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Saturday, August 18, 2018

Fentanyl, Nitrogen Gas, Firing Squad: Why States Are Adopting New, and Reviving Old, Execution Methods

As states struggle to obtain traditional lethal injection drugs, some are turning to new methods of execution, or reviving old ones, as a backup.

Death penalty opponents were horrified on Tuesday when Nebraskabecame the first state in the union to carry out an execution using the painkiller fentanyl, which has been a driving force of the deadly opioid epidemic.

Some critics objected to the use of “a drug that’s currently ravaging our communities and killing thousands of Americans a year,” as Democratic New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson put it on Twitter. Others, like American Civil Liberties Union attorney Brian Stull, argued that the lethal protocol for Carey Dean Moore’s death was “cruel and unusual punishment” since the state paralyzed him before injecting the fentanyl, making it harder to know if Moore felt pain.

Nebraska's unprecedented move is part of a broader pattern of states turning to new methods of execution, or reviving old ones, as a backup. This is happening because more and more of the companies producing and supplying traditional lethal injection drugs want to keep their products from being used for capital punishment.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How is this even a QUESTION????? Many of these death row candidates guilty of killing people, by lethal injection of what they sell at some time or another! How is this not the perfect storm for the perpetrator?

And I'm a big fan of public hangings and firing squads, but this may even be better.

Anonymous said...

Is there real a nice and usual way to kill someone. Seriously, very few men are on death row because they were upstanding citizens. They're there because they're the scum of the Earth.
The only reason I dislike the death penalty is that it takes do many years and hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money to do it. It's much cheaper just to put them in jail for life.

Anonymous said...

gilotine

Anonymous said...

Firing squad, painless, just ask them. Hanging, painless, just ask them. Electric chair, painless, just ask them. Drugs were a bad choice for painless executions. It takes too long for them to die, and will always be accused of being cruel. Death should be quick, and shouldn't take 27 minutes to obtain. Boom, done, now go ask them if it hurt.