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Imagine waking up in the hospital where they have to get you healthy enough to discharge in order to send you back to death row

I don't think a doctor at a hospital gets to change her level of care just because her patient is condemned to death.

My reading of the situation is that she suffered severe brain damage. It might be debatable if 'she' is even there any more for them to try and kill a third time.

When firing squads were a thing here there would be multiple shooters firing simultaneously but only one of them had live ammo. This was to "protect" the executioners from having to know who actually killed the person.

I'm sure they would even have a sign up sheet for who gets to be on execution duty that week.

Fuck, that's so depressing. It's wild that the US still executes people, but mentally ill teenagers who suffered abuse as kids? These people need help, not the death penalty.

They don't want humane killing, we can do that. They want sanitized killing where the people wanting execution don't feel gross about it and the people being executed still feel pain, either emotionally or physically but ideally both.

If you wanted to make sure it was done so the inmate feels no pain we can do that. You could drug an inmate with ambien so they go to sleep, then anesthetize them deeper, put them in a gurney and wheel them into a room where their head is blown off by a very large shotgun. This would be foolproof and easy for the prisoner, but would be obviously barbaric.

They want the appearance of being civilized while doing an uncivilized act, so we have this circus instead.

Reading the eyewitness accounts from the botched execution, fucking wild is an understatement.

They had non medical trained staff administering it, old and untested drugs that came from unknown sources, they closed the blinds on multiple occasions so no one in the public really knows everything that happened behind the scenes.

One reporter even said they have never seen an execution like this and they have attended a lot.

Republicans are the animal side of humans.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that " meaningful appellate review was a prerequisite to any constitutionally acceptable scheme of capital punishment." There are myriad required hearings and appeals before an execution can take place. Those hearings and appeals often take years because of all the trials and hearings over evidence and the fact that the court systems are so backlogged.

All those appeals are important though.

As of June 2021, 33 of the men and women wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death since states resumed capital punishment in the 1970s had waited 20 or more years to be exonerated. Seventeen who were exonerated between 2010 and June 2021 had waited 25 years or more for their exonerations and, for twelve, exoneration took 30 years or more.

It is absolutely necessary to take all this time to make sure that the courts get it right. There's no going back. If someone gets a life sentence and, three decades later, new evidence shows that they were not guilty, they can be released. If they've been executed, then an innocent person is dead and the guilty party will never be caught because no one will be looking for them because the authorities believe the crime to have been solved.

Even with all the mandatory trials and appeals, the courts still apparently get it wrong. I say apparently because the courts are notoriously reluctant to look into cases once someone has been executed. In many cases, it seems like the courts will strive to cover up even prosecutorial negligence or worse in order to protect their own reputation.

Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed issued a report in 2007 finding that Ruben Cantu was guilty of the crime for which Texas executed him in 1993. However, critics have noted that Reed was formerly a judge who handled Cantu’s appeal and set his execution date, raising a conflict of interest in conducing an investigation of his guilt.

You are right, in my opinion, to oppose the death penalty. Despite all the effort to make sure the courts get it right, they still make mistakes and execute the wrong person, which means that the real criminal is still free and a threat to society. Also, because of all the mandatory hearings, DP cases are normally far more expensive to the tax payer than life sentences. Added security and special holding facilities and required hearings mean that death penalty cases end up costing 2.5 - 5 times more than life without parol.

For example:

To try to assess whether there are significantly different costs between these two penalties, researchers sent out surveys electronically to judges, prosecutors, public defenders and victim advocates in nine Pennsylvania judicial districts of varying population sizes and caseloads that had past or current capital murder cases. In its conclusion, the Task Force cited to a 2016 study of death penalty costs by The Reading Eagle (see below for more detail) which estimated that $272,000,000 had been spent per execution in Pennsylvania since 1978. The Task Force also found that post-conviction correctional costs were 47% higher on average in capital cases than non-capital cases, and that there is no evidence that ​“guilty pleas for capital murder cases offset the extra costs incurred and other resources consumed for capital cases that do not result in a guilty plea.”

Because the people are fighting for their lives. If they choose not to fight it all happens relatively fast.

If it takes that long it's because the person is appealing it. A right that we thankfully still have.

Don't worry, she's a prisoner so the tax payer will fund her medical bills, no expense should be spared to save her so we can kill her (also at your expense).

For one, that has also failed to kill people. Second, the "techniques" used for execution are made to be as impersonal as possible; in most cases the person doing the killing doesn't see the person being killed when they take the action, the only exception that I know of being firing squad, but the condemned is still made to wear a hood. It's cowardice masked as "humane" because they don't want the executioner to have PTSD from taking another human's life.

If you're going to kill people, there are so many better ways:

Long drop hanging: gets the job done, quite effective, mature technology. Sometimes rips a head off (gruesome, but not more painful to the victim) or fails to break the neck (leads to rapid unconsciousness due to interruption of blood supply to the brain and cerebral oedema, then death by asphyxiation / cardiac arrest)

Guillotine: very effective if the machine is well designed and maintained. Makes a bit of a mess, but if you do it in a room that's designed like an abattoir, it's easy enough to clean up. Probably not much suffering for the victim - it's debatable whether one can maintain consciousness, but either way, not for a long time.

Shooting: can be relatively humane if done properly, but can be messed up quite badly. In East Germany they did it by an unexpected shot to the back of the head at close range, which is surprisingly humane, considering what that government was capable of.

Nitrogen gas: leads to rapid, painless loss of consciousness. The victim will convulse, but they're not conscious anymore by that time. If your systems are set up properly, it's very effective.

But the bottom line is that it's not a good policy to kill convicted criminals. No justice system is perfect, so innocents get executed. It's been repeatedly shown to be ineffective as a deterrent. It's difficult to do well, so it ends up being expensive, in most cases more expensive than just keeping them locked up.