Kill ‘em with Kindness

The State of Texas executed Yokamon Hearn last Wednesday.  He was the first to be executed using a single drug, pentobarbital, instead of the three-drug cocktail that had been used in recent years.

That was because the state had run out of the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide.  The drug’s European manufacturer no longer supplies the stuff because of anti capital punishment sentiment at home. 

Ohio, Arizona, Idaho and Washington have also adopted the single-drug procedure, and Georgia was going to use it last night, but was stopped by a last-minute ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court. 

The court did not rule that he didn’t deserve it – Warren Lee Hill was convicted of killing another inmate while already serving life in prison for murdering his girlfriend – what the court said was that Georgia law required public hearings to be held before  the method of execution could be legally changed.

If drug availability continues to be a problem, I can suggest several solutions:

1. Kill them with heroin – The city of Houston confiscates enough heroin in a year (week?) to supply every prison in the country with enough horse to administer lethal overdoses to all their capital prisoners.  Disposing of it this way seems like a win-win situation.
2. Don’t use drugs at all – I’m not really advocating hanging, firing squads or the Guillotine, but I wouldn’t be concerned if they came back.

Actually, my personal preference  would be to use vacuum chambers similar to those that have been used by laboratories, dog pounds and animal shelters around the country to euthanize unwanted animals.  There have been some complaints that these chambers are inhumane, but only by those opposed to ever killing anything under any circumstances. 

I’ll admit that there is an (unlikely) possibility of unwanted side effects – if not done correctly, the prisoner might even suffer from the bends.  This could be avoided by the introduction of an inert gas like nitrogen, but that just complicates a basically simple process.

The American Humane Association supports LAPS (low atmosphere pressure system) decompression for the humane  slaughter of poultry, but the American Veterinary Medical Association now calls decompression “unacceptable for euthanasia.”

It can’t be all that bad though, even PETA used vacuum chambers in the past.

If vacuum chambers are good enough for helpless animals whose only crime was being born, they ought to just fine for eliminating the worst of humanity.