The movement started in 1789, with the introduction of the guillotine. However, interest in more humane capital punishment is hundreds of years in the making. Meanwhile one traveller visiting Delhi, India, in the 14th Century, reported that elephants had been trained to slice prisoners to pieces using blades attached to their tusks. In ancient Persia, there was “schapism”, in which the victim was sandwiched between two rowing boats – one on top of the other, with the person’s arms and legs sticking out – then covered in milk and honey and left to be eaten alive by vermin. From drowning people in sacks with animals, to pulling out their lungs through their backs, humankind seemed to have no shortage of imaginative ideas – and few moral qualms about enacting them. It’s safe to say the lethal injection is in crisis.įor thousands of years, execution was a spectacle to be relished by the public. As a result, several executions have been botched, including one in which the man reportedly took two hours and 640 gasps before he died. Now an ongoing shortage of execution drugs has led some states to experiment with alternatives. If you step back, you might say we’ve just moved away from visually brutal methods of killing people.” Though the majority of Americans agree with the death penalty, very few think that it should hurt. “What one comes away with based on the data is this very, very disturbing conclusion that the mechanism of death was suffocation,” he says. There was no research or testing of any kind.įurther research revealed one of the drugs, which was supposed to stop the heart, wasn’t working. But it might not be quite as peaceful as it looks. To this day, the method is the first choice in every US state where capital punishment is legal. Minutes later, a doctor said “I pronounce this man dead.” One witness to Brooks' death said that he simply yawned and heaved his stomach. The lethal injection was hailed as kinder and more technologically advanced, with no blood and no screaming. It regularly set hair on fire, leading guards to stash extinguishers nearby, just in case. It was so violent, sometimes the victim’s eyeballs would pop out and rest on their cheeks. It was 1982 and this was the first time the lethal injection had been used to kill a criminal in the United States.īefore this pioneering moment, the nation’s favourite mode of execution was the electric chair, which is today widely regarded as torture. Instead, his final moments were spent in the death chamber at a Texas prison. The man could have been a hospital patient. He had an intravenous line in one arm and doctors hovered nearby. He was lying on a white stretcher, dressed head-to-toe in typical 80s fashion, including gold pants and a shirt with all the buttons open. Then Charles Brooks Jr – a convicted murderer – looked away from his girlfriend and felt death creep in. His last words were “I love you”, followed by a Muslim prayer.
Warning: This story contains details about methods of execution that some readers may find distressing.
0 kommentar(er)
