That quotation and other sources report that the Italian government wouldn’t license Hospira to run a plant in Italy that manufactured sodium thiopental unless Hospira could guarantee that the drug would not be used in lethal injection, a guarantee Hospira could not provide.

Those are intensely different demands from the Italian government and is a fundamental misrepresentation of the Italian government’s stance on the issue.

Thanks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine#Living_heads

If they’re going to execute me I want to be strapped to nothing less than a 20 megaton hydrogen bomb. Either I die instantly or end up with super powers.

i don’t disagree that dying while unconscious is peaceful, but i’m saying that executions aren’t in anyone’s best interest

kindly share the data you’re referring to; it would help to enliven the debate

The law passed states that for “the drug to be sold it must be stated that the use of the product is allowed only in hospitals and in the contract of sale must be clearly specified that Hospira cannot allow the distribution of the product for the practice of lethal injection”.

This is unlikely to have been a surprise to Hospira, as they agreed to it in a meeting with the Italian Health Minister before the legislation was put to parliament.

The state execution of individuals who have committed (or often, not) acts against the community — this therefore includes kidnapping, treason, and murder — is an offence against every individual within that state as it makes them an involuntary participant in killing another human being.

Given the prosecution record of many states, and the rate of now acknowledged error, it seems appalling to me that any civilized human being, especially someone who calls himself a Christian, would condone capital punishment.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth …” comes from the Old Testament and is a pretty primitive method of problem solving. I am amazed (and appalled) that people still think it justified.

It is essentially the difference of being a direct party to the production of lethal injection drugs (providing a license to manufacture) and taking forceful action to protest lethal injection by punishing those who are a party to it (refusing to buy from those companies that manufacture it).

That’s a HUGE difference.

Low blood pressure results in a “faint”, a temporary loss of consciousness that lasts from a few seconds to a few minutes.

Consequences include: horizontal posture to increase blood flow, and facial injury.

So an effective guillioutine (one that actually seperates the head from the body quickly) should be “ouch, nothing” quite quickly (in less than a few seconds)

Nevertheless I’ve never understood the argument of quick and humane execution. If the crime is so heinous to require execution, why shouldn’t the perpetrator suffer? Alternatively, if execution is cruel, why kill in the name of justice?

If I wanted to punish someone, they would need to live in agony. In a bizarre way, the death penalty is the kindest revenge ever.

On that note, I wonder if they’ll run into similar issues if they switch to a different agent for lethal injections. Italy manufactures a lot of propofol…

Dropped out of an airplane while inside a flaming 1964 Chevy and sitting next to two rabid gorillas?

Probably wouldn’t cost as much, and it’s *definitely* morally abhorrent. Win-Win!

But getting back to the argument about Nitrogen I suppose there are many factors which limit using it for a murder. Most rooms aren’t sealed enough to keep the nitrogen in. Nitrogen straight out of a container is very cold and might wake the victim up before they pass out. For a decent sized room you would need a lot of nitrogen and tracing it back to the source might not be so hard. There can’t be that many places which use the stuff.

Gun store owner’s next move if he’s to be consistent is to not sell the ammunition to Mr. Gunman.

And the other gun store owners have confederated together to starve Mr. Gunman which makes me quite cheerful this morning.

I heard that someone met their demise while inside a wood chipper. Should the victim’s family sue the wood chipper manufacturer because the owner of said wood chipper misused the product?

That’s a poor comparison for two reasons. First, the families of those being executed aren’t suing anybody. Second, there was no ambiguity here about how the product was to be used by the customer so it’s more like someone walking into your hardware store and saying “I need a woodchipper to dispose of a body. Can I buy that one?”

A better analogy would be the U.S. government penalizing any domestic company that knowingly sold power tools to a foreign dictator’s interrogators for the explicit purpose of committing torture.

my friend still lives with the stigma of a wrongful murder conviction but if he had lived in a country that still executed it’s convicts then he too may have taken his innocence to his grave

i also have empathy for relatives of the murder victims who don’t know who to blame for their loss.

justice systems are imperfect so they should not have irreversible sentences

Whether contemporary states should be executing anyone for capital crimes should be a discussion based upon contemporary morality, but not on historic antisemitic claims.

you would need a lot of nitrogen and tracing it back to the source might not be so hard. There can’t be that many places which use the stuff.

Every chem lab in the world for starters… so, millions of places. It’s cheap and reasonably inert so it has thousands of uses.

I can buy tanks of nitrogen for cash, no questions asked, at the gas tower where they fraction out argon for welders. I bet I could buy a thousand pounds of it from praxair while dressed in a zoot suit and a studded codpiece. And why not? It’s no more dangerous than a brick or a toilet, you can kill a dozen people easily by dropping a couple toilets off a roof. Nitrogen tanks last a long time, too – it’s not uncommon to get gas tanks with defaced swastikas on them, that were made in Germany in the early 40s and are still in use in the USA today. So good luck tracing a tank back to a cash purchaser.

When you compress air to get the argon and oxygen out for sale, you get a lot of nitrogen. Air is over 75% nitrogen, so it’s cheap and readily available.

An engineer in me does not understand what’s so difficult in killing someone “humanely” when world is full of substances that will render anyone “peacefully” unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes. It seems plain stupid to inject someone with stuff that can fail painfully.

First, the “Rich Elite” do not fear it, though they do by far more damage to society.

Second, it’s somehow found a way to be even stupider and crueler than “The bloody heel of authority” it was before. Now it’s just “Justice by Points” against the poor who maybe killed someone. The persecutors aka District Attorneys who bring charges do it for “Points” and don’t care a whit except to get a conviction.

Third, it doesn’t stop the next murder by a second. And it costs more to keep someone alive in prison for life than to kill them and woe to us when some RightTard uses the next Charlie Manson to push through some way around the “Appeals” process…

Fourth, and far from last, there is a being that in one of the texts attributed to him said that man is not to kill. Now, I dislike those who claim to be his eyes and ears and religion in general, but I do after a life of denying believe in that being. Killing in self-defense might be one thing, but killing a helpless person if there’s a way to get around it (fill prison space) is murder. Modern society is no “Frontier” where perhaps you actually can’t afford to feed a prisoner for life in a cage.

And, if I start my own society, (sea stead, re-claiming after supervolcano/epidemic) I might well include capital punishment. Like I said, a frontier couldn’t afford life in prison or managed slavery. But I’d make NO pretense it wasn’t murder. Decapitation with a sword. Dangling a person in the water so sharks and other fishes rip them apart for days. And I’d make sure there was a process where “The Rich” could indeed be executed if their financial manipulation hurt society, chiefly that their lawyer would face death with them if his defense failed.

Since no one ever complains about it hurting, it’s probably painless, too. Over before it begins.