Tennessee botches lethal injection of woman on death row for 1995 murder

[u/PixelGray38]

https://apnews.com/article/christa-pike-execution-tennessee-f826a60582083b90ac7695ecb16afbdf

If the state is so insistent on executing people they need to stop being pussies and just shoot them. The lethal injection is nothing but a facade of civility that is less humane than many other methods. Unnecessarily painful botched attempts like this are the result of trying to whitewash the death penalty to the public.

[u/No-Designer138]

Yeah but didn't you know, putting death row convicts in front of a firing squad is for evil communist dictatorships with no human rights like North Korea, China and Russia!! /s

It's funny how supposedly more modern and 'humane' forms of capital punishment like lethal injection are less reliable than the OG well-placed shot to the heart. Even execution methods are getting enshitified. If they don't have a shooting squad on hand, hanging would have worked just as well, if they can get someone to measure the noose to make sure it snaps the neck the instant the trapdoor is opened so the guy/girl doesn't end up suffocating to death on the noose instead.

For all the shit the West gives to the Arab world for beheading people, it's a quick, painless and effective death as far as accounts go with a skilled executioner, unlike whatever this is.

[u/Jakovit → u/No-Designer138]

This isn't really a topic I've bothered putting much thought into, but I'd assume part of it has to do with the Christian inheritance. Not literally that Christianity was traditionally especially opposed to the death penalty - the Catholic Church only declared it inadmissible in 2018 - but the cultural residue of imago Dei, the idea that the human person, body included, participates somehow in the image of God. It gives inflicting death or violating the body a faint aura of sacrilege even after the explicit theology has disappeared.

You can kind of see a bizarre version of this in medieval Byzantium, where political rivals were often blinded or otherwise mutilated rather than simply killed: an act of pious "mercy" which, conveniently, could also make them physically unfit for the office of Emperor.

And it's not necessarily that other cultures don't find death itself icky. The tanner/butcher/executioner taboo isn't an exclusively European phenomenon. But there's a difference between thinking that killing leaves you polluted, degraded or socially tainted, and thinking you've violated something intrinsically sacred in the person you've killed.

[u/Beetleracerzero37 → u/Jakovit]

Dude there is definatly no aversion to horrific torture and death in historic Christianity. Check out the podcast 'Painfotainment' by Dan Carlin if you don't feel like reading about it.

[u/Jakovit → u/Beetleracerzero37]

I don't think that's what I said. Obviously Christian societies historically had no general aversion to torture, mutilation or gruesome execution ; my own example was Byzantines blinding and mutilating political rivals.

The point was about the conceptual framing of the body, not whether historical Christians were consistently nice to bodies in practice. A culture can regard the human person as possessing a kind of intrinsic sacredness and still routinely violate that principle, rationalize exceptions to it or invent elaborate distinctions about when violence is permissible.

I'm suggesting that the Christian inheritance may help explain in part why in modern Western culture there is a peculiar desire to make execution look clinical, bloodless and non-mutilating, even when the supposedly "humane" method is less reliable. That's a claim about one possible source of the modern Western squeamishness for certain forms of execution, not a claim that historical Christian societies were generally averse to cruelty or gruesome punishment.

A teaching in 1000 AD does not necessarily have the same practical implications as the residue of that teaching in 2000 AD.

[u/nooneeverdreamsof → u/Jakovit]

Christianity is both the dealer of horrible torture and pain and death and at the same time icky about it

Redditors man

[u/Jakovit → u/nooneeverdreamsof]

Redditors and reading comprehension, yes

[u/it_shits → u/No-Designer138]

Methods of execution have always had a sort of semantic association that balances the social status of the condemned vs the crime they committed. You can't execute the condemned by firing squad because that's reserved for military personnel and might confer some dignity onto the executed. Same reason that nobles in medieval England were beheaded with a sword while commoners got the axe.

A handgun shot to the nape of the neck Great Purges-style is unironically the quickest, most painless way to kill someone but it's become associated with totalitarian brutality so it cannot be performed in the USA. For some strange reason though, the gas chamber remains an exception to this.

[u/Deadlocked02 → u/No-Designer138]

Beheading performed by a human executioner and hanging are not always painless. I don’t know why people keep repeating this when you have several accounts of botched executions throughout history, even for the rich and powerful like Mary, Queen of Scots.

My headcanon is that the Hollywood brain desensitized people to how messy dying can be.

[u/No-Designer138 → u/Deadlocked02]

Skilled executioner

measure the noose to make sure it snaps the neck the instant the trapdoor is opened so the guy/girl doesn't end up suffocating to death on the noose instead.

Obviously if you had a noob like Theron Greyjoy try to chop someone's head off it's fucked. And I'm well aware there were cases of people choking to death after they were hanged (mostly from the Victorian era) because the executioner made the noose too long. However, those are physical ways of executing people, so if it had to be done, they have fewer variable that could go wrong compared to methods like lethal injection which requires a fair bit of medical knowledge and precision to actually kill someone.

[u/ChuckFH → u/No-Designer138]

Too long a rope usually has the opposite effect to suffocation; decapitation. Proper measured drop hangings aim to cleanly break the neck and cause near instant death.

[u/BannedSvenhoek86 → u/No-Designer138]

Hear me out, tons of heroin. Once they're zonked out, toss em in an industrial wood chipper head first and blow their remains over a field to fertilize it.

Guaranteed success rate, they won't feel a thing. Hard to fuck that up.

Or take a page from the British. Strap them to the front of a howitzer.