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United States on the brink of welcoming back firing squads [1]
['Jason Weisberger']
Date: 2023-03-24
Death for the convicted remains a thing in the United States, and as pharmaceutical companies have stopped supplying drugs that didn't necessarily work so well anyways, for lethal injections, States are turning back to the firing squad. Idaho just passed a law authorizing it.
A study conducted at Amherst College shows that firing squads never fail to kill their intended target and that death by four bullets to the chest at once may be painless. Deaths by injection and electrocution are far more likely to go awry and torture the person subjected to them.
Chicago Tribune:
An Amherst College political science and law professor, Austin Sarat, studied 8,776 executions in the U.S. between 1890 and 2010 and found that 276 of them were botched, or 3.15% of the time. The executions that went wrong included 7.12% of all lethal injections — in one notorious 2014 case in Oklahoma, Clayton Locket writhed and clenched his teeth after midazolam was administered — as well as 3.12% of hangings and 1.92% of electrocutions. By contrast, not a single one of the 34 firing squad executions was found to have been botched, according to Sarat, who has called for an end to capital punishment.
As if living out your life in a US prison isn't punishment enough.
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