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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Why is executing or euthanizing someone so complicated? For example lethal injection has been called a painful

... a painful way to go. And why use Dr. Kevorkians suicide machine? Why can't people just be put to sleep with carbon monoxide? Many people have effectively, painlessly, and peacefully done themselves in by this method. This method would also be very inexpensive.
Answer:
People react to everything differently.Carbon Monoxide Poisoning is not always peaceful. It's just more pleasant for the families to hear that then " They started sizureing, they started vomiting,.. then their bovels went".Euthanization works better,.. it's more predictable then Carbon Monoxide.Leather injection is probably painful because you get to feel all that pain from your muscles going haywire,.. not like you can't with the others,.. it's just guareented.
Bullets work too. And they're cheap.I saw a program once on the learning channel or something about lethal injection - it said that it costs something like $100,000 to execute someone by lethal injection.
Lethal injection is not a significant punishment in my opinion. There are 3 different drugs injected. First is something that makes the felon go to sleep. Second is a paralyzing agent that restricts muscle activity so that the felon stops breathing. The third drug causes the heart to stop and eventually kills the guy. Sounds like a nice peaceful way to die. I think for a lethal injection we should inject about a pint of gasoline and then watch the guy die. That would be a much better deterrent than the normal way it's done now.
I look at this like this. I don't care how painful it is. I have never known of anyone being murdered painlessly. It always involves rape and murder or gunshots or beatings or something else that causes severe pain and suffering so I personally think we should have a death penalty that causes a lot more suffering than it does. I think the same thing should happen to the prisoner that he or she did to the person they murdered...beat to death, raped and murdered, etc.
Lethal injection is actually pretty cheap and probably painless. It consists of Potassium, Sodium Pentethol, and Versed. The Versed should keep you from understanding what's going on.
Firstly, carbon monoxide isn't at all a nice a way to die, CO poisoning causes severe pain and requires high levels to be effective as it destroys the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. Most people who suicide using gas are actually dying from oxygen deprivation - the car exhaust has a low concentration of O2 which causes them to lose conciousness and then die.Lethal injection as used in the USA as capital punishment uses three chemicals injected sequentially - the killing agent is potassium chloride (KCl) which in a sufficient dose causes cardiac arrest and death. Conversely, veterinarians generally use lethal doses of barbiturate anesthetic to cause rapid unconciousness and death.Finally the reason that it (human euthanasia) is so complicated is because it is a big step to take, with significant moral and ethical debate in the community. A large proportion of people are opposed to capital punishment as a punishment, and generally an entirely different group are opposed to voluntary euthanasia, and in fact in most western countries neither are in legal use.As for the expense of executions - most of the expense in capital punishment cases is due to the drawn out nature of the court process and the cost of keeping the prisoner in maximum security prisons or remand centres for long periods of time - it regularly takes 10+ years to bring about an execution. Compared to the American system of capital punishment, life imprisonment would almost always be cheaper and certainly less controversial, and as an added bonus would deprive the prisoner of ongoing public attention.
the method involved here is not the primary problem in euthanizing or executing some body is not the primary complication; actually what is complicated is the procedure for choosing the man to be executed or euthanized which are two entirely different things.
the former involves a legal process in most civilized societies with which we might not always agree( e,g,saddam's death sentence) but usually there is a due process . so it is the moral implications of the decision with which people are so uncomfortable-
1: do we have the right to take another human being's life?
2: does it achieve its avowed purpose?
3: does it put society on the same position of a lynching mob?
4: does society have a role in the crime it is so ostensibly punishing and so on.... so actually the method is merely a technicality( of course not to the person being executed of course).
Euthanasia is on an even more slippery gorund as it involves the assisted killing of a person whom the society does not judge as guilty but the person himself precieves his life as not worth living due to severe physical illness. now, this means
1: some body is making the decision that life is not worth living and this raises deep disturbing questons in our society which traditionally values life so much
2: there are socio religious connotations especialy in the context of the judeo-christian-islamic thinking
3: reverses the role of the physician which is usually a life giver not a taker
4: modalities are not fixed if the person is mens rea
for the decision and so on.... so the problem here is much more cmplicated as most of these points can be extensively debated; and are far from being even partially resolved. other wise painless easy killing is within the armamarium of most anaesthesiologists today!
Carbon monoxide isn't necessarily painless, and it isn't very reliable. The methods used are basically those of surgical anesthesia, just taken a bit farther, and, I think, followed by an injection of potassium chloride to stop the heartbeat. At least that's my understanding.

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