Come fire at me and be my thug
and see the scales of justice shrug
that prisons, jails, and cops, and courts,
come to fail without this last resort.
And I will sit upon a chair,
blindfolded and shackled there
while priests and witnesses espy
a life removed, a gun thereby
Poor hands will dig my bed of clay.
With Justice, there I’ll always lay:
Shot by officers of state.
Death just in time, we call just fate.
I’ll be buried in a suit of wool,
a handsome cloth bought for a fool.
This late respect, required but cold,
may cover your hatred for my soul.
But this is what our laws require:
Punishment that most befits our ire.
For our justice is moral rage
Which murders to its wrath assuage.
The Christian choirs shall sway and sing.
My death knell will be Justice’s ring.
And if this form of justice voters move,
Then fire at me, and Justice prove.
After C Marlowe and Sir Walter?
Literally just seen this :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-16/us-death-row-inmate-picks-firing-squad-over-electric-chair/100995350
now before seeing that epic poem.
Don’t even need to guess the colour of his skin do we?
@sbh
Shamelessly copied. No independent artistic merit whatsoever.
@StevoR
Yeah, the odds were heavy on that one.
Here’s what I’d be saying in his position:
1. Only barbarian shitholes have governments that kill people in cold blood. By executing me you are demonstrating inconvertibly that you are WORSE than almost any murderer.
2. If you must do this, do me by oxygen starvation. Find a reasonably – not necessarily 100% – airtight room, install a pressure swing adsorber, and exhaust the oxygen to outside and the nitrogen back into the room. Run the PSA for a couple hours until the oxygen content of the room is down below 1%. Leave me in there overnight. Come pick my body up in the morning.
Many, many people have died on chemical plants because they’ve gone into confined spaces with oxygen deficient atmospheres. Quite often the incident claims more than one life because a co-worker sees a guy go down, goes in to help him, then he dies too. (If you question the pronouns in that sentence, I challenge you to find an example of a woman dying in these circumstances.) Sometimes, lucky people get most of the way to dying like this, and are retrieved. Their report of how they were overcome is always the same – they just painlessly went to sleep, passed out and knew nothing about it. Nitrogen is odourless, tasteless, colourless – it’s four fifths of what you’re breathing right now, so it would be.
Opening a bottle of nitrogen in a small room is a good way to kill whoever’s in that room, painlessly. I only recommend a pressure swing adsorber above in case nitrogen suppliers get queasy about supplying bottles to states for use in executions – but I would imagine states have many, many legitimate uses for nitrogen bottles in laboratories and such like, so could just add one to the order – you’d only need one. And in any case, PSAs are cheap and easy to build.
The impression I get, however, is that the US does not implement this is a method of execution because as a method it’s not nasty and violent enough. Those people in that shithole have a deep national need not just to kill people in cold blood, but to do it in a way that is definitely going to hurt and be horrific. Hence the ridiculous spectacle of people running around trying to find a drug company who will supply them with stuff to lethally inject people with, when a proven lethal substance is moving in and out of their lungs with literally every breath they take.
Oh they whine and pose about their fucking constitution being so brilliant, because it bans punishment that is “cruel and unusual”, sure. But consider what sort of people think killing someone in cold blood is not cruel. And as for “unusual”, take a look at this map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#/media/File:Capital_punishment_in_the_world.svg
If you live in a place coloured red, you’re in an unusually shitty place.
(Dark green is no death penalty. Light green is DP for only odd offences, like war crimes, but with nobody actually killed. Orange is DP, but never used. Red is “string em up”.)
Granted, there’s an argument that something like half the world’s population live in a country that’s coloured red. Still and all though, it amazes me that any US politician actively wants to be on a list that goes:
Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, USA, China, Bangladesh.
Let alone wants to be further up that table…
Sadism. Especially making people choose between methods of death. Yuk, yuk, yuk.
What a sickening shithole the US is.
I’m not in favor of the DP but nitrogen hypoxia is easier, less expensive, and does not require special equipment. Use a hospital oxygen tent or mask but connect it to a tank of nitrogen. Painless, simpler, and not at all violent. The victim goes to sleep and does not wake up.
“The victim goes to sleep and does not wake up”? That’s why this scheme will never be adopted. To the sort of people who vote for the death penalty, the suffering of the target during the process isn’t a bug… it’s a feature.