Most death row inmates agree. Hence why they try to appeal. Admittedly, there are death row convicts who choose to get it over with instead for various reasons. But that has more to do with the harsh conditions that come with being a death row inmate specifically. Being on death row for decades is a special kind of hell even worse than regular life imprisonment.
So not only are they sentenced to die, they spend the rest of their lives stuck in even worse prison conditions than the lifers.
Edited by M84 on Feb 15th 2023 at 8:07:24 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedYeah, uh, that's one of the problems with the death penalty, especially in the US.
You get executed...but you also get a very extended period of time in shitty conditions and sometimes people croak before they get executed, in part because it takes so goddamn long. It's also why the death penalty is so expensive to have around. So, in many cases, the death penalty is also life imprisonment without chance of parole. For decades.
IMO, I'm for rehabilitative justice where prisons are intended as basically, long-term therapy and vocational training and people deemed too dangerous to be put back into society are treated well, they're just never allowed to re-enter the general population. Punitive justice is obviously a failure.
Edited by Zendervai on Feb 15th 2023 at 8:51:25 AM
Yep, solitary confinement and uncertainty about when or if the state is going to execute you. Followed by the actual execution in cases where the death sentence was not overturned or something.
It's basically two punishments at once.
Edited by M84 on Feb 15th 2023 at 10:07:27 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedI want to note that solitary confinement is so bad that the fucking Puritans thought it was horrifying and so inhumane that even the worst possible criminal they could imagine didn't deserve it, because the result usually was someone who was totally incapable of repenting or even really understanding what they did.
And if the Puritans, who abandoned some of their children in the Netherlands for the crime of learning Dutch, thought solitary confinement was that bad, maybe we shouldn't encourage it like this.
Edited by Zendervai on Feb 15th 2023 at 9:08:14 AM
The appeals process can also make the wait on death row even longer since it takes such a long time. Meaning attempts to try to get out of the death penalty result in even longer stays on death row. Small wonder that some inmates eventually just give up on appeals.
Edited by M84 on Feb 15th 2023 at 10:12:43 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedAlso, to be extremely morbid, life without parole gives the prisoner the option to die if they'd rather not spend the foreseeable future in prison, while the death penalty takes away that choice.
Neither are particularly good options outside of a few edge cases obviously.
(Dictatorships like the death penalty for shows of force, its only real use-case, and life no parole may be a good idea in very specific circumstances, like compulsive murder.)
They're severely different, though.
Death Penalty means a person is no longer alive at all. They also have to suffer quite severely on Death Row for a long time before ever getting a release(or do it themselves). They're basically being tortured. And come a botched killing attempt, and it gets even worse. This is not really the same for Life without Parole at all.
Life without parole is still bad, but they're not automatically put in solitary confinement, and the treatment isn't always going to be horrible either. The fact they can still be treated humanely makes it automatically not only different, but better overall.
They're... nothing alike. Beyond the fact both will always suck(as it stands. The latter option can be improved, since it doesn't involve killing someone. You can't improve the Death Penalty. Like, it's not possible. It's inherently inhumane by design). Which means nothing, really.
Shadow?I should note that solitary isn't the only thing that makes death row worse. Death row inmates are also denied access to some of the few amenities regular prisoners get. No education programs, greatly reduced visits, little to no exercise, etc.
They're basically treated by the system as dead people walking. Or not walking, given they don't get much chance to work out and do cardio.
Disgusted, but not surprisedAnd it downplays how horrible the Death Penalty really is by even remotely comparing it to Life Imprisonment. No, we don't have a Death Penalty like that. They're massively different.
It's apples to oranges and a poor comparison. Also, that. You're treated like you still have a life overall with life without parole. That's a key difference. There's no inherent death involved. It's not a penalty that must have death. It really makes no sense to give it that kind of comparison when they're not even similar, again, beyond both being sucky situations. Even the terminology alone is highly contradictory. What you're saying really makes no sense.
![]()
That one I couldn't remember. Yeah, the fact you're still treated like you have some kind of life in general is a major deal. If you're on death row, you're more or less unpersoned as much as they can(hence why it's easy to justify torture towards a person. They don't exist anymore, right? They're not a human by that point, but some pile of trash we can do whatever we want with).
Once that gets abolished in the US(it'll come someday), we'll finally be rid of that awful system and have nothing close to it currently. Though I can imagine they might try to find another punishment outright equivalent, but whether or not that'd ever be let through is another story.
Shadow?Alabama inmate Kenneth Allen Smith has been put to death via nitrogen gas, the first in over 25-ish years.
45 52 52 4f 52 3a 20 49 6e 76 61 6c 69 64 20 73 79 6e 74 61 78 20 65 72 72 6f 72I'm not sure where you're getting that idea? The article's entire summary of the execution itself: "Media witnesses said he appeared conscious for several minutes into the execution, and then he appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney for two minutes. That was followed by several minutes of deep breaths until his breathing slowed and it was no longer perceptible to media witnesses."
That's... fairly mild, honestly. People executed by lethal injection have been seen visibly gasping for breath before they die. Reports on this case seem to be inconsistent on whether Smith was unconscious during the movements, but the prison officials said afterward that they were an expected and normal side effect of nitrogen hypoxia. Said official also said that Smith appeared to be holding his breath, which would prolong consciousness and could possibly cause the kind of distress that nitrogen asphyxiation is intended to avoid. (Humans cannot detect a lack of oxygen, only a buildup of CO 2, so breathing something with no oxygen in it won't trigger a sensation of suffocation but not breathing at all will.)
Ultimately — separately from whether you support the death penalty in any form — nitrogen asphyxiation seems to be the most humane method of execution, and this case seems to bear that out.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Physically, I will imagine the most human way would be to drug the executed first before killing him in his sleep to avoid pain.
But this won't solve the problem of psychological terror that the condemned face while waiting for the day of his execution (in some countries, at least, he won't be informed beforehand of the day of execution, so he will wake up every day wondering if this is the one).
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt![]()
![]()
All of those are much easier to botch than nitrogen asphyxiation, and will cause extreme pain if death is not instant. One of the things you have to take into account is real-world conditions. Even lethal injection has had problems where the IV needles were difficult to insert or inserted improperly, and they typically use a cocktail of multiple drugs which must be administered in a specific order in order to have the desired effects, which leads to bad outcomes when everything isn't done correctly.
One of the benefits of nitrogen asphyxiation is that it's extremely simple. Affix mask. Feed nitrogen into mask. That's it, that's the whole procedure. The worst case scenario is that they don't get pure nitrogen and (depending on how much oxygen they are getting), either they never lose consciousness at all (at which point the execution has failed and they need to try again) or they still fall unconscious but it takes longer for them to actually die than it would from pure nitrogen. There's no pain during any part of the procedure, even if the procedure is botched.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Nitrogen asphyxiation, done properly, results in unconsciousness within a few seconds. At that point it doesn't matter that it might take another 10 minutes to confirm death — as far as the condemned is concerned, they're no longer suffering.
As far as "the acute fear, struggle and the anticipation of death"... that's going to happen regardless of execution method, so I'm not sure why you bring it up? I'm not sure why "strapped to a gurney waiting for someone to put a mask on you" is worse than "stood up in front of a firing squad", "being put into a guillotine", or "having a noose put around your neck on the gallows".
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I have literally not once in my life considered which one I would rather get rid of first, that is a completely separate thought from me thinking one is worse than the other.