Capital punishment in the US needs to be debated on its own merits and may eventually go the way of Canada. Until then, a humane society needs to choose the most humane method of employing it
Lethal injection executions, back in the news, just aren't working. For a variety of reasons. While they are bloodless (so is strangulation, starvation, and being broken on the wheel), it appears they often are not painless. They most certainly are not quick, sometimes taking hours. They arguably violate the Hippocratic Oath in having a doctor perform them, yet you hardly want an amateur to perform them. And drug companies don't want their products associated with causing death. Go figure!
So that's it, right? The U.S. is out of tricks. (Canada abolished the death penalty long ago.) Or so capital punishment opponents would like us to think, as a backdoor means of ending the entire institution in the U.S. But while there may be serious moral grounds for ending executions to consider, it's not logical to ban it strictly on grounds that there's no form that's totally painless, bloodless, and quick. Presumably the victims of the perpetrators did not die in such a manner.
