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Screams, Flames Among Horrors of Botched US Executions
WASHINGTON — US executions are meant to be clinical and humane, but for some they end up resembling medieval torture, complete with the smell of burning flesh, screams, and scenes so gruesome that witnesses faint.
Signs against the death penalty are seen in front of the Supreme Court in Washington DC in 2008. (AFP image) "We put animals to death more humanely," reporter Carla
McClain said of a 1992 execution she witnessed, in which Donald Eugene
Harding writhed and thrashed in an Arizona gas chamber for over 10
minutes before dying.
Last month, Romell Brown became only the second man to leave a US execution chamber alive, after 18 failed attempts to administer the lethal injection.
Authorities in Ohio decided to halt his execution after officials spent two hours trying to inject him with lethal chemicals.
Many of those executed in the United States in the last 25 years were not so lucky, suffering through executions in which flesh caught on fire, blood saturated shirts, and witnesses watched and listened as the condemned convulsed and screamed with pain.
In 1999, Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw reacted with horror to pictures of Allen Lee Davis, who was put to death by electric chair.
"The color photos of Davis depict a man who -- for all appearances -- was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida," Shaw wrote.
Davis had been strapped into an electric chair especially designed to fit his 350-pound frame. As he was electrocuted, but before he was pronounced dead, blood poured from his mouth, soaking his white shirt and oozing through the buckle holes of the strap holding him down.
Michael Radelet, a professor at the University of Colorado, worked with the Death Penalty Information Center to collect testimony on more than 40 botched instances from the witnesses required to be present at executions.
Horror stories have emerged about all the execution methods commonly used in the United States, including the electric chair, lethal injection and gas chamber, with most of the disasters due to human error.
In 1983 in Alabama, a first jolt of electricity caused the electrode attached to John Evans' leg to catch fire. Smoke and sparks also came from under the hood placed over his head, near where an electrode was strapped to his left temple.
A second jolt was administered, but despite the smoke and smell of burning flesh, doctors discovered Evans' heart was still beating and applied a third jolt that finally killed him after 14 minutes.
Two years later, in Indiana, William Vandiver received five separate jolts of electricity over the course of 17 minutes before his heart stopped.
Jesse Joseph Tafero was sentenced to death by electric chair in Florida in 1990, but a synthetic sponge that was used during his execution caught fire, causing six-inch flames to erupt from his head.
Sentenced to death by gas chamber in Mississippi in 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray had the misfortune to be put to death by an executioner who later admitted he was drunk. Gray's gasps and moans so horrified observers that the witness room was cleared by officials.
In recent years, several lawsuits have challenged the lethal injection as "cruel," but it continues to be used by most US states practicing the death penalty and the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 2008.
But for Bennie Demps, who spent 33 minutes of agony as execution technicians tried to find a back-up vein that could support an alternate intravenous drip in case the first one failed, the pain was excruciating.
"They butchered me back there. I was in a lot of pain. They cut me in the groin, they cut me in the leg. I was bleeding profusely. This is not an execution, it is murder," he said in his final statement.
In Angel Diaz's case, in Florida in 2006, a single dose of the lethal cocktails that anesthetize, paralyze and then stop the recipient's heart was not enough. The first injection went through his vein and out the other side, dispersing the chemicals into his muscles, forcing a second dose to be given.
At times, the scenes have been gruesome enough to physically affect observers. In 1989, in Texas, which holds the record for the most US executions, a male witness fainted after watching Stephen McCoy's violent writhing.
Some of the most recent horror stories come from Ohio, where Broom's execution was halted.
"It don't work! It don't work," yelled a sobbing Joseph Clark in May 2006, as the vein that executioners had worked 22 minutes to find collapsed while the chemicals were being administered.
A year later, Ohio authorities took two hours to successfully find veins and administer Christopher Newton the lethal injection. The process took so long, he was authorized to take a bathroom break.
The only other person to have survived execution in the United States was young black man named Willie Francis who survived a Louisiana electric chair in the 1940s. He was later put to death on a second attempt.
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44 Comments so far
Show AllUntil the human race becomes a lot more perfect and fair in jurisprudence, and devises a foolproof way to execute (the guillotine was probably one of the more humane methods), we should stop killing people. One only has to look at the records of those executed in the United States, particularly the south, to see how bigoted our jurisprudence is. We could start by gathering juries from OUTSIDE the areas where the alleged crimes were committed. Even better, the trials should be held outside the areas. Furthermore, the racial and sexual mix of juries should reflect the race and sex of the person(s) being tried. This business of an all white male jury sitting in judgement on a black man or woman has to stop if we expect to have anything resembling a fair trial. With computerization, it would be possible to use the entire population of the United States as a pool for selecting a jury, entirely by chance. We do it for lotteries, why not juries? Also, there has to be a way of evening the quality of legal representation. Just because a person can afford a team of the best legal minds should not allow him or her to buy their way out of a fair trial. Or a person should not be represented by inferior legal counsel simply because they cannot afford the best lawyers. Another pool, that of lawyers, comes to mind.
