as an immense step, in probably all cultures.
That reasoning would be insufficient for the engineer crowd who would love to replace all laws and human interactions with flow charts, but I don't see why it should be immediately discarded.
Capital punishment is a one way street, and we have a history of realizing -- sometimes years later -- that we convicted someone based upon flawed or fraudulent evidence. You can't really go back and say "sorry, my bad" to a corpse. Er, I guess you can, but it doesn't achieve much. You can't undo 20 years of incarceration either, but you can let someone out and give them some money to get restarted.
From self-interest alone, we should all favor judicial penalties that can be undone if the system makes a mistake. We frequently make mistakes with, e.g., lineups, fingerprints, miscalculating the uniqueness of certain dna evidence, etc. So it's useful to structure the system to be robust to those errors.
2) People sometimes are wrongly convicted, happens, will always happen, another point: Law is different, depending on where the trial happens, what state you are judged in, sentences differ. There is no way the death penalty can in any way be "fairly" handed down. (Law is not mathematics, it's a social science)
3) Does it keep people from committing crimes? No obvious answer, likely not
4) There is a racial factor involved, black killing white more likely to get the death penalty than black killing black for example.
5) There are no good or bad people, that might be what religious people think, but you aren't born a criminal, nor is it simply your well informed free choice to become one. What if I had grown up in a low income low educated black community with high criminal and incarceration rates, without a father and a single mother struggling to provide for her children? I am privileged and I know it, so even if someone does something hideous, shouldn't society not be one of revenge, but one that while it punishes, also tries to lend a hand and tries to give support to a poor soul? (the American justice system is not working well in that regard, solution is more therapy, psychologists, less life-long sentences, no minimum sentences, better education, more social workers, et cetera, not death penalties...)
We value life according to some simple factors, how intelligent is it, how close is it to ours, how do we estimate its perception of its surroundings, its "degree of consciousness" so to speak, et cetera, in that regard killing an animal or a human being is different. It's also different whether you kill an ant, or an elephant. That's why killing an animal unlawfully does not have the same legal consequences as killing a human being. Your comparison is not really relevant and fair. Regarding abortion it's the same, we are not talking about aborting fully grown human beings, I am pretty sure we are not talking about aborting fetuses one month before birth, more likely 6,7 months before birth in most cases... and even then I see how it is a moral dilemma for some people.
And wars should also be the absolute last course of action exactly because it kills people. And you see the consequences, does killing abroad make the United States safer?! In a lot of cases I doubt it, it fuels hatred and radicals... does killing criminals help anyone? let me summarize: it costs more, there is a racial bias, there always will be innocent among the criminals sentenced to death penalty, you are not a criminal out of free choice, violence fuels violence, it's likely not to deter crime, ...
To your #3 point, one argument I've heard on this point is you want capital punishment for 1st degree murder to give a reason for the criminal not to kill their victim in order to better cover their tracks. That implies a level of rationality in the criminal mind which might be overly optimistic at that point, but it seems like a reasonable argument.
