I am an advocate of capital punishment, but only when the crime is especially heinous, and only when the guilt of the defendant is beyond dispute. Jack Ruby, for example, was guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald: he did it on national TV. The crime Carruthers was tried for was certainly worthy of the death penalty: he was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of three people. If his lawyer is to be believed however—and she has an obvious bias—the case against her client was weak.
However, DeLiberato’s brief is supposed to be about the intrinsic cruelty of an imperfect execution method, not unjust convictions. Life imprisonment of an innocent man is also an ethical abomination. After warping the discussion by focusing on her client’s alleged innocence, the lawyer spends paragraph after paragraph describing her client’s agony and the difficulties doctors had finding a vein.
My view of that issue: it is anti-death penalty zealots like DeLiberato who are responsible for all the complications involved in lethal injections. A bullet to the head is virtually infallible, quicker and cheaper than the baroque process of death by injection, which has been litigated into absurdity. In India at one time, a condemned man had his head crushed like a grape by a trained elephant. Instant and painless! Again, the lawyer’s case is deliberately misleading. She is attacking the death penalty by indicting a needlessly complicated and fallible system. Would she approve of a more certain and efficient execution system any more than the one Tennessee mishandled? No, she opposes all executions, and the fact that botched executions happen occasionally has nothing to do with her position. Ironically, the failed execution of her client worked to his benefit: he’s still alive, and Maria has a year to try to save him. What’s she complaining about?
I have written before about executions that cause more pain than they are supposed to. My reaction: Gee, that’s too bad, but I don’t care enough to lose any sleep over it. The criminals who deserve the death penalty should be executed efficiently, but if they aren’t, they are the ones who took lives and who have forfeited the right to live in a civilized society. They also have earned whatever pain their just elimination causes them.
“For 90 Minutes, I Watched an Execution Go Horribly Awry” begins by raising the uncontroversial issue of wrongful prosecutions. It moves on to attacking the death penalty because it might be icky in isolated examples of executions gone wrong, but it is the fact of incompetent executioners and flawed methods in such cases, not the death penalty itself, that is the real issue. This is dishonest analysis. When capital punishment is proven for an appropriate crime and the execution is carried out properly, capital punishment serves societal needs and is both moral and ethical.
Ethics Alarms 
What is the agony of the doctors not being able to find a vein? My doctor’s office tried for 20 minutes trying to find a vein to draw blood. After the third stick she decided she needed help from the RN who could not pierce the vein because it kept “rolling under” – whatever that means. Even the RN could not get the blood and I was sent elsewhere to get the sample. The point is that there was no agony. just a couple of extra pinches and a small bruise.
I hold the same position as you regarding the death penalty. Perhaps this should be extended to politicians indirectly cause death by giving CDL licenses to people who cannot speak English – which is a violation of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act – so they can plow into cars in a work zone and kill 5 and injure scores more. Take that Kathy Hochul. If that does not work I hope the families sue New York state for hundreds of millions of dollars for each of those killed and injured by their woke political calculus.
This point of objection has been mentioned times here at EA, but I don’t understand it. How does reading, even speaking, English factor into illiterates/mutes plowing into cars in a work zone killing and injuring? It seems to me that if I see something in front of me I slow down or go around without reading. Too, most of the world uses 0-9 glyphs and base 10 counting. It stretches my imagination thin to believe that some random dude from India can’t read 45(other countries have similar speed limit signs to ours) or see that there are cars ahead for which he must slow down.
“How does reading, even speaking, English factor”
Because not all road signs are fixed signs, like flashing construction signs warning of rolling construction work over a hill or around a blind turn in the road that can’t be seen before it is too late to slow down.
many, many years of medical practice. When the peripheral approach to establsihing intravenous ACCESS is difficult or impossible ( usually due to prior drug abuse) THEN ONE CAN ALWAYS GAIN ACCESS WITH A CENTRAL LINE THROUGH THE LARGE NECK VEINS OR THE FEMORAL VEIN. ONE CAN ALSO INJECT DIRECCTLY INTO THE HEART.
DEXTER HAS A UNIQUE APPRAOCH WHICH NEVER FAILS.
however, the bullet headshot is the msot efficient, seee THE AMERICAN SNIPER
Unfortunately, legislated interference is a becoming an effective way to get your way politically, even when you lose on the main issue.
Death penalty legal? Make it impossible to acquire the drugs to perform injections, rule any form of discomfort as cruel and unusual, allow seemingly infinite appeals…
The same is done with many other issues. Don’t like legal gun ownership? Have waiting periods, magazine limits, bump stock bans. Abortion? Mandate ultrasounds or counseling, waiting periods, etc.
There’s no such thing as settled law when opponents are always nipping around the edges.
From Page 1:
“Carruthers pre-sets the dial to sympathy”
I think you meant DeLiberato.
-Jut
Sure did. Rats. Fixed. Thanks.