Just as a single payer health care plan is required if all Americans are to receive adequate health care, so should a revised legal system be required if all Americans are to receive a fair trial. These things should have been straightened out decades ago--in any rational democratic society. Too bad the United States is an oligarchy.
IMHO besides being barbaric, the death penalty, when looked at in a critical way is a pretty stupid punishment.
Lets use logic, as painful has it will be for some. If you don't believe in God/an afterlife, then the second the person in question is put to death his sentence is over, done, finished. Any punishment for what he has done is over, period. He is dead there is nothing further you can do to him/her. The person will spend the rest of eternity in what amounts to a dreamless sleep.
On the other hand if this person had to spend the rest of his life in jail he/she would be punished continuously, day after day, every day until the last day of his life.
Now if you believe in God/an afterlife, you were taught that God is all forgiving, so if the person is truly sorry for what he/she had done that person will go to heaven after their execution. They will immediately be dancing with the angels, playing harps, etc. That person will literally get a "get out of jail free" card and will be fast tracked to a blissful afterlife in Heaven.
The other possibility if you are the God fearing type is that if the person being executed is not sorry for what they did then he/she will go to hell to spend the rest of eternity being punished for what they did on Earth. So if that person is going to spend ETERNITY in Hell what is the rush to send him there? What's another 30, 40, or 50 years of being punished on Earth first before an ETERNAL/FOREVER punishment in the afterlife? 50 years on Earth is a long time, but 50 years is but a blink of the eye when you talk of eternal damnation.
If someone has harmed someone else, what good does mindless revenge serve? If there is some kind of afterlife, perhaps "Hell" simply means non-existence. You can torture people for eternity, but for what ends?
Maybe those who support the death penalty share this point of view i.e. they don't want revenge as such, they just want the person gone. Or maybe not. Maybe they think killing the person is the worst punishment there is - given how much they value life.
I don't support the death penalty. If a person isn't allowed to murder, then neither is the state. And, in any case, the state doesn't do the killing - another person does!
Let's take another logical tack with this issue. I think all would agree that some people have, through their own actions, proven that they should never be allowed into the general society again. Some have proven so dangerous that they continue to murder even while in prison. I hope that nearly everyone would agree that these people must be permanently controlled by the state, or irreversibly removed from society. On this basis, even mental health would not be a mitigation to a finding of "permanent removal from society".
Since it is clear that these people can never be trusted in society large or small again, then what shall we do with them, for our own protection? As someone else has pointed out on this page, it seems cruel to confine someone to a cage from age 19 or so until their natural death at 70+ years of age. It is also expensive to do so. Prison labor helps offset some of the cost, but only marginally.
Therefore, given that certain prisoners must never be allowed freedom again, it might be more humane for the prisoner, and much more convenient for the state, to implement a sure method of removing a person from society, either by putting a prisoner to death or removal to a low-cost inescapable prison (there does not exist such a prison today). It might even be possible for the prisoner to have a choice in the matter.
The current methods of execution are all designed to salve the feelings of those watching the proceedings. They are less gruesome than beheading or hanging that served the purpose so well for so long. I submit that such niceties are unnecessary and counter-productive to the ultimate goal of criminal justice. Public executions by one of the more sure, but gory methods might serve as some small deterrent to those considering similar actions.
I am of two minds on this matter. I am generally against executions. The moral burden of taking another's life is tremendous. On the other hand, I believe evidence shows that for every sociopathic killer executed, 2.5 innocent persons will not be murdered. These are choices I wish we did not have to make.
Another thought: if there is an afterlife, no one really harms anyone else - they just harm the body! Life can be very painful for some, but so was being born, and no one remembers that, nor cares how painful it was. Maybe if there is anything after death, life is something that's forgotten, something that will be viewed as completely irrelevant.
Hope I don't attract the atheists - they are too pious for me! I'm agnostic.
