Why does the state need to obtain illegal execution drugs?
Let’s say you’re the prison. You’re supposed to execute a prisoner tomorrow. You don’t have the drugs to do so.
You could either fail to execute the prisoner, or take a fairly large risk and get illegal methods. Would the prison really lose face if it just said that it didn’t have the means to carry out the execution and thus did not?
Death row is very expensive. In part because the types of people up for death are high risk and so they have to pay for more security (guards, locks and even fire protection). In part because death row sees the most appeals so lawyers keeping them in cost more.
Shit. Yeah that’s it and is retrospectively obvious. The prisons probably are responsible for operating under their assigned budgets, which means they need to literally kill off their liabilities.
I wonder what correlations exist between prison profitability and inmate death rates.
At least as of 2009, no state housed death row inmates in private prisons: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html. In Alabama, death row inmates are housed and executed in Holman, a public facility. Moreover, Alabama has just 1% of its prison population in private prisons. Many states that have the death penalty (Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, etc.) have no private prisons at all.
That’s good, but not contradictory of the point above. A public, not for profit prison presumably still has to operate on a budget. I did say “profitability”, but I suppose I really meant ability to operate.
If prisons are held accountable to their finances, which I assume they are, they’re put into a position where expensive inmates who are budgeted to die must die, else they threaten the entire prison.
Because the main ingredient of the injection cocktail, sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the US. The EU has also banned the drug. So states are now trying to "score" an alternative, pentobarbital which works similarly to sodium thiopental, but is slower acting, resulting in a few botched executions in Texas.
And to be quite clear (while I am personally against all applications of the death penalty), a botched execution is far more expensive, legally, and even medically (if there are increased healthcare costs for that timeframe), and also, a botched execution is generally considered "cruel and unusual punishment".
I wouldn't expect that ruling to survive this particular SCOTUS. They've broken years of precedence and created law from thin air that don't exist prior. It's not likely to survive when the pendulum swings on the court again, justice like judicial overreach on anti trust with the previous liberal majority was generally overturned.
"In 2015, the federal government seized drugs the state bought illegally off the black market. The shoddy, shady sources for the deadly cocktails have become a weak spot death penalty opponents have leveraged."
I say this as an opponent of the death penalty, there is nothing intrinsically difficult about killing someone, and I would guess that the ways a person can legally be killed have grown smaller and smaller over time by opponents of the practice. This is identical to the strategy used by anti-abortion advocates who chip away at access and timing and so on, and it's ethically questionable IMO.
The reason why states can't source drugs to use them for killing is because, surprise, the corporations that manufacture them refuse to sell them for that purpose.
Fair enough, but that doesn't negate their refusal to sell them for that purpose. They refuse to sell them for that purpose because they know the state will pay far less than they would otherwise lose from public scrutiny. I'm okay with that.
It doesn’t negate it, but it does taint it. You know that if they thought the calculation would come out the other way and they’d make money, they’d be actively soliciting prisons to buy their drugs for executions.
Except this is unlikely to be a big business opportunity, plus chances are someone would notice (executions in the US aren't exactly secret), so I would be pretty surprised if big pharma companies would try to circumvent this.
No, the two strategies differ in whether they are in concordance with a constitutional right or against a constitutional right (to take a strictly legalistic view).
Limiting access to abortion is counter to the Supreme Court's decision that abortion is a right.
Limiting the methods of execution is to prevent undue suffering, which violates the constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment.
That makes no sense. Morality applies to the goal (or the result, including side-effects, which may or may not have been the goal).
If I scratch you to relieve an itch you can't reach, or I scratch you to violently gouge out your eyes, it's a meaningless comment to say "There's a moral equivalence to the method."
The only "equivalence" between the two original scenarios is that they both involve the verb "limiting," but there is no "moral equivalence" that automatically applies to any action using that verb. Or is there a "moral equivalence" between the laws to limit abortion and my attempts to limit my kid's screentime?
> In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well.
> Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan’s execution and decided to pay a visit. At the company’s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read elgone driving academy. Inside she found two desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations.
...
> Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee’s, Kentucky’s, South Carolina’s, and Alabama’s.
> When the DOC deposed her, Isner had to answer deeply personal questions about her faith, her social media habits, her adopted children, her political beliefs, her charitable donations, her work history and just about everything you might imagine apart from the only question that mattered — whether the DOC documents are public records.
IANAL but I don't think she "had" to answer these questions. I'm not defending Alabama at all here, but depositions are not an open forum where anything goes. She is legally required to answer truthfully, but she doesn't have to answer at all if the question isn't germane. Maybe she opened the door to some of the questions by providing a religious basis for her information request, but most of these questions are completely irrelevant. She should have refused to play the game.
