A fallible state institution that has made many documented mistakes in the past is still given the power to murder prisoners who are in its custody and under its protection. It’s barbarous.

America is hellbent on the concept of punishing criminals over rehabilitation while also having an objectively unfair justice system. The cruelty is the point sometimes, and it’s very unfortunate that people still think this way.

Weird stuff, Americans

Just the pro life crowd being inhumane. Nothing to see here.

When it comes to mixed bag news this is as mixed as it gets. If we're gonna execute people, we can at least do it as humanely as possible.

Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith's spiritual adviser, was at Smith's side for the execution, and said prison officials in the room "were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went." "What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life," Hood, attending his fifth execution in the last 15 months, told reporters. "We saw minutes of someone heaving back and forth. We saw spit. We saw all sorts of stuff from his mouth develop on the mask. We saw this mask tied to the gurney, and him ripping his head forward over and over and over again."

All our technological advances as a society and this is the best we can do?

In November 2022, Alabama officials aborted his execution by lethal injection after struggling for hours to insert an intravenous line's needle in his body.

In Smith's second and final trip to the execution chamber on Thursday, executioners restrained him in a gurney and strapped a commercial industrial-safety respirator mask to his face. A canister of pure nitrogen was attached to the mask

This doesn't sound very professional!?

why can't they just give them an insane amount of opiates rather than all this odd shit

(if we have to kill people, which we shouldn't)

.

32 minutes. Huh.

Civilized countries don't execute criminals and somehow don't experience more criminality or unacceptably high incarceration costs as a result. Capital punishment is an outdated cultural practice like slavery, genital mutilation or child brides and has nothing to do with the administration of justice. It is cultural and nothing else. They like the killing. They believe in the killing. It has no other purpose.

I don't know why much of the discussion is about the method of execution. Would it matter how they were fucking kids or beating slaves in Alabama or that they were doing those things at all? State executions are barbaric and indefensible in any form.

Richest 3rd world country