Death row inmates not guaranteed 'painless' execution, U.S. Supreme Court says

He kills his ex-lover’s new boyfriend, kidnaps and rapes her, shoots at her 6-year-old son and a police officer. Too bad the cops didn’t kill him when they had the chance.


He plays the appeals game for years and gets a stay with the support of Justice Kennedy. His latest ploy is to complain that a lethal injection will cause him pain due to a congenital condition.


In a decision that exposed stark divisions among the justices on the death penalty, the court ruled 5-4 that Bucklew had failed to present enough evidence to pursue his request to be executed by lethal gas. The court’s five conservatives were in the majority and its four liberals dissented.

Referring to the history of capital punishment, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s majority that “the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death - something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.”

Does that mean that states are now free to reinstate electric chairs, gas chambers, hanging, or even firing squads?


We can only hope.


More @ Death row inmates not guaranteed 'painless' execution, U.S. Supreme Court says | Reuters


He should have been hanged 20 years ago. Stop the insanity!
Capital punishment is state sponsored murder. How can anyone who even claims to be a Christian, like most Trump voters, believe it is moral for the state to pay a stranger to inject a prisoner strapped to a gurney with poison? Can you imagine Jesus saying he was cool with that? And we know for a fact states who use capital punishment have higher homicide rates than states who do not...and countries that have capital punishment, with only Japan as the exception, have much much higher murder rates than those who do not. So it is not a deterrent, in fact, it may be just the opposite. Remember how Ted Bundy killed a bunch of people in Washington, a state with little or not capital punishment, to move to Florida to continue his killing, a state with the second highest rate of capital punishment? If the death penalty was that big a deterrent would he have done that?

And as far as torturing people, only a sadistic loser would suggest that. That is how they treat murderers and even thieves in Muslim countries, maybe you would be happier there knowing murderers are put to death in very painful ways. What a sick little puppy you must be to get off on the pain of others, even miserable human beings who have committed such awful heinous crime. Only God can punish such people the right way, and those who would torture him here are no better morally than he is.
An eye for an eye criminal lover.
 
Executions should be as inglorious as possible. Once again, all the pomp and circumstance of flushing a toilet, which in some ways it is.

Personally, I'd have felt cheated by that.
That's kinda the point.

Because you have some vested interest in leaving victims and their families without a sense of closure and that justice has been served?
I thought you would feel cheated being the condemned. How about shooting the bullet to the back of the head.

I don't personally care about the manner of execution, although I recognize that society had a variety of valid reasons for switching methods. I am, however, considering the fact that using a method considered to be more brutal would have the effect of increasing societal objection to execution. I don't think that's a consequence you would want.
That is exactly right and it has a detrimental effect on the people who actually put them to death. Lethal injection, watching someone go to sleep, is far more palatable than watching someone literally fry from being electrocuted.
 
Personally, I'd have felt cheated by that.
That's kinda the point.

Because you have some vested interest in leaving victims and their families without a sense of closure and that justice has been served?
I thought you would feel cheated being the condemned. How about shooting the bullet to the back of the head.

I don't personally care about the manner of execution, although I recognize that society had a variety of valid reasons for switching methods. I am, however, considering the fact that using a method considered to be more brutal would have the effect of increasing societal objection to execution. I don't think that's a consequence you would want.
That is exactly right and it has a detrimental effect on the people who actually put them to death. Lethal injection, watching someone go to sleep, is far more palatable than watching someone literally fry from being electrocuted.

I believe it also is more precise and has less room for error. Not that I particularly give a damn about the condemned, but it's not right to ask people who are already tasked with executing human beings to also have to deal with even uglier and more traumatic situations which could be avoided.
 
That's kinda the point.

Because you have some vested interest in leaving victims and their families without a sense of closure and that justice has been served?
I thought you would feel cheated being the condemned. How about shooting the bullet to the back of the head.

I don't personally care about the manner of execution, although I recognize that society had a variety of valid reasons for switching methods. I am, however, considering the fact that using a method considered to be more brutal would have the effect of increasing societal objection to execution. I don't think that's a consequence you would want.
That is exactly right and it has a detrimental effect on the people who actually put them to death. Lethal injection, watching someone go to sleep, is far more palatable than watching someone literally fry from being electrocuted.

I believe it also is more precise and has less room for error. Not that I particularly give a damn about the condemned, but it's not right to ask people who are already tasked with executing human beings to also have to deal with even uglier and more traumatic situations which could be avoided.

