Look bro I've been where you've been arguing with people online and trying to justify your opinions more than you try to listen to what the other person has to say or just feeling misunderstood. I probably shared the majority of your political views just a month or so ago and would have done the same.

You'll share a link to something you maybe just skimmed over or move the goalpost a little or admit you aren't really that knowledgeable to lessen the blow a bit. It sucks being in arguments where you feel like you're being attacked on all sides for something you simply "know" to be correct.

Trust me when I say that a lot of the people in this community and instance really knows things and have perspectives way outside your worldview. They get things wrong sometimes but tend to get generally well read. Trust me when I say to give them a shot and listen. I made a post a while back asking for resources and information about communism/socialism and the stuff they had me read shattered my world view. Give them a shot, trust me. They are a lot nicer and more accepting than you think.

You're trotting the goalpost back, whether you mean to or not. Death sentences represent a substantial liability to the state, because killing someone on the basis of an accusation that turns out to be false is a danger, one that is worse with a faster turnaround to these events. The state is happy to have false convictions, so long as they don't cause the boat to rock.

There are surely even true-blue people like you who help promote these measures on some high-minded basis of minimizing infringement on the rights of citizens, but what has been most consistently demonstrated by the state is that if lofty liberal principles come into conflict with material interest, the latter wins. If the state gave a shit about "rights" among the general population, we wouldn't have hundreds of de-facto summary executions per year doled out by the cops (this making allowances for actual violent conflict, since the total number of killings is past 1000)

The simple fact of the matter is that these long periods of internment work as an alibi for the state and, most egregiously, allows for the killing to be carried out with substantially less ado. This is a well-tested method that is notoriously used for the crimes of federal agencies wherein they wait a few decades and then publish what they did once things have cooled down, defusing the liability of another discovery like Cointelpro.

Ok, and you don't think that if they weren't explicitly concerned with the appeals process or the questionable mental health of the prisoner, that they wouldn't just execute them immediately?

You are hopelessly naive.

They're not concerned with whether it hurts people or there simply wouldn't be death sentences at all.

What they're concerned with is convincing heavily propagandised naive dumbasses that they're acting with good intentions, and implement the bare minimum that they're politically pressured into implementing in order to achieve that without fundamentally changing the core of the system itself.

I think that, if you were in anywhere in the U.S. that practiced the death penalty prior to DNA evidence, there was a lot of 'let God sort em' out' happening in the U.S. court system. Basically, I think the 4% exoneration rate is a really really low estimate, it could potentially be as high as even 10%, particularly during the wild west of prison expansion during the 80's and 90's.

That said, the prison industrial complex runs far more on racking up fines and filling beds with low level offenses than dealing with death-row stuff, but it's still a good racket.

The reason why it's a racket is because the whole U.S. evidence and prison system is mostly a racket. The protections afforded to us are minimal at best, and mostly locked behind wealth premiums. To the degree we do have protection it is because someone in the private sector makes money off of that protection, which is a functional, if contradictory, system. Once you get into the prison system, it requires a Herculean effort to escape, especially for people who are mostly there due to mental health issues. The U.S. has the largest prisoner per capita ratio in the world for a reason, and it's not because the system is working well for the majority of subjects, it's just works really well for those it is supposed to work well for, the wealthy, lawyers and cops, who while sometimes having opposing interests, are mostly on the same page from a 'functional system' aspect.

Edit: Again, you can 'echo' any amendment you like, but there is a lot more 'Aw gee isn't this new whiz-bang invention swell? Probably sure does execute folks safer and more humanely! ;D' when there was and is no evidence that that is the case in the history of executions in the U.S.

Companies want to make money and they'll appeal to the 8th amendment, but it usually isn't the amendment actually driving these changes, it is a 'modernizing' drive within prisons to 'keep with the times'.

But the act of requiring the chemicals in the first place, as opposed to just hanging or shooting, echos the protection of the 8th (separate, relevant ammendment) anyway, what with cruel and unusual punishment not being allowed.

Not to dog pile, but I can't emphasize enough how misguided this point is. Long drop hanging, firing squad, decapitation, and a handful of other traditional execution methods are all virtually painless. The thing about lethal injection is that it deliberately suppresses evidence of the victim suffering by paralyzing them, so there is no sign of them suffering even if they feel like there whole body is aflame. Other methods are much more transparent in this respect (except electric chair, which has the opposite problem of drowning pain responses in noise).