You do not have to answer, but if you do not, I presume the state, under the interpretation it has made of the law, can use your refusal as a basis for refusing your request for public records.
Declining to answer probably wouldn't have helped her cause, but I doubt anything she said would have stopped them from refusing. Hopefully now she at least has evidence of bias or misconduct that will serve as ammunition for her appeal against the ruling. I just wish she'd taken a stand against their absurd questions and stood up for the principle.
Then again, I still let the TSA and customs perform intrusive searches and ask intrusive questions (that have no bearing on safety) when I travel, because I want to get on with my life. For example, when I return to the US (as a natural born US citizen), immigration will ask me what the purpose of my trip was, where I went, etc. They have no legitimate reason for this, I legally don't have to answer any of the questions, and they cannot refuse me re-entry (assuming they accept the validity of my passport), yet I play their game because at the end of a 10-hour flight and a 2-hour queue, I don't feel like sitting in a cell for 72 hours while they process me.
The purpose of your trip is actually valid. It can trigger certain customs limitations on monetary value that you can legally return to the country with. It's obtuse, but it's a valid question. It's also important to note that you have zero civil liberties, even as a citizen, within 100 miles of a border to the United States, of which an airport has been considered I've in some cases.
TSA security theatre on the other hand is a whole different ball of wax. Very little of what they do contributes more to security than prior measures or alternative, less intrusive measures. The fact that programs where you can pay to avoid it exist prove this point. They already have the same level of access to every person thorough the dragnet of law enforcement and intelligence databases that every single air traveler gets processed through. When it's trivially easy to spot numerous gaps in security in every single airport I've been to, it's more a statement to the fact that most people are good than it is to the fact that we're good at catching bad guys. An airport just needs to be a less viable target and bad guys will go elsewhere that's easier.
tl;dw: No physician worth his/her salt will go anywhere near prescribing drugs for lethal injection (Hippocratic Oath and what not) so states and prisons use non-medical-trained personnel to choose, source, and administer the drugs.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. For one, look at Oregon, and many other countries where euthanasia/assisted suicide is legal, and (I believe) has a legitimate and worthwhile place. As far as Oaths go, many physicians do not swear that any more, or do a modified / modern version (apropos of anything else, the Oath forbids "cutting the flesh", which would be problematic for surgeons).
That is true, but “first, do no harm” is still a part of many versions of the oath taken by physicians. In any case, it is still one of the, at times conflicting, principles at the core of medical ethics.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Seriously. I live in a LOC (low cost of living) state and work as a remote programmer. This is a good scenario.
Lots of people retire to states like Alabama. As you say, nice weather, cheap housing, etc. Every state has it's culture/education/entertainment centers, you can always live close to it.
She's not asking for the dietary inputs of prisoners on death row. She's asking for the process the state uses for executions. How does that have any bearing on individual prisoners' privacy?
What she's asking for is public, and perhaps asking "why" might be allowed. But preventing access in any way to public information unacceptable.
The state is using illegal drugs, administered without the care or advice of a doctor, to kill its citizens and you think it should remain secret for the sake of the privacy of the condemned? I can’t even.
The article is confusing, from what I can gather she is interested in praying for those about to be executed and wants their name.
There is lots of other text about drugs and such in their, but it doesn't seem to be the subject of her request. Instead I read it as a side discussion. Worth investigating - and thus worth the records, but the forms would be filled out differently if so.
>When Isner asked for Alabama’s death row execution protocols, she had to give a reason on the Department of Corrections’ public information request form.
>Isner has strong opinions about the death penalty (like a lot of people do). She’s an ordained minister, although she doesn’t lead a church (her husband does, though). Later she would run for Congress against Rep. Martha Roby (Isner lost).
>When she filled out the form she said what a lot of politicians and preachers say when confronted with a prickly question: She wanted to pray on it.
>Next to “Proposed Use of Records” she wrote: “As a member of the clergy, I feel a spiritual obligation to pray over executions. To do this most effectively, I need to have a detailed understanding of how executions are carried out.”
Can you indicate which bit of this is confusing to you?
And did you just conjour up the bit about her wanting their names, entirely from whole cloth? As it is nowhere is the text.
death row execution protocols should be viewable by anyone who wants to see them. This is a simple matter of the government not being transparent when they should be
As far as I know constitutionally we can't, there's too many issues, they're US citizens, I don't believe states can legally secede, and a bunch of other stuff.
