> An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records.
So they tried to kill her and then provided medical aid? What the fuck are we doing as a country. Goddamn.
I believe it is the same in the case of unsuccessful abortions, in the US at least. Sometimes they result in a birth, presumably of a heavily injured and premature baby, who is then entitled to emergency medical care. Some of these people survive long term. One example is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianna_Jessen
That was the most "WTF?" in the article. No one working there thought about the nonsensicalness of calling for medical aid for someone who was supposed to be killed?
It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.
I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.
I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.
For me the issue isn't so much to execute someone for something they did at 18 (18 is plenty old enough to knowingly do atrocious things), butt rather to do it 32 years later with all the time spent in jail.
The US legal system allows for a great deal of time to be spent appealing death penalty cases, which usually takes years. Most people who support the death penalty support it happening much more quickly than decades after the sentence was passed.
Where should the exact cut off be? How many units of time after birth is it not too young for certain punishments? To me 18 sounds as reasonable as any. Why not even 16 in some cases. Or should it be say 21? Or 25? or 30?
I would rather we don’t have the death penalty at all, but if that’s off the table then I would probably do the cutoff at wherever the medical community says adolescence is done.
The medical community would not set a hard and fast date for this; or if they did they might well go with the legal and social definition (in most Western countries) of 18 years old.
It's wrong to give "the State" the right to take a life. Period.
My opinion, of course.
To be sure, there are crimes so heinous that the perpetrator can no longer be allowed to roam freely in society. You might even believe that, from a moral standpoint, they have forfeited their own right to life. But you still don't give the state the power to take it.
There are plenty of arguments for why you should not allow this, but, just an obvious one, in doing so you also give the state the right to take yours.
I think I am in broad agreement. If someone isn’t an immediate threat (and in the case of capital punishment they’re by definition confined and separated from society) then there’s no justification for killing them.
I’m not a complete bleeding heart here; I am not going to pretend that the world is a worse place because we killed Ted Bundy. He was an awful human who you could make a pretty good argument for deserving to die. I just find the idea that the state is killing people pretty bad.
You KNOW that we are living in the Twilight Zone right now. Plus a bunch of Star Trek's (Return of the Archons) and some Hitchcock. Bang! You're Dead. With Billy Mumy.
I was super busy in 1989 with work and family. I was "Mister Mom" for the evening shift, talk about busy.
Worth a look-see. Thanks. I saw the Lon Chaney Jr. and Lionel Atwill, when we had the "slightly above lowest tier" cable, which brought the old movie channels.
I am very against medicalised punishments like this. It’s bad for medicine as a whole to be associated with it. I also think it prolongs the suffering of the person and often has things like this happen, and is mainly for the benefit of the audience not wanting to see icky blood.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
Agreed. Mock executions are considered to be a form of torture. Botched executions are perhaps even worse, given the actual physical pain and severe risk of brain injuries being inflicted.
The news is that lethal injections are legal, but required a retry. GP asked: So why not a firing squad? Them retrying might be less cruel than reinjection.
If I had to die I want the injection because if it works right you just doze off and die. That compared to being tied to a pole and have people fire guns at you seems terrible. There is a significant chance of serious pain and suffering.
I think you have that the wrong way round. The injection is far more likely to cause intense pain and suffering due to the lack of medical professionals being involved (it's not a medical procedure). The drugs are often obtained from "dodgy" sources and so the dosage can't be determined due to the variability of the drugs. The lack of medical professionals will often mean that the injections are poorly administered (e.g. missing a vein).
I was just reading a Reddit post from a veterinarian and the protocol for euthanising animals is far better than that used for lethal injections - notably pre-meds are used to sedate the patient and prevent breathing issues and panic.
A bullet or two to the head is far more effective and reliable. The only downside to lethal shooting is that it looks too barbaric to observers.
"If it works right" is doing quite the heavy lifting here. The adminsitering guards are not medical professionals, nor are the people designing the protocols.
Firing squads should be making a comeback given recent Trump DOJ guidelines that break with what had been the precedent on these questions.