There's nothing more precise than a bullet to the head.

Hanging is OK, too.
 
He kills his ex-lover’s new boyfriend, kidnaps and rapes her, shoots at her 6-year-old son and a police officer. Too bad the cops didn’t kill him when they had the chance.


He plays the appeals game for years and gets a stay with the support of Justice Kennedy. His latest ploy is to complain that a lethal injection will cause him pain due to a congenital condition.


In a decision that exposed stark divisions among the justices on the death penalty, the court ruled 5-4 that Bucklew had failed to present enough evidence to pursue his request to be executed by lethal gas. The court’s five conservatives were in the majority and its four liberals dissented.

Referring to the history of capital punishment, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s majority that “the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death - something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.”

Does that mean that states are now free to reinstate electric chairs, gas chambers, hanging, or even firing squads?


We can only hope.


More @ Death row inmates not guaranteed 'painless' execution, U.S. Supreme Court says | Reuters

Cruel and unusual punishment

Is excruciating pain cruel?

For this guy I don't really care, but the cruel and unusual ban was about torture before execution mostly , which was very common in the years leading up to the Constitution, things like drawing and quartering, stretching, pressing, racking. Things to make you confess before they killed you.

The Death Penalty is Constitutional, it is even considered as a punishment, where the 5th amendment requires due process to be deprived of "life, liberty, or property"
Is a slow and painful execution torture?

Cruel and unusual punishment is the threshold

No, because torture is designed to punish or extract information, not to execute.

The problem with going with another method, i.e. the Nitrogen hypoxia method, is that we all know the second the State agrees to it, The State will be sued for violating its legal execution method. If they amend their execution law, they will be sued for implementing it ex post facto.

It's the same issue with asking for a certain Chaplain to enter the chamber when the person is not authorized. They sue to get him allowed in, and if he is, they will sue because he isn't part of the rules on who is allowed in. and if they changed the rules, BOOM, back to the ex post facto argument.

This is not about the pain of this one inmate, this is about attempts to make the Death Penalty impossible via countless legal challenges.

Luckily this decision also commented on that, and hopefully lower courts will get the message.

As I recall, many forms of execution in the past were also viewed as a source of entertainment for the masses, as well as an object lesson to cow people into compliance. The executions of traitors in 18th century Great Britain, for example.

Lethal injection is as quick, painless, and humane as we have the ability to make an execution. And I'm afraid "I have a medical condition that makes it painful for you to kill me" really doesn't impress me. He'll be in less pain than his victims were by a wide margin, and it won't last as long. Besides, the ultimate point here is for him to wind up dead, anyway. Pretty sure that's not supposed to be fun.

Also the method was designed to elicit a confession via pain, or if no confession "purity" via pain.

Things like drawing and quartering were designed to get a confession, and thus show the power of the State. same thing with pressing.

. A convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, andquartered (chopped into four pieces). The traitor's remains were often displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge. For reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burned at the stake.

Hanged, drawn and quartered - Wikipedia
 
He kills his ex-lover’s new boyfriend, kidnaps and rapes her, shoots at her 6-year-old son and a police officer. Too bad the cops didn’t kill him when they had the chance.


He plays the appeals game for years and gets a stay with the support of Justice Kennedy. His latest ploy is to complain that a lethal injection will cause him pain due to a congenital condition.


In a decision that exposed stark divisions among the justices on the death penalty, the court ruled 5-4 that Bucklew had failed to present enough evidence to pursue his request to be executed by lethal gas. The court’s five conservatives were in the majority and its four liberals dissented.

Referring to the history of capital punishment, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s majority that “the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death - something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.”

Does that mean that states are now free to reinstate electric chairs, gas chambers, hanging, or even firing squads?


We can only hope.


More @ Death row inmates not guaranteed 'painless' execution, U.S. Supreme Court says | Reuters


He should have been hanged 20 years ago. Stop the insanity!
Capital punishment is state sponsored murder. How can anyone who even claims to be a Christian, like most Trump voters, believe it is moral for the state to pay a stranger to inject a prisoner strapped to a gurney with poison? Can you imagine Jesus saying he was cool with that? And we know for a fact states who use capital punishment have higher homicide rates than states who do not...and countries that have capital punishment, with only Japan as the exception, have much much higher murder rates than those who do not. So it is not a deterrent, in fact, it may be just the opposite. Remember how Ted Bundy killed a bunch of people in Washington, a state with little or not capital punishment, to move to Florida to continue his killing, a state with the second highest rate of capital punishment? If the death penalty was that big a deterrent would he have done that?