Ignore the parent, he's just spouting random inflammatory bull crap.
Alabama didn't even get electricity without the feds, theyre very financially tied up with the feds to masquerade as representative of a developed nation
We can single out Alabama without mentioning Alabama specifically
They’ll get the benefits of being a state after conforming and dissolving their theocratic government
Honest question. How religious people in these states reconcile these two contrasting ideas, the first one being believing in the bible and thus in the 10 Commandments, and the second being allowing people to be executed under their administration?
Seems like you're talking about the 6th commandment[0], which is more accurately described as "Thou shalt not murder", rather than "thou shalt not kill".
I like Dennis Prager's commentary on the 10 commandments[1]
I went to Catholic School for 12 years, and what they believe is quite different than the Baptists in Alabama, but the Catholic Church says we should not have the death penalty unless there is a risk of the person causing harm to more people. So, in today's society (in the west at least) there is no place for the death penalty.
12 And the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice.
13 And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone.
14 And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it.
15 Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire:
16 Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female,
17 The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air,
18 The likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth
The US political system naturally stabilizing at two parties has some weird effects, like psychologically/socially pressuring people to accept a bunch of crap they might not otherwise, to an even greater degree than a somewhat more nuanced political landscape might. This is especially true with major wedge issues, and double especially with abortion.
Like, what exactly is your average, normal pro-life person who happens to also kinda support gun control and kinda oppose the death penalty and maybe even favor universal healthcare supposed to do, in the voting booth? Recall that their belief may be that abortion is equal to or at least very close to baby murder, before answering. Their options come down to voting for a 3rd party that's pro-life but agrees with them on some other positions, which is so close to not voting that they may as well be identical and anyway I'm not sure such a party exists (usually they're more extreme, if anything), voting anti-baby-murder but also against all their other positions, or voting pro-baby-murder but for the other things they like. This is clearly not a great position to be in.
So rather than going around feeling shitty about their own politics all the time, they soften or reverse their opposition to bundled views they wouldn't otherwise agree with.
[EDIT] this was highly visible in the last Presidential election, when a lot of the "WTF happened?" interviews afterward went like "yeah, of course Trump seems like a slimy piece of crap, obviously, I mean have you listened to the guy talk and have we all forgotten how he was, not that long ago, the universal media symbol for highly-successful rich scam artists? But I prayed on it and in the end held my nose and voted for him, because judicial appointments and Roe v. Wade".
This is me every election except I don't soften or reverse my opposition, just try to figure out which bundle most closely matches mine and sometimes get frustrated enough that I vote third party anyways. Sometimes I take a whole ticket approach and vote one side for governor. and the other for Lt. governor. One bundle for president and the opposite bundle for senator for instance.
If the point is to more-or-less represent the views of the people, our system does an exceptionally poor job of it, between this and lots of winner-take-all elections + gerrymandering (sorry, other 49.9% of the population, better luck next time). I'm probably less on the "more democracy is always a good thing" side of the spectrum than most in the US, but this stuff is subversion of democratic will to no clear systemic beneficial purpose. Quite the opposite, as far as I can tell.
In addition to the point below, which is that the prohibition on murder does not extend to many instances of homicide the law seems justifiable, I believe you are also confused about the posture in which the question has come up.
The article discusses a member of the clergy who requested information about Alabama’s death penalty protocols to help her “pray on” the issue. The state pushed back, and “why does God need to know this information” was a snarky question asked of the clergy woman by the state’s lawyer. So the religious person and the entity executing people are on opposite sides of the issue. The state’s response could just as easily have come from an atheist.
I don't reconcile them. I'm religious and believe the death penalty is wrong for any reason under any circumstances.
Because I'm religious though I know people who do not have this view and believe the death penalty is fine. They tend to use the deterrent to crime and protection of society arguments as well as mentioning certain old testament Levitical laws which make the distinction between justified and unjustified killing. Killing someone in self-defense, a soldier killing during war or the state killing as punishment for certain crimes versus an individual killing another.
Even those who believe this acknowledge that many of the commandments are repeated, either in word or in idea, in the New Testament. Debates continue today about whether an image of Jesus is an idol, or whether the Sabbath commandment is repeated in any fashion, but "thou shalt not kill" is directly restated in the text, and emphasis added on heart motive as well. (In other words, Jesus calls people out who use harsh words but don't stab people as violators of the commandment.)
In any case, the word means murder, not any killing. This is plainly true in that soldiers are not immediately called to abandon their posts.
