How did our criminal justice system get so bad at executions?

[JVS]

Over the last year or so I've heard of several cases of botched executions. This is not a topic that I'm particularly interested in, so I figure if I read about it it's a fairly big story. How is this happening? It's not like there has been any shortage of executions for the prison system to grow rusty or forget what they are doing. Even outside of prisons the police are notorious for killing people with whom they interact upon even the slightest provocation. Perhaps it would be easier for the executioners to forego their cocktail of chemicals and simply tape a plastic gun to the condemned's hands and deliver him to a neighborhood regularly patrolled by the police. Executioners have one job to do and they seem to be fucking up on a regular basis. Why?

[onehandle]

1. The GOP is always looking of the cheapest way to do everything.

Cutting corners creates problems.

[KT2000]

2. the executions were done

with drugs a manufacturer has stopped producing. European pharmaceutical companies cannot pick up the ball because they are not allowed to sell drugs for executions. Now the states are making up their own concoctions to see if they will work. Guess they are hell bent on killing.

[Agnosticsherbet]

3. Meet the woman behind a shortage of execution drugs

Meet the woman behind a shortage of execution drugs
"I don't believe there's such a thing as a humane execution," she said. "We have executions which are lasting 25 minutes, and the prisoner's dying in agony. That for me as a form of 'just' punishment is a contradiction in terms."
In 2011, Foa began researching pentobarbital, the drug most commonly used in U.S. executions.

It was developed to treat epilepsy, but in the high doses used in lethal injections it causes respiratory arrest.

Foa discovered that the only company with approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell pentobarbital in the U.S. was a Danish group called Lundbeck.

[JVS]

5. I'm amazed that our national policies of charging patients through the nose for medication and...

banning consumer imports, great examples of protectionism for the industry, has resulted in a pharmaceutical industry that is not self sufficient.

[Agnosticsherbet]

14. The Pharmacdugical industry is in business to make profits.

I suspect they find no profit in these drugs.

[oldhippie]

4. A .45 to the back of the head ...

... is seldom botched. Quicker and more humane than the current chemical process, but a bit more messy. Messes can be cleaned up.

[JJChambers]

6. I expect we will see hanging return to favor

[oldhippie]

7. Works for me. nt

[Nye Bevan]

8. Properly hanging someone is quite tricky.

There is a real art in determining the correct drop length. Too short and the criminal is slowly and painfully asphyxiated while dangling from the rope. Too long and he or she is decapitated which tends to cause revulsion among the witnesses. The infamous Albert Pierrepoint, who was England's chief hangman for many years, was an acknowledged expert in this field, but such an expert would probably be hard to find these days.

Or how about we just join most of the rest of the civilized world and abolish the death penalty.

[JJChambers]

11. Hanging is more likely than abolition. In many states the DP is quite popular

[Nye Bevan]

13. The trend, however, is towards abolition.

Most Americans still support capital punishment. But their majority has dwindled from 80% in 1994 to 60% in 2013, according to Gallup. Separate polls by the Pew Research Centre find that although most old and white Americans support it, young people are less keen and ethnic minorities such as blacks and Hispanics are solidly opposed. Since the young and non-white are America’s future, that suggests that demography favours the abolitionists.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21601270-america-falling-out-love-needle-slow-death-death-penalty

[elleng]

9. The international community,

generally against the death penalty, has refused to provide the necessary drugs for U.S. states trying to do this thing, making actually DOING executions much more difficult and uncertain.

[LisaL]

10. Europe refuses to sell US drugs for use in executions.

Apparently we don't make these drugs ourselves.

[Spider Jerusalem]

12. Simple answer to this:

States that carry out capital punishment have moved to lethal injection (ostensibly because it's "less cruel" but really because medicalising the process of execution makes it more palatable). The drugs formerly used for lethal injection have no US manufacturers and were obtained from pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers in Europe where a US export ban has been placed on them precisely because of their use in executions. Left without a source for drugs states are moving to untested and theoretically effective compounds of drugs that can be obtained in the US or made up by compounding pharmacies. Because using hanging, or the firing squad, or the electric chair, or the gas chamber, instead, is too obvious, I suppose, for one, and removes the whole sanitised, medicalised aspect of capital punishment, for another.