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Of respondents in a new NBC News poll suggested hanging as an alternative to lethal injection, while 20% favored the gas chamber, 18% were for the electric chair and 12% for firing squad. One in three said that if lethal injections are no longer viable — because of drug shortages or other problems — executions should be stopped altogether rather than returning to more primitive forms of execution.
I don’t know whether it was inhumane or not, but it was botched.
— Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), quoted by The Hill, on Oklahoma’s trouble carrying out the death penalty last week for a convicted murderer.
The oxymoronic quest for humane executions only accentuates the absurdity of allowing the death penalty in a civilized society. It’s understandable that Supreme Court Justices have tried to make the process a little more palatable; and there is a meagre kind of progress in moving from the chair to the gurney. But the essential fact about both is that they come with leather straps to restrain a human being so that the state can kill him. No technology can render that process any less grotesque.
— Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New Yorker.