I've heard conflicting stories about this. Sometimes it is phrased as delivering us from the vengeful god of the OT, other times it just embraces and extends.
I'd love to hear something official just to know how best to criticize the hypocrites...
There is nothing to reconcile because murder is against the OT law and the penalty is death.
The 10 commands are a simple summary of OT law. They are a good guide, but the full OT law is (as any set of laws) complex and messy. The full law if you kill someone you will be killed in return, with a very complex set of exceptions for accidental killing.
Oh my! The 10 commandments were for the Isrealites wandering the desert, but there were a whole bunch of exceptions and specific rules, and in the old law, loooooots of the punishments for breaking those rules were death. Not just any old death, specific kinds of death, like impaling someone with a beam from their own house.
Christianity is a bit different, generally believing the old law (including those gruesome punishments) to be done away with, but there are still scriptures in support of local governing authorities. The more commonly cited scripture is Paul's letter to the Romans (Chapter 13, verses 1-2):
> Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
There are a few other examples, but at least from a Christian point of view, the guiding principal is to presume that the government is at least partially put in place by the hand of God, and should generally be respected.
(Disclaimer: I am not a religious person, but I grew up in a religious household.)
82 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadLet’s say you’re the prison. You’re supposed to execute a prisoner tomorrow. You don’t have the drugs to do so.
You could either fail to execute the prisoner, or take a fairly large risk and get illegal methods. Would the prison really lose face if it just said that it didn’t have the means to carry out the execution and thus did not?
The closest thing I see from google is "Trump's Child Detention Camps Cost $775 Per Person Every Day" which is unrelated to this discussion.
Just for kicks and giggles: I wonder if it's $1337.995 per day?
I wonder what correlations exist between prison profitability and inmate death rates.
If prisons are held accountable to their finances, which I assume they are, they’re put into a position where expensive inmates who are budgeted to die must die, else they threaten the entire prison.
https://www.inverse.com/article/4100-the-growing-black-marke...
Not any longer. The Supreme Court ruled this term that prisoners sentenced to die have no right to a comfortable death.
wat?
The reason why states can't source drugs to use them for killing is because, surprise, the corporations that manufacture them refuse to sell them for that purpose.
Limiting access to abortion is counter to the Supreme Court's decision that abortion is a right.
Limiting the methods of execution is to prevent undue suffering, which violates the constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment.
That "No" is unwarranted - the strategies differ in the way you say, but they coincide in the way the post your responded to says.
If I scratch you to relieve an itch you can't reach, or I scratch you to violently gouge out your eyes, it's a meaningless comment to say "There's a moral equivalence to the method."
The only "equivalence" between the two original scenarios is that they both involve the verb "limiting," but there is no "moral equivalence" that automatically applies to any action using that verb. Or is there a "moral equivalence" between the laws to limit abortion and my attempts to limit my kid's screentime?
Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?
> In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well.
> Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan’s execution and decided to pay a visit. At the company’s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read elgone driving academy. Inside she found two desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations.
...
> Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee’s, Kentucky’s, South Carolina’s, and Alabama’s.
IANAL but I don't think she "had" to answer these questions. I'm not defending Alabama at all here, but depositions are not an open forum where anything goes. She is legally required to answer truthfully, but she doesn't have to answer at all if the question isn't germane. Maybe she opened the door to some of the questions by providing a religious basis for her information request, but most of these questions are completely irrelevant. She should have refused to play the game.
Then again, I still let the TSA and customs perform intrusive searches and ask intrusive questions (that have no bearing on safety) when I travel, because I want to get on with my life. For example, when I return to the US (as a natural born US citizen), immigration will ask me what the purpose of my trip was, where I went, etc. They have no legitimate reason for this, I legally don't have to answer any of the questions, and they cannot refuse me re-entry (assuming they accept the validity of my passport), yet I play their game because at the end of a 10-hour flight and a 2-hour queue, I don't feel like sitting in a cell for 72 hours while they process me.
TSA security theatre on the other hand is a whole different ball of wax. Very little of what they do contributes more to security than prior measures or alternative, less intrusive measures. The fact that programs where you can pay to avoid it exist prove this point. They already have the same level of access to every person thorough the dragnet of law enforcement and intelligence databases that every single air traveler gets processed through. When it's trivially easy to spot numerous gaps in security in every single airport I've been to, it's more a statement to the fact that most people are good than it is to the fact that we're good at catching bad guys. An airport just needs to be a less viable target and bad guys will go elsewhere that's easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lTczPEG8iI
tl;dw: No physician worth his/her salt will go anywhere near prescribing drugs for lethal injection (Hippocratic Oath and what not) so states and prisons use non-medical-trained personnel to choose, source, and administer the drugs.