Kill, Baby, Kill!!! I love it when one hears slogans that "America is Pro-Life" and that "American is a Compassionate, Forgiving Nation". BUNK! I just read an article in Socialist Worker about Governor Hair of Texas being in deep dodo after executing an innocent man back in 2004. Just another horror story from the Lone Star State. "Capitol Punishment is a Deterrent to Crime" BUNK! "Preserve the Sanctity of Life" Yeah, right. Jesus W. and Alberto G.=152 Texas state murders. The killing continues......
I fail to understand the difficulty in finding a humane way to execute someone. Although opposing capital punishment, I can still see easy, certain, ways to it, and even ways to end suffering for the terminally ill who want a way out. Demerol, a plastic bag and a bit of duct tape come to mind (I would add the Bach G minor mass).
Quite frankly while the beheading of people claimed barbaric it no more barbaric then any of these examples of the "Civilized behaviour" of the United States.
The Death Penalty is not needed by any State.
Beheading is the same as a legal execution? Your values are a bit off on this one. By any stretch of the imagination.
Your bias is showing again.
Beheading is a legal form of execution in some countries.
Done in public in Saudi Arabia, the locals call the place 'chop chop square'.
Your ignorance is showing again.
Are you for real? Beheading IS a legal form of execution in other States. The World does not include the USA and No one else Henry.
In fact three people sentenced to death in Indonesia appealed to the Supreme Court that ISLAMIC law be applied to them and that they be beheaded as they claimed it a more humane form of Capital punishment.
The guillotine (an instrument of beheading) was a legal form of execution through to the 1940s in Germany (aka fallbeils - Nazi records indicate that between 1933 and 1945, 16,500 people were executed in Germany and Austria by fallbeils) and Vietnam. East Germany did not outlaw the guillotine until 1987.
Yes, you ignorance is showing.....again.
The death penalty is just one more example of the hypocrisy of this nation and especially its so-called christians. Sanctity of Life, my a##.
Not only Christians put people to death for crimes and less, including today, and certainly not all Christians in the U.S. are for the death penalty, but you and many others always write in terms condemning everyone who's Christian in the USA, or worldwide. That's another form of bigotry. I'm sure that among the group you favour most, there probably have been death penalty fiends, oppression of women's rights, etcetera.
Surely many of the death penalty fiends in the U.S. aren't Christian. Some may pretend to be, but probably know that they refuse to listen to Jesus. Others are probably KKK or white supremicist, and they're definitely not Christian, albeit some of them can also pretend to be.
What do you want from psychopaths? The U.S. is overfilling with such people and they're not all people who claim to be Christian. The better ones are sociopaths, the others are outright psychopaths, even if it's mostly through supporting psychopathic crimes committed by others; like all the cheerleaders for the GWoT wars, but who wouldn't dawn the uniform and serve in these wars, f.e.
It has nothing to do with being Christian, but everything to do with being psychopathic.
There are only 140,000 Christians in the US; they are called Quakers.
The other self-professed "chistians" are Protestants that was largely invented because of Catholic prohibitions against usury and for charitable works (just like Islam), got in the way of the advancement of Capitalism. All a Protestant needs is Faith whatever that is, and they can then pursue their greed.
Christ repeated the golden rule that was handed to him by Buddha and pre-Socratic Greeks: "Do not do as you would not have others do unto you". Something that the majority of unforgiving American Protestants have never heard.
This is not bigotry. This is reality.
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" - Mohandas Ghandi
Thanks for pointing that out.
The idea that Protestantism was "invented" as a necesary revision to accomodate the rise of Capitalism sort of dawned on me some years ago. The way Protestantism arose at the same time as early capitalism, and the way it rejected "good works" i.e. acts of compassion, replacing it with "faith", ("whatever that is" indeed) seemed entirely too convienient a coincidence. But I've never actually read a serious treatment of the subject. Do you know of any?
pjd412--- check out "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" by Tolstoy for a primer on the molestation of xtianity---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_You
there is a link to the full text on the wiki page--- it is to me what "War Is a Racket" is to many posters on here-
and for further crit.theory/poli-sci/philo. studies... have a look at the work of Ellul.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
many bases covered-
Hey, don't put down the poor puritans, who built this here country. How could they spread us westward without using usury, or killing/converting the Endeans. The Catholics only wanted to enslave em, after they were convereted, and after they built them there beautiful cathedrals. And all the Quakers wanted to do was sit around listening to small voices. Ain't no profit in that.
I'm surprised that there are 140,000 Christians--I mean Quakers--in the United States. It's a good thing there aren't more, or we wouldn't be in the great shape we are now.
LOL.... Your impersonation of a retarded bible-thumpin' southern redneck was hilarious!
Um, it was an impersonation, right?
A technical point, but there is no difference in the diagnostic meaning of socio- vs. psychopath.
