Firing squads are eco friendly

Via The Telegraph

US states may revert to killing their death row inmates with electric chairs, firing squads and gas chambers as it becomes increasingly difficult to source chemicals for lethal injections.

The EU has banned the export of one of the most common sedatives used in lethal injections, forcing US states to experiment with new “cocktails” of drugs for executions.

One such experimental recipe was used in the botched execution of an Oklahoma prisoner on Tuesday, leaving him to writhe in pain and die of a massive heart attack 43 minutes after being injected.

The shortage of execution drugs, coupled with fears the courts may intervene to ban experimental methods of lethal injection, have prompted states to look at alternative ways to kill prisoners.

Tennessee’s legislature has passed a bill that would reintroduce the electric chair if the state was unable to find drugs for lethal injections.

The state’s Republican governor is still weighing whether to sign it into law.

Missouri is considering a proposal to reintroduce both firing squads and gas chambers if it becomes impossible to carry out a lethal injection.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said the laws were intended as symbols by conservative politicians of their commitment to the death penalty.

“It’s about being even more blatant than the anti-death penalty side. To see this as a rational process is to miss the harshly divisive political atmosphere that produces these things,” he said.

Lethal injections are the primary execution method for all 32 US states which still have the death penalty. However, more than a dozen states also have laws theoretically allowing for gassing, hanging, electrocuting or shooting.

The use of such methods is not unheard of in the recent past. In 2013, Robert Gleason, a convicted murderer, chose to die by electric chair in Virginia.

Ronnie Lee Gardner was the last American killed by firing squad. He was shot in Utah in 2010 by five unnamed police officers armed with .30-caliber Winchester rifles.

Mary Fallin, the governor of Oklahoma, said the state would execute a second inmate as soon as a review of Tuesday’s botched killing was complete.

“His fellow Oklahomans have sentenced him to death, and we expect that sentence to be carried out as required by law,” Mrs Fallin said.

Texas also said the prolonged death in Oklahoma would not deter it from executing a man convicted of kidnapping a woman, raping her and then shooting her in the back as she fled from him.

http://weaselzippers.us/184687-states-ma...-firing-squads/

With the ammo shortages, let's skip the firing squad. How about bayonets instead?

Go back to hanging, or any other form of execution used when the Constitution and Bill of Rights was passed since, idiot Liberals and moronic Supreme Court Justices like "Feel Good" Marshall, Harry Blank Brain, Stevens, Darth Vader Ginsburg et al aside; they were all considered neither cruel, nor unusual [as Scalia has noted the Eigth Amendment requires both for a no no] for the purposes of the Framers.

Or, in the name of diversity, we could try Native American techniques. I favor the Apache brain roast myself, but the Iroquois were VERY inventive, and didn't they give us our form of government? [sarcasm off]

How about executing these killers with the exact same method they murdered their victims? For example, that creep in OK could have been wounded with a shotgun and then buried alive.

Seems fair.