And as far as torturing people, only a sadistic loser would suggest that. That is how they treat murderers and even thieves in Muslim countries, maybe you would be happier there knowing murderers are put to death in very painful ways. What a sick little puppy you must be to get off on the pain of others, even miserable human beings who have committed such awful heinous crime. Only God can punish such people the right way, and those who would torture him here are no better morally than he is.

Sorry, but for some crimes 3 hots and a cot for the rest of a person's life isn't a sufficient punishment.
For others it's a fate worse than death.

Usually that type of person doesn't commit a murder worthy of the death penalty.

My brother is a DA, and his view is many career criminals see prison as either a part of paying the bill, or not that bad of an alternative if they do get life.
 
Sorry, but for some crimes 3 hots and a cot for the rest of a person's life isn't a sufficient punishment.

I disagree.

Life in prison is not living, it’s being alive. A big difference.

Given the choice, I’d rather they take me out and be done with it.

That's you. For someone who has been in and out of the prisons for a long time, someone with gang affiliations and cred in the system, it probably is something they get used to, or even thrive in.

You have to get inside their heads, and outside of yours. Of course as a free person you see imprisonment as a horrible thing, for someone who has been in and out of it their whole life, it's probably just the cost of doing business.
 
He kills his ex-lover’s new boyfriend, kidnaps and rapes her, shoots at her 6-year-old son and a police officer. Too bad the cops didn’t kill him when they had the chance.


He plays the appeals game for years and gets a stay with the support of Justice Kennedy. His latest ploy is to complain that a lethal injection will cause him pain due to a congenital condition.


In a decision that exposed stark divisions among the justices on the death penalty, the court ruled 5-4 that Bucklew had failed to present enough evidence to pursue his request to be executed by lethal gas. The court’s five conservatives were in the majority and its four liberals dissented.

Referring to the history of capital punishment, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s majority that “the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death - something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.”

Does that mean that states are now free to reinstate electric chairs, gas chambers, hanging, or even firing squads?


We can only hope.


More @ Death row inmates not guaranteed 'painless' execution, U.S. Supreme Court says | Reuters


He should have been hanged 20 years ago. Stop the insanity!
Capital punishment is state sponsored murder. How can anyone who even claims to be a Christian, like most Trump voters....


Stopped reading here, the stupid was too strong.
 
This post alludes to the larger question.

Is the death penalty cruel and unusual?

I am conflicted on the subject. On the one hand I think some people deserve killing, such as rapists and murderers. On the other I know that there have been innocent people put to death.

And I'm not sure the death penalty itself is cruel and unusual but I am pretty sure the isolation of those sentenced to death for what can amount to decades is cruel and unusual punishment.

As with most questions of this magnitude there is a very large gray area.
 
So here's the thing: there is a significant cadre of motherfukkers in the American Legal Community who simply want to abolish the Death Penalty. But unfortunately for them, the Constitution TWICE refers with affection to people being deprived of their LIFE (i.e., executed), provided that they are accorded "due process of law." So the argument that the death penalty is simply a "cruel and unusual" form of punishment, per se, and hence prohibited by the Eighth Amendment simply won't work, given the aforesaid authorization of the death penalty in the Constitution itself.

And chances of abolition by Constitutional Amendment are nil, since most Americans want it. Hell, we'd like them to be televised.

So what these oppositional MFers do more or less constantly is to make specious arguments in individual cases that THIS PARTICULAR type of execution is Constitutionally defective - not ALL executions, just THESE executions. This type of injection or this type of gas chamber, or this type of water torture...whatever. It is all horse-shit, of course, but the anti-DP folks have a lot of supporters in the court system, so THEY pretend that the arguments are NOT horse-shit, and we have this steady stream of appeals on the various forms of execution that the various states come up with.

You may recall from High School that when the guillotine was invented in 1789, it was presented as quite a humane method of execution. And in fact, it has a lot going for it. It is quick, definitive (wouldn't even need a doctor around to confirm that the executee is dead), and painless (no one has ever complained about the discomfort). And I'm sure there would be no problem finding people who are willing to "flip the switch."

Now is the time. Guillotine!
 

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