Both mean an inability to empathize with the suffering of others. The terms were conflated due to Freud's and others' terminology, and often are mis-described as the technical legal definition of insanity, the inability to tell right from wrong.
But it is a lack of empathy, like a blindness or deafness, that causes human psychopaths to behave as they do (corporations are psychopathic by definition; see The Corporation film, e.g.). Because they cannot empathize, there is no emotional difference to them between say, having a conversation about the weather, and killing and mutilating you. In other words, literally nothing, other than their intellectual assessment of the risks of being penalized by the law, prevents a sociopath/psychopath from doing what may fairly be termed evil. Not all psychopaths commit overt violence, but all will behave in only self-serving ways, because in their solipsism is complete. It is this writer's humble opinion that the majority of our governance are human psychopaths, primarily controlled by and utterly servile to, corporate psychopaths. The rest of us are either sources of financial blood to be drained, or just in the way.
This disease is global, and it will kill humanity as we know it. Perhaps something better will evolve from the smoked radioactive glass-continents and boiled oceans, but it might take a lil' while...
Cheers.
If you really want a death penalty that criminals would fear, it's not that hard, sentence them to die naturally in prison, then be buried in the prison graveyard.
Of course, that's not what the standard death penalty advocates want. They want the executions to be horrific, painful and that succeed at spreading terror amongst the targeted population groups.
"We put animals to death more humanely," reporter Carla McClain said...
No we don't. Most animals in the US are are put to death slowly and painfully. Gas chambers, inexpertly applied "humane killer" and euthasol all mean that the last 10-30 mins of an animal's life is in extreme pain. EXTREME pain.
Most people think small-animal vets (using euthasol) and farmers (using a bullet at close-range) are representative of animal executions. How wrong can you be. The reality is a bored production line worker and a quota of 500 animals to kill before quitting time, and the only tool the worker is equipped with is a pneumatic hammer that frequently jams.
Sheesh, even the well-used expression "putting animals to sleep" is bald-faced spin to make all y'all meat eaters feel absolved.
no noose is good noose.
dead joke walking!
· Yr Obd't Servant
sorry - perhaps I shouldn't joke about such a grave subject.
Perhaps it's best if we back out of this sub-thread before it becomes a dead end.
· Yr Obd't Servant
it needs an injection of humour.
jumpin' jack flash, it's a . . .
deleted duplicate
bligh4
Personally, I am against the death penalty as it is now practiced here in the U.S. Too arbitrary and too delayed.
I'm not going to get too upset though about the executions of the likes of Allen Davis- who beat a pregnant woman to death with his pistol-while he was out on parole-then shot her 9 year old daughter in the face, and chased down and shot her other 5 year old daughter in the head.
Vicious murderers like this need to be sent somewhere that they cannot possibly hurt another person ever again-for life.
Vicious murderers also include the mentally ill. You first have to decide whether the person was in his right mind when he committed the crime. If he was, then "vicious murderer" is the correct term to use.
However, if you drop bombs on the heads of civilians, then, under no circumstances are you a murderer. Or, if you use child labor, or pay your workers so little that their children have to prostitute themselves to survive, you're not a child abuser - you're a successful businessman!
Under the terms of the World Trade Organization agreement, using child labor is perfectly legal, as long as it's "voluntary". We all know that children who work in poor countries are doing it completely voluntarily, of course.
Thank you for your clear insights into the ambiguities of human nature.
When I start to think about things like this nothing seems to make sense.
Except that I feel compassion for all involved.
Do we have to decide whether a killer was "in their right mind"? Our society makes these arbitrary decisions only because of the "option" capitol punishment. If we adopted a policy of cloistering killers (aka put 'em in jail) regardless of their state of mental health, no such arbitrary decisions are required.
In my mind and heart there's just no need to execute people no matter what they have done.
It always ends up on someone's conscious.
So you have another killer in the world even if they are working for the guys in white hats.
It never made sense to me and it never will.
We can lock them away forever.
I don't understood the death penalty.
I am sorry for everyone in a situation like that.
Capital punishment is probably one of the more elusive of all topics. IF a person has committed a crime so heinous that only death will satisfy the collective sense of justice, why bother being 'humane'? Inject an air bubble into a vein and let the beast wrench in agony awaiting death's soothing embrace. Let's not pretend that we care about the feelings of someone who is going to die in a few minutes because he'd wronged another.