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
Because in the cases where we've used nitrogen gas we've observed people suffering. Nitrogen works if the victim breathes normally. But people naturally won't do that when you put the murder mask over their mouth and nose.
Some studies are warranted to determine the pattern of introduction of nitrogen that eliminates any adverse sensations. The studies could probably be done on those seeking assisted suicide.
It may make pharma look bad, but that is an entirely accurate conclusion, and that is a big reason that they’ve begun refusing to distribute the lethal drugs that have been extremely efficacious.
Medical professionals do not take part in executions. Lethal injection has the vague trappings of a medical procedure, but is fundamentally not one. Prisons even must resort to trickery to obtain the drugs, as pharmaceutical organisations are prohibited ethically and even sometimes legally from selling to them.
By and large I view the death penalty as anachronistic, but as long as it must exist, one gets the impression that firing squads and hangings are a hell of a lot more honest about what it really is.
This is what I don’t understand. You don’t need a doctor to tell you what to do. Like ChatGPT 3.5 could tell you the best way to kill a person painlessly and effectively. Why don’t they just go with something better like nitrogen asphyxiation or a morphine overdose or something?
> Why don’t they just go with something better like nitrogen asphyxiation
Alabama have just started using this method - and it appears to be extremely torturous. Rather than just passing out, the person suffocates while conscious:
Sounds like there's an additional one I'm missing at the moment. There's also been some loose murmurs about it in regards to that botched execution woman.
I’m against capital punishment and I agree with you. If it’s to be done at all, it should be brutal, bloody, and instant. Capital punishment is barbaric and shouldn’t be concealed under false cover like medical procedure.
I would guess that most people being shot and dies do so from bleeding out or disruption to breathing, and not the impact itself. The only thing that actually is guarantied to work, fast and produce minimal pain would be an high speed explosion.
I thought overdosing on opiates was highly easy to achieve, basically pain free, and also relatively cheap even in the social backwaters of the world where they have death penalties?
This is how pets are euthanized, usually, and it's about as humane as it gets. That said, you'd never sell this because the portion of the population who want the death penalty either want it to be inhumane, or would balk at the possibility of making the condemned euphoric before death.
How an opiate impact a person varies from person to person. Some would fall asleep, others would violently convulse, some would get trouble breathing, and others would get irregular heart rhythms and multiple heart attacks.
The state shouldn't be able to take your life outside of war. I've had this strict belief since junior high, maybe because I was raised catholic. I don't understand how anyone can see otherwise. Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.
Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.
Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?
> What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.
It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.
Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.
Is your belief based in something? You say "shouldn't be able to..." but, like, why not? To convince anyone else of it you'd have to agree on the framework in which states are and aren't allowed to do things.
I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
> I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them
There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.
The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.
No they're just two different things. That's my point. On the one hand the state is delegated with using violence for protection. On the other hand the state is delegated with carrying out retribution.
If you had no state you would see people build the exact same delegations in private: first, people would enact their own protection and retribution; then, they would coordinate to make it more just by centralizing those powers and (theoretically) subordinating them to some system of justice that uses them more fairly than individuals would. We're just on the other side of that process, which is why I'm saying it's the explanation for why the state has those powers.
This has no bearing on the morality of "should the state do this"; it's just how it actually is, and why it makes sense of the minds of people who are okay with it (since the OP said they couldn't imagine a reason).
But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen. (In practice though, you definitely are, you're just going to modulate how extreme it can be, i.e. killing people vs incarcerating them.) Just, IMO, the people who pretend like the justice system is not at all about retribution and only about rehabilitation/protection are... living in a fairy tale version of reality. Like I would love if that were the case, and if everyone was reformable and came out repentant for their behavior then it would be possible, but in practice, people want other people punished for their crimes. Consider that the point of jailing executives for fraud, which everyone wants more of, is not to prevent fraud but to actually punish them. Since it is the punishing that has a theoretical chance of stopping other people from fraud.
> But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen.
You educate/culture it out of them, which is what the Nordics, and Western Europe more generally, choose to do. Seems to be working fine so far.
> Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.
What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.
Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.
you will be glad to know my weight against killing someone innocent is very high. personally i think the only defensible version of capital punishment uses it only in the case where there is literally no doubt about the guilt, like, many unbiased people saw it happen or there's a recording or they credibly confess or stuff like that. it boggles my mind that it is used outside of this. Feels like people say "beyond the shadow of a doubt" and then somehow don't mean it? Everyone is detective-story pilled like they think a watertight explanation of a thing is the same thing as eliminating doubt, and that's just not at all true.
I'd go so far as to say that the standard should be, if people agree on capital punishment and turn out to be wrong, then they should be tried for murder themselves. Not fair as things are currently designed because the standard is (apparently!) not that high, but that's how high I would set it.
but anyway I was not describing my own view but rather what I saw as the view of people who generally support it by default, since the OP did not seem to understood how that was possible.
The state has a monopoly on violence. In exchange for this great power we expect great responsibility. A state that is flippant with its use of violence signals something to its people. I believe that even if there are zero incorrect convictions that the state should use the minimum of violence to improve the safety of the populace. The death penalty (as opposed to lwop) does not protect anybody from crime. It does not deter people. Its only function is vengeance. And when the state uses violence in vengeance it degrades society.
yeah but then you quibble over the definition of "flippant". What if the state is maximally responsible about its use of violence, so there's no arguing that it could be any more violence. Now what? You have to find a different argument.
(Well, there is the "the limiting case of maximum responsibility is still nonzero errors therefore it is always unjust", which is a coherent stance, but I kinda get the impression that it's a fake one? Like it is not the actual reason that the people who profess it are opposed to the death penalty; instead it's a reason they kinda confabulate to justify their opposition even though it's not their actual reason. Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly. (this is all me trying to vibe out where other people are coming from, though, so I could be wrong)
I was describing the thought process: the reason for a death penalty (which, to be clear, I am not arguing for either way, I am describing why I think it has come to be at a practical level) is that given that vengeance/retribution is a thing that people 'want', the state assumes the responsibility of carrying it out (responsibly) so as to avoid vigilantism / preserve the monopoly.
I didn’t realize you weren’t arguing in favor. Still I do see this formulation frequently used to argue for capital punishment. They will fall back on claims of protection whenever challenged, but the core argument (that not everyone accepts!) is that victims have a right to vengeance.
I think people are get very muddled when they attempt to put their positions into words. That doesn't necessarily mean they're being deceptive. Sometimes it's just a skill issue. I think that what I have described is the "coherent" version of the position (the steelman, if you like). I like to lay it out like that because it makes the discussion about the thing it is actually about, which is, as you said, whether a right to vengeance makes sense or is something we want to enshrine in our society.
Now that I'm thinking about it there is at least one other coherent position I know of for it, which is: if you start out thinking of life as rather 'disposable' (so humans are somewhat equivalent to animals, which we regularly raise to eat; war is okay; things like that), then the argument for keeping people alive is that they contribute to society or at least don't heavily detract from it, and the argument for putting them to death is that people have proven themselves not even worth keeping alive. This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is. but I do think it is ultimately how a lot of people think about it, as well---at least in regard to people who are not part their personal community.
> This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is.
This risk shouldn’t be understated—there’s a lot of unpersoning happening right now among those with political sway, and if it continues we could easily swing back around to the eugenics and mass killing of the early 20th century. The modern notion of human rights was explicitly created as a reaction to the mass death and atrocities of the world wars.
There’s a tendency among the powerful to view those at the bottom as “useless eaters,” so when you start making decisions about who should be “kept alive” this can become quite dangerous.
I’m against death penalty, but if you must do it, can’t you give them a massive and gradual drug overdose? It’s reliable and maybe less horrific than some of these stories you read.
Or would giving murderers recreational drugs not please Us voters?
The case became sensationalized when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”
What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!
Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.
If you read her bio, this lady was dealt some of the worst cards you could possibly get. She stood almost no chance.
More recently, she seems to have saved more than one life in prison.
