If the state wants to execute somebody it had better find a way that doesn't take 25-minutes to kill.
Ohio is now officially the State of 'death by torture.' Unable to get a supply of lethal injection drugs from the European companies that will no longer tolerate the use of their products for judicial euthanasia, Ohio opted for a two-drug cocktail of its own making. Ignoring protests, what ensued was obscenely grotesque.
A death row inmate who was executed by the state of Ohio on Thursday with an untried and untested combination of two medical drugs appeared to gasp and snort in a procedure that took an unusually long 25 minutes to kill him.
Dennis McGuire was pronounced dead at 10.53am at the Southern Ohio Correctional facility in Lucasville. His lawyers had warned ahead of the proceeding that the experimental combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone might subject him to “air hunger”, an insufficient flow of air into the lungs causing the sensation of suffocation.
In court proceedings last week, an Ohio state prosecutor said bluntly: “You're not entitled to a pain-free execution,” and a judge allowed the execution to proceed.
A reporter for the Associated Press, which sends a journalist to every execution in the US, wrote that McGuire “appeared to gasp several times during his prolonged execution ... McGuire made several loud snorting or snoring sounds during the more than 15 minutes it appeared to take him to die. It was one of the longest executions since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999. McGuire's stomach rose and fell several times as he repeatedly opened and shut his mouth.”
Another eye-witness report from the Columbus Dispatch provided concurring evidence. Dispatch reporter Alan Johnson wrote that four minutes into the procedure, "McGuire started struggling and gasping loudly for air, making snorting and choking sounds which lasted for at least 10 minutes. His chest heaved and his left fist clinched as deep, snorting sounds emanated from his mouth."
What kind of fucking animals are these Americans? Hitler garroted his would-be assassins with piano wire but they didn't endure 25-minutes of agony.
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I have waited all day pondering whether to even post this. Yet it has to be told and retold, again and again, so that we can see plainly the face of people who dismiss this saying "You're not entitled to a pain-free execution." Just who does that cretin speak for, what sort of society does he represent?
4 comments:
Barbarians
The prosecutor is a professional; we are members of a society; and something needs a good shaking.
It wasn’t that long ago that remarks such as that made by the prosecutor would only be expected to have come from a bystander considered by the standards of civil society to be emotionally disturbed, or from a child or a very immature teenager. And now we witness the urge to identify publicly with such an attitude by an adult member of the legal profession. Why couldn’t it have worked for him if he’d just closed his book on the case and kept his mouth shut? I guess he just had to show the public how much he really despises murdering rapists, as if he does any more so than the rest of the people do. Notwithstanding the perversity of condoning torture, it’s whatever motivated him to make that remark that disturbs me more than anything else. It comes across as though this person, much as some murdering rapists have done. is actually celebrating the infliction of pain. My brother would have said, “He’s a sick man.”
The callousness is extreme. I wonder if he was obliged to attend the execution.
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