• CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The government should never be allowed to put its own citizens to death. The government is not infallible. The government has put innocent people to death.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Regardless of the method of execution, imagine knowing the exact date and time of your death and knowing nothing you could do would stop it. That is torture, plain and simple. It should be in violation of the eighth amendment.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Or is it cruel to make someone wake up and ask “is this the day that I will die?”

    • PineRune@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s been ruled that a punishment needs to be BOTH cruel AND unusual, to qualify as a violation. One or the other is fine, as long as it’s not both. Scalping someone for petty theft would be okay as long as most-everyone convicted got scalped.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        In this specific case, I wouldn’t call it usual and it certainly is cruel.

        I would also argue that, since it is not applied evenly in any way and that only a minority of people get the death penalty, even though some people who don’t get it have committed worse crimes, it is always unusual. Usual is prison for some length of time, possibly life.

        I would also add that SCOTUS found it both cruel and unusual at one point.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furman_v._Georgia

        Then it was reinstated in Gregg v. Georgia because SCOTUS claimed that some states met some arbitrary criteria they didn’t actually meet.

  • The Pantser@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you survive one execution I don’t think they should be allowed a do over, let him live in his cell, he earned it.

    • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve heard (don’t know if it’s true) that in the old days if you survived a hanging then you were allowed to live

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I’m pretty sure* they took a method that was supposed to give a clean painless death and deliberately implemented it in a way that would cause agony.

      Edit: after further reading about this, there are other possible mechanisms that could have lead to that first one being in agony, so it is possible that the nitrogen asphyxiation method was approached and implemented in good faith while still causing agony. Though I’d say continuing to use it despite how the first one went does bring that good faith into question plus the possibility of good faith doesn’t imply it wasn’t in bad faith, but I no longer stand by that “pretty sure” I originally stated above.