> Jones later testified that Pike had intervened to protect other inmates before the 2001 incident. A 2025 episode of the podcast Unrestorable, which examined Pike's years in solitary confinement, reported that Jones had attempted to kill at least three other women and that Pike had intervened in each incident, including pulling one woman away from cell bars, pulling another away from a toilet, and intervening when Jones was strangling another woman with a telephone cord. In reporting on Pike's scheduled execution, WTVF-TV, republishing reporting from the Nashville Banner, reported that Jones later testified that Pike had intervened in a fight between Jones and another inmate and likely saved the other woman's life.
At least the press in Nazi Germany is honest when they witness the regime botching an execution:
In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Glad the Nazi Supreme Court stepped in and honorable judges put their name under the order that allowed this to happen.
It’s easy to sign someone’s death warrant as long as you’re not the one having to press the buttons or pulling the trigger.
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 14.2 ms ] thread2026 is really something else. 3 months left.
So they tried to kill her and then provided medical aid? What the fuck are we doing as a country. Goddamn.
I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.
I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.
My opinion, of course.
To be sure, there are crimes so heinous that the perpetrator can no longer be allowed to roam freely in society. You might even believe that, from a moral standpoint, they have forfeited their own right to life. But you still don't give the state the power to take it.
There are plenty of arguments for why you should not allow this, but, just an obvious one, in doing so you also give the state the right to take yours.
I’m not a complete bleeding heart here; I am not going to pretend that the world is a worse place because we killed Ted Bundy. He was an awful human who you could make a pretty good argument for deserving to die. I just find the idea that the state is killing people pretty bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Made_Monster
You KNOW that we are living in the Twilight Zone right now. Plus a bunch of Star Trek's (Return of the Archons) and some Hitchcock. Bang! You're Dead. With Billy Mumy.
https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/alfred-hitchcock-gun-contr...
Worth a look-see. Thanks. I saw the Lon Chaney Jr. and Lionel Atwill, when we had the "slightly above lowest tier" cable, which brought the old movie channels.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.
(Also, for many, there’s something wrong with capital punishment, to start with, but that’s a different discussion)
US case law disagrees. From a botched execution of a child, even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Francis
I was just reading a Reddit post from a veterinarian and the protocol for euthanising animals is far better than that used for lethal injections - notably pre-meds are used to sedate the patient and prevent breathing issues and panic.
A bullet or two to the head is far more effective and reliable. The only downside to lethal shooting is that it looks too barbaric to observers.
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
So why not put the patient to sleep first with anesthetic drugs? After that the mask should not be a bother.
(As demonstrated by this botched execution, which used pentobarbital - a barbituate used for anaesthesia)
https://eji.org/issues/alabama-botched-executions/
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5cp4NxZt8KMjA9Wa7?g_st=ac
Pharma would rather stick to their core competencies, such as pesticides and herbicides.
By and large I view the death penalty as anachronistic, but as long as it must exist, one gets the impression that firing squads and hangings are a hell of a lot more honest about what it really is.
Alabama have just started using this method - and it appears to be extremely torturous. Rather than just passing out, the person suffocates while conscious:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/26/alabama-nitr...
> or a morphine overdose
Nebraska has tried using fentanyl. But the drug manufacturers are against it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45185687
Coming back in fashion? I've heard of at least two executions recently in which the condemned requested and were granted a firing squad execution.
https://scdailygazette.com/2025/11/14/death-row-inmate-set-t...
Sounds like there's an additional one I'm missing at the moment. There's also been some loose murmurs about it in regards to that botched execution woman.
A guillotine would also be acceptable.
The last execution by guillotine in France was surprisingly recent; 1977, the same year Star Wars was released.
There is also some evidence that the head may stay conscious after decapitation (which would make it unnecessarily cruel):
https://www.newsweek.com/nerve-connection-body-mind-decapita...
What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.
Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.
Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?
Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.
It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.
Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill". Quakers kind of take that to mean what it says.
I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.
The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.
If you had no state you would see people build the exact same delegations in private: first, people would enact their own protection and retribution; then, they would coordinate to make it more just by centralizing those powers and (theoretically) subordinating them to some system of justice that uses them more fairly than individuals would. We're just on the other side of that process, which is why I'm saying it's the explanation for why the state has those powers.
