[nerve touch warning: Anti-death penalty rhetoric follows]Helen may not like the discussion of rape, but I have my own bete noir.
wwh opined that the (US) government should use carbon monoxide to carry out executions. Well it had to be the US, didn't it? No one else in the semi-civilised world is executing people anymore. The Arab countries do a lot of it, of course. But I did qualify "world", didn't I? Here are some very, very American reasons (to my way of thinking) why they wouldn't use carbon monoxide to execute the guilty and innocent alike with such gay abandon:
It'd take too long. You couldn't have the executions taking two hours. It's simply not sound-bite material. The prison governor or whoever needs to be able to come out within a few minutes and say "Hey, we did it again!". There's no rope, no drop and jerk, no needles, no electrodes, no clouds of potassium cyanide gas rising from the little can under the chair, no hiss as the pellets hit the water, no crackle as the power hits the electrodes, no
visibile and audible punishment. Justice and injustice alike being seen to be done, and all that.
The outcome: The witnesses at the execution - and by extension the rest of the nation - wouldn't get their vicarious buzz. And there must be one, since the majority of Americans seem to accept the death penalty. The prison employees wouldn't get to feel all virtuous and wouldn't be able to say things afterwards like "S/he wasn't such a bad person, but we simply carry out the sentence of the court". There's no pizzazz or razzamatazz in that kind of execution. No drama. No proactivity. No market. No potential television rights. And McDonald's, that other great killer of people the world over, wouldn't buy the advertising rights if it were possible. All of which won't be very far away now that the former Governor of Texas is the President, and the President is currently riding on a surge of popularity.
Oh, I suppose you could colour the carbon monoxide, but the Supreme Court might see that as a cruel and unusual punishment and we couldn't have the death machine stopped, now could we? The moral majority would never stand for it, and think of all the unemployment it would create. Why, Huntsville in Texas might have to lose its McDonalds, it being the busiest of the death factories in the land of the free. And that could
never be allowed. You can't have an insignificant thing like people's lives standing between a hamburger and its consumer, can you?
Besides, the FDA might never approve the colouring agent. Could turn out to be dangerous to the health ...
And worst of all in a way, no students on a journalism course would get to prove how nearly all of the executions carried out in one state for the past umpteen years had been miscarriages of justice. And one was one too many however you look at it.
Better to have no executions, eh? Especially since your (in)justice system seems so ready to condemn the wrong people and to do it with such consistent regularity ...
[/rant]