And what about "life without the possibility of parole"? This, to me is the most inhumane sentence of all. First, for the family of the victim. Not only have they lost a loved one, but must now pay taxes to keep the perpetrater alive and healthy for life. How many people must face this reality each year, to pay to keep alive the person guilty of wronging us? Second, for the guilty party, to be locked away, nurished, entertained, cared for, but never allowed to roam free....
The most alarming element to capital punishment is the number of people who have been exonerated from death row by new evidence, either DNA or retracted testimony. I'd suggest that for any state that has the 'death penalty' that a law be enacted that mandates that the governor, and only the governor, may perform the execution. The task could not be deligated to any other person or authority. This way, the people could use it as a litmus test for candidates, as well as make the elected official responsible to carry out the people's mandate..... no more need to wait for the last minute appeal to the governor....
Capital punishment is fully compatible with our technobarbaric culture and the amoral Hollow State.
MOST of the world's nation-states are sufficiently civilized to instinctively grasp that capital punishment-- state-sublimated vengeance-- is wrong for any number of reasons.
I never saw the film "Dead Man Walking", but once a co-worker and friend noticed me with the book. She's a good-hearted and generally pleasant person, but she mentioned that she didn't like the movie.
"They kept tryin' to make you feel sorry for the Sean Penn [condemned prisoner] character, and I didn't feel sorry for him at all-- and didn't WANT to!"
I didn't argue about it; that is, after all, what considering the story is ABOUT. I might have noted that in the book, sorrow and victimhood was not a zero-sum quantity, or an either-or. There's plenty to go around.
I suppose that it's too much to hope that this latest person to be "inadvertently" tortured will be spared another attempt on sheer humanitarian grounds.
Incidentally, as Sister Prejean's powerful book discusses, one of the ways in which the state "copes" with its legalized homicide is to reduce and thus trivialize the process down to a series of impersonal procedures and "technical" problems to be solved.
It's obvious to the discerning eye that meticulous considerations such as swabbing the pre-corpse's arm with alcohol is to anaesthetize the killers and their duly authorized enablers-- to sterilize the unseemly traces of Sin that cling to the business.
"Solved"= LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED... antiseptically.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Yes, I can just imagine the executioners going out for a drink afterwards with satisfied citizens and toasting to "All's well that ends well!"
As the Grim Reaper likes to say: some days you bite the scythe, and other days the scythe bites you.
I think we can all agree that the main thing is the main thing is to get Closure-- by hook or by crook! Thus honor is satisfied.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Psychopaths! The executioners and their bosses, and the "legal" system.
Is it not ironic that so many Americans are for WARS, GUNS, and the DEATH PENALTY, and yet claim to be PRO LIFE?
Unfortunately, that pretty much says it all. I feel like making that comment into a poster, or a bumper sticker.
CNN online lead story this morning:
"States Can't Afford Death Penalty, Study Finds...
A new report concludes that states are wasting millions on an inefficient death penalty system, diverting scarce funds from other anti-crime and law enforcement programs. "Thirty-five states still retain the death penalty, but fewer and fewer executions are taking place every year," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "At a time of budget shortfalls nationwide, the death penalty is turning into an expensive form of life without parole."
****
The deterrent effect of capital punishment may be determined by comparing the 2008 regional murder rate per 100k people against the number of executions in that region since 1976:
SOUTH -- murder rate//excutions: 6.6 // 970
WEST -- murder rate//excutions: 4.8 // 67
MIDWEST -- murder rate//excutions: 4.8 // 134
NORTHEAST-- murder rate//excutions: 4.2 // 4
Source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-1996-2008
****
Apologies to the bloodthirsty for confusing this issue with facts.
First off, the majority say yes to the death penalty. So you minorities get used to this.
Second, incompetence does not invalidate a task. Americans are just too uncreative and too impractical to devise a proper execution method. Yet many are available: (1) Blowing the person up with explosives; (2) Dropping a ten ton weight on his head; (3) Heroin OD; (4) Instant head removal; and so on.
Third factor: Life sentence is often rebutted by wacko psychologists, and other nutters. Others prisoners escape. And life sentences are expensive for the taxpayer, who would rather feed his family. A dead man cannot re-offend.
these same folks are against abortion.there's two america's.
one with states like this where the populace feeds on this
and then civilized states where there is life imprisonment.
throw the goobers some red meat and they will never ntice
that they are getting robbed blind! this also lead to a state of blind people as an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind
except the one eyed jack who proclaims himself king.
I am against the death penalty, but if they're going kill people to show that killing people is wrong, there's a perfectly efficient, safe, and painless way to do it.
Killing with kindness - capital punishment by nitrogen asphyxiation
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n17_v47/ai_17374449/?tag=content;col1