CNN: Too Fat to be Executed?

Inmate on Death Row claims that he shouldn't be killed because he's too fat for his executers to easily find his veins, his weight may make the anesthetic too weak, and his migrane medicines might interfere with the effects of the lethal injection.

 

er, as the Nazis discovered, death is not an easy thing to make effecient.

When you're trying to kill thousands at a time while making sure nobody finds out about it, yes, I imagine that would be quite a challenge.

I'm with Milly on this one.  Surely it's no harder to execute or euthanase a human by lethal injection than it is a dog?  Unless I'm missing something.

I half-watched a documentary years ago about lethal injections - IIRC the complexity of the injections used was to do with finding something absolutely foolproof, as well as relatively painless.

I'm guessing, HtoHe, that it has to do with an abstracted notion of justice: that terminating the life of the death-rowee is justice for the crime they committed (you commit such-and-such a crime, you die), but that inflicting unnecessary pain is outside that judicial equation and therefore inhuman. Bizarre, but it makes a peculiar intellectual sense (I'm not advocating capital punishment myself).

Don't forget that human beings like a spectacle as well.  To draw it out and make it last would satisfy a lot of the revolting ghouls that feed on that sort of situation.  I'm anti-capital punishment myself.  There've been far too many mistakes.  It also doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent - otherwise there wouldn't be much need to do it and in places like Texas there are many who've been sentenced to death.  I think it's appalling that the appeals system can string it out for so many years too.  That's more than a punishment surely! To make someone live with the threat of death for 20 years and then end up doing it by some inhumane means.

(Oh! HtoHe has just pipped me with roughly the same opinion).

With regard to Shipman I remember reading several witness statements to the effect that the victims died so quickly it wasn't possible to take any action to save them.  One in particular he killed in his surgery when she visited him.  She walked in, told him what was wrong, he injected her and then called the reception staff in to attend because she'd died.  It was that quick!  There may have been many others who didn't go as quickly and indeed they're unsure how many he actually killed - but certainly those few incidents proved to me that a very quick death is possible with a high enough dose of morphine.  I have witnessed my dogs dying within seconds of the needle being inserted.

Shipman would have known where to find the veins of course and how much to administer, but don't doctors administer lethal injections?  I'm sure they'd have to.  I think it's more a case of making "an example" of people and creating an obscene spectacle with executions.

It's all very strange and extremely sad.

It seems all too plausible to me.  You have to remember that the US prison service is delivered entirely by a lucrative private sector industry, selling its services to cash-strapped state authorities at the lowest possible price, in a society in which incarceration runs at levels barely imaginable in the UK (although we're getting there, and that industry has quietly been moving into the UK, offering New Labour cheaper prisons with a non-unionised workforce).  The incentive is therefore to feed inmates as cheaply as possible - and nothing comes cheaper than sugar or fat.  Think supermarket pies; and, remember, we in the modern western world are the first society in history in which obesity is associated with poverty. And you can't make people exercise, especially if you're running the pen on the cheap.


Absolutely.  On the one hand you have the legality of judicial killing; on the other hand you have the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.  State Governors have long been proud of being "tough" on crime and derive considerable electoral benefit from it (and Bill Clinton as governor of Arkansas was one of the worst, with a reputation for ensuring high-profile executions when things were politically tough) and will do a lot to stop their executions being ruled unconstitutional.  Besides, there is a vast and lucrative legal industry in the States which will pick up on exactly this sort of legal issue and fight over it for years.

As with so much in the modern US, the whole situation leaves one feeling that Gogol was living in the wrong century in the wrong country.