This has no bearing on the morality of "should the state do this"; it's just how it actually is, and why it makes sense of the minds of people who are okay with it (since the OP said they couldn't imagine a reason).
But, I think, if you aren't going to let the state carry out vengeance at all, you do need to figure out what you're going to do about people's desire for it to happen. (In practice though, you definitely are, you're just going to modulate how extreme it can be, i.e. killing people vs incarcerating them.) Just, IMO, the people who pretend like the justice system is not at all about retribution and only about rehabilitation/protection are... living in a fairy tale version of reality. Like I would love if that were the case, and if everyone was reformable and came out repentant for their behavior then it would be possible, but in practice, people want other people punished for their crimes. Consider that the point of jailing executives for fraud, which everyone wants more of, is not to prevent fraud but to actually punish them. Since it is the punishing that has a theoretical chance of stopping other people from fraud.
You educate/culture it out of them, which is what the Nordics, and Western Europe more generally, choose to do. Seems to be working fine so far.
What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.
Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.
If you'd like to understand the imperfection more concretely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...
I'd go so far as to say that the standard should be, if people agree on capital punishment and turn out to be wrong, then they should be tried for murder themselves. Not fair as things are currently designed because the standard is (apparently!) not that high, but that's how high I would set it.
but anyway I was not describing my own view but rather what I saw as the view of people who generally support it by default, since the OP did not seem to understood how that was possible.
(Well, there is the "the limiting case of maximum responsibility is still nonzero errors therefore it is always unjust", which is a coherent stance, but I kinda get the impression that it's a fake one? Like it is not the actual reason that the people who profess it are opposed to the death penalty; instead it's a reason they kinda confabulate to justify their opposition even though it's not their actual reason. Their actual reason is closer to: nothing will ever get them to fully trust the state with killing. Which is much more reasonable, IMO, so I wish they would just state that directly. (this is all me trying to vibe out where other people are coming from, though, so I could be wrong)
I was describing the thought process: the reason for a death penalty (which, to be clear, I am not arguing for either way, I am describing why I think it has come to be at a practical level) is that given that vengeance/retribution is a thing that people 'want', the state assumes the responsibility of carrying it out (responsibly) so as to avoid vigilantism / preserve the monopoly.
I guess that or go full on Judge Dredd.
Bailey: vengeance
Now that I'm thinking about it there is at least one other coherent position I know of for it, which is: if you start out thinking of life as rather 'disposable' (so humans are somewhat equivalent to animals, which we regularly raise to eat; war is okay; things like that), then the argument for keeping people alive is that they contribute to society or at least don't heavily detract from it, and the argument for putting them to death is that people have proven themselves not even worth keeping alive. This opens a whole different can of worms though where you have to explain where your bar for keeping people alive is. but I do think it is ultimately how a lot of people think about it, as well---at least in regard to people who are not part their personal community.
This risk shouldn’t be understated—there’s a lot of unpersoning happening right now among those with political sway, and if it continues we could easily swing back around to the eugenics and mass killing of the early 20th century. The modern notion of human rights was explicitly created as a reaction to the mass death and atrocities of the world wars.
There’s a tendency among the powerful to view those at the bottom as “useless eaters,” so when you start making decisions about who should be “kept alive” this can become quite dangerous.
Or would giving murderers recreational drugs not please Us voters?
What a cruel mess.
What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!
Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.
More recently, she seems to have saved more than one life in prison.
> Jones later testified that Pike had intervened to protect other inmates before the 2001 incident. A 2025 episode of the podcast Unrestorable, which examined Pike's years in solitary confinement, reported that Jones had attempted to kill at least three other women and that Pike had intervened in each incident, including pulling one woman away from cell bars, pulling another away from a toilet, and intervening when Jones was strangling another woman with a telephone cord. In reporting on Pike's scheduled execution, WTVF-TV, republishing reporting from the Nashville Banner, reported that Jones later testified that Pike had intervened in a fight between Jones and another inmate and likely saved the other woman's life.
In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Glad the Nazi Supreme Court stepped in and honorable judges put their name under the order that allowed this to happen.
It’s easy to sign someone’s death warrant as long as you’re not the one having to press the buttons or pulling the trigger.