"yeah, it's really nice down here - housing, weather, etc - but I hate being 45-50th in every national list".
Seriously. I live in a LOC (low cost of living) state and work as a remote programmer. This is a good scenario.
Lots of people retire to states like Alabama. As you say, nice weather, cheap housing, etc. Every state has it's culture/education/entertainment centers, you can always live close to it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is the prisoners in question have some privacy that should be respected.
What she's asking for is public, and perhaps asking "why" might be allowed. But preventing access in any way to public information unacceptable.
There is lots of other text about drugs and such in their, but it doesn't seem to be the subject of her request. Instead I read it as a side discussion. Worth investigating - and thus worth the records, but the forms would be filled out differently if so.
Requesting their names wouldn’t make any sense anyway. That’s already publicly available.
>Isner has strong opinions about the death penalty (like a lot of people do). She’s an ordained minister, although she doesn’t lead a church (her husband does, though). Later she would run for Congress against Rep. Martha Roby (Isner lost).
>When she filled out the form she said what a lot of politicians and preachers say when confronted with a prickly question: She wanted to pray on it.
>Next to “Proposed Use of Records” she wrote: “As a member of the clergy, I feel a spiritual obligation to pray over executions. To do this most effectively, I need to have a detailed understanding of how executions are carried out.”
Can you indicate which bit of this is confusing to you?
And did you just conjour up the bit about her wanting their names, entirely from whole cloth? As it is nowhere is the text.
Ignore the parent, he's just spouting random inflammatory bull crap.
Primarily withholding of highway funding again
Alabama didn't even get electricity without the feds, theyre very financially tied up with the feds to masquerade as representative of a developed nation
We can single out Alabama without mentioning Alabama specifically
They’ll get the benefits of being a state after conforming and dissolving their theocratic government
I like Dennis Prager's commentary on the 10 commandments[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RENPaY043o
...according to you or the Catholic Church. What other reasons do you have for there not being a death penalty?
13 And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone.
14 And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it.
15 Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire:
16 Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female,
17 The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air,
18 The likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth
Deuteronomy 4:12-18
Like, what exactly is your average, normal pro-life person who happens to also kinda support gun control and kinda oppose the death penalty and maybe even favor universal healthcare supposed to do, in the voting booth? Recall that their belief may be that abortion is equal to or at least very close to baby murder, before answering. Their options come down to voting for a 3rd party that's pro-life but agrees with them on some other positions, which is so close to not voting that they may as well be identical and anyway I'm not sure such a party exists (usually they're more extreme, if anything), voting anti-baby-murder but also against all their other positions, or voting pro-baby-murder but for the other things they like. This is clearly not a great position to be in.
So rather than going around feeling shitty about their own politics all the time, they soften or reverse their opposition to bundled views they wouldn't otherwise agree with.
[EDIT] this was highly visible in the last Presidential election, when a lot of the "WTF happened?" interviews afterward went like "yeah, of course Trump seems like a slimy piece of crap, obviously, I mean have you listened to the guy talk and have we all forgotten how he was, not that long ago, the universal media symbol for highly-successful rich scam artists? But I prayed on it and in the end held my nose and voted for him, because judicial appointments and Roe v. Wade".
At least both sides get to take their turn at the helm. Seems to work okay to me.
The article discusses a member of the clergy who requested information about Alabama’s death penalty protocols to help her “pray on” the issue. The state pushed back, and “why does God need to know this information” was a snarky question asked of the clergy woman by the state’s lawyer. So the religious person and the entity executing people are on opposite sides of the issue. The state’s response could just as easily have come from an atheist.
In any case, the word means murder, not any killing. This is plainly true in that soldiers are not immediately called to abandon their posts.
I'd love to hear something official just to know how best to criticize the hypocrites...
The 10 commands are a simple summary of OT law. They are a good guide, but the full OT law is (as any set of laws) complex and messy. The full law if you kill someone you will be killed in return, with a very complex set of exceptions for accidental killing.
Christianity is a bit different, generally believing the old law (including those gruesome punishments) to be done away with, but there are still scriptures in support of local governing authorities. The more commonly cited scripture is Paul's letter to the Romans (Chapter 13, verses 1-2):
> Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
There are a few other examples, but at least from a Christian point of view, the guiding principal is to presume that the government is at least partially put in place by the hand of God, and should generally be respected.
(Disclaimer: I am not a religious person, but I grew up in a religious household.)