Being anti-death penalty is literally the easiest stance ever. People just say "but should the state kill THIS type of person?" and you just say "no". Not killing people is so fucking easy actually
Failing at critical thinking by dint of being ignorant of the magical Kill Only The Bad People Who Deserve It And Nobody Else button that we have. Apparently
It goes like this:
Okay, let's say that these people mentioned *do* deserve to die, just for the sake of argument.
Who gets to decide that they do? Who actually genuinely has the right to make the final decision, specifically?
Is it the judge? Is it the lawmakers? It can't be you. It can't be a case by case basis where you get input, this is being carried out by the state.
Do you trust those people to never ever get it wrong? Do you trust the state?
If you do trust them, you aren't paying attention to literally anything that has ever happened in this or any country.
If you don't trust them, you must shift your stance to oppose the death penalty because a circumstance where an innocent person is killed is unacceptable.
Peeling back the curtain, yeah, my personal feelings are that there *are* people who should stop being alive. I don't think that's a good thought for me to have, but I have it.
And I don't trust the fucking state, or myself, or judge, or a panel of people, or ANYONE to be able to, with ZERO false positives, make that determination. No one, no one, NO ONE has the right to make that call because no one can always get it right.
So I oppose the death penalty even though, yeah, my gut reaction is that certain people who have severely harmed others and will do so again should be killed. But the death penalty is wrong. For even a single innocent person to die is a moral failing, an unacceptable loss. There is not and never will be a way to administer that fairly and perfectly.
You must oppose the death penalty. It is your moral duty.
I become very uncomfortable with "Just kill anyone who's a pedophile" when there are ongoing efforts to have the act of me (a man) kissing my husband where children can see get labeled as pedophilia.
It's not that these people want to make public displays of non-straightcis romantic feelings punishable by death. They just want them labeled as being this other thing that's (under 'kill all pedos' laws) already punishable by death. Completely different.
Hey guess what!
Lethal injection protocols with three drugs (which is most of them) are designed to give the appearance of a clean medical death without suffering. The truth is:
Many states use midazolam as their first drug to “induce sedation.” Midazolam is not physically capable of maintaining unconscious deep enough to overcome agonizing pain! It also has a “ceiling effect” meaning that it literally cannot do any more after a certain point, as it bonds to GABA receptors(?) and you only have so many! Despite many doctors testifying, briefing, and submitting affidavits to this effect, the Supreme Court ruled it was okay.
Why was it okay? Well, the inmates had to demonstrate that they would definitely be tortured to death and then they have to propose in detail an alternative method of execution (what???). But they don’t have that evidence because the second drug is a paralytic that acts to ensure that the body cannot move no matter what pain it’s in. It literally only gives the appearance of a peaceful sleep without really doing anything to help the execution.
Both the second and third drug are horrendously painful.
The huge overdose of drugs introduces chemicals of the wrong pH into the bloodstream. This balances quickly but not before an extremely acidic or caustic fluid goes through the lungs. Most inmates lungs in autopsies after executions are filled with fluid and froth and show signs of struggles to breathe. Literally the drugs dissolve their lung tissue and drown them while they are conscious (because midazolam does not keep them unconscious) and paralyzed.
Placing IVs frequently goes wrong because medical professionals rarely participate, this being wildly against the Hippocratic oath. This results in drug delivery constantly going wrong, creating huge blister-like bubbles full of drugs in people’s joints or muscles.
Drug companies refuse to supply medications, meaning prisons use huge cash transactions with dubious compounding pharmacies whose names are kept secret by special state laws or just on the black market. Or they lie when they buy the drugs.
Independent reviews are nonexistent. Reviews are often prohibited by those same secrecy laws, which many states have specifically to protect the fiascos that are state executions.
There’s a reason inmates literally beg for the electric chair. At least then it only takes five minutes to die, not twenty. Not forty. Not three hours.
If I were ever sentenced to death, I would opt for firing squad. Fastest. Probably least painful. And it’s a horrible look for the correctional center. Let them live with the guilt personally.
I’m a pacifist but I am not necessarily what you would call “chill about it.”
Time to share Justice Blackmun's dissent from Callins v. Collins (1994) again:
"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored—indeed, I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor.
Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.
It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question—does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die?—cannot be answered in the affirmative.
It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, see, for example, Arave v. Creech (1993), relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, see, for example, Johnson v. Texas, (1993), and vital judicial review to be blocked, see, for example, Coleman v. Thompson, (1991).
The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution."
