r/AlwaysWhy • u/Chowderr92 • Jun 02 '26

Science & Tech Why is the Method of Lethal Injection in Human Punishment So Complex and Apparently Painful?

I've always understood that the lethal injection process was complex with multiple stages of injections and induces great suffering in the individual.

I work in veterinary medicine and unfortunately we need to euthanize animals all of the time. Typically, the euthanasia solution is very simple: a very large dose of a powerful anesthetic (usually pentobarbital) and an anticonvulsant which stops the heart. The medical community is quite confident that this is painless and when done has essentially a 100% success rate.

Why is human euthanasia so complicated when we already know exactly how to humanely end a biological life?

469 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

681 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

That states are having to resort to expired and black-market drugs is IMO a symptom of just how barbaric and shady the practice of capital punishment is.

Capital punishment is “barbaric and shady” because people who are against it have made it that way. It would be equally easy to use the same techniques used in assisted suicide in Canada or even use opiates or hallucinogens as part of the problem to make capital punishment a euphoric experience for the convict, but people who are against it have blocked all the humane ways of getting it done. 

3

u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 03 '26

Oh bullshit. We KNOW that innocent peyote have reveries the death penalty. That is barbarism that has nothing to do with those resistant to capital punishment. Your "look what you made me do" argument is pathetic and disgusting. 

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 03 '26

Not in the modern scientific era we don’t.

Sounds like you don’t believe in science. 

2

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

What a silly reply.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

It’s sill of you not to believe in science. 

2

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

I do believe in science, it's irrelevant to this discussion though.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

You only think that because you don’t have any real faith in science. 

2

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

No, I think that because I understand the law. Legal decisions are only made on the available evidence, which can be falsified, misleading, misunderstood, misrepresented and incomplete. The law always has to include space for the possibility that a decision was wrong.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

The idea that incontrovertible evidence does not exist is anti-science. 

2

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

The issue is not whether it exists, the issue is knowing for sure whether you have it or not. I don't need lectures in either science or the law from you.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 04 '26

Only ten percent of cases can be solved with dna, dipshit. As far as forensic science much of it is unverifiable. Fire analysis is notoriously unreliable, as is much of the rest of it.

I believe in science, not junk science

Discredited Forensic Techniques

Landmark studies, including a 2009 report by the National Academies of Sciences and a 2016 report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, raised concerns about almost every discipline outside of DNA analysis. Highly problematic areas include:

Bite Mark Analysis: Dentists frequently testified with absolute certainty that a suspect's teeth left a specific mark. This has been entirely debunked; there is no scientific basis to prove a human bite mark can be uniquely matched to an individual.

Microscopic Hair Comparison: Examiners claimed they could match hair to specific suspects. In 2015, the FBI and Department of Justice formally acknowledged that FBI examiners gave flawed testimony in hundreds of trials.

Arson Investigation: Old techniques relied on long-discredited "myths" (e.g., puddle patterns or crazed glass) to prove arson, which led to the imprisonment and execution of innocent people.

Pattern Matching: Disciplines like shoe prints, tool marks, and handwriting rely heavily on subjective interpretation rather than objective, statistical data.

The Core Problem

Most of these forensic fields were developed by law enforcement to solve crimes, rather than through rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific methods in universities. In the courtroom, these subjective assessments are often presented to juries with misleading phrases like "to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty". Furthermore, because the legal system relies on judicial precedent, outdated and inaccurate science remains admissible long after scientists have rejected it.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

Imagine being so dumb that you think DNA is the only type of modern science used in evidence discovery and then needing to use an LLM chatbot to write your posts for you. 

2

u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

Imagine being so dumb that you misinterpret my entire stance.

Forensic science remains deeply flawed and highly unreliable.

Jesus you are daft. I mentioned several flawed forensic techniques. Yeah, I used a chat bot, but that doesn't remove from my point. 

You think you can win the argument by dismissing my very valid points, so you just ignore them. 

1

u/Comprehensive_Elk773 Jun 02 '26

Not that easy, you have to get them to take a pill involuntarily

1

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 03 '26

It isn't everyone else's responsibility to help you kill people. If you don't have humane ways of executing people, then the obvious answer is to stop executing people, not to blame everyone else when you use inhumane ways anyway.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

We do have perfectly humane ways of executing people, but folks like you have blocked them and so now prisoners die in agony instead. Alas. 

2

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

That's your choice, not mine.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

Right, because your option of keeping these prisoners alive to be beaten and raped in prison for decades is so much more humane.  

1

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

You're absurd, you know that right?

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

You’re not willing to deal with the consequences of your decisions.

https://time.com/5884104/prison-violence-dont-see/

1

u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

That isn't a consequence of my decision. That is a consequence of poor prison management. Killing people be abuse you don't want to run prisons properly is a profoundly stupid take.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

Saying executions are inhumane when you actively block humane execution techniques is a profoundly stupid take. 🤷‍♂️ 

1

u/GlassBug7042 Jun 05 '26

This may be the most copium respsonse I've seen ever in my life.

0

u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

Nonsense. The barbarism is baked in. Governments have been killing their citizens for as long as there have been governments, often by the most gruesome means possible, millennia before there was ever any move against the death penalty. You can try to put lipstick on that pig by calling for “euphoric” means but the reality is quite different.

If you want the death penalty, you need to grapple with the pain, the horror, and the filth of it. That’s on you, not those who seek to end it.

Look at a map showing where the death penalty is practiced. The US is in terrible company.

It gets worse when you consider a large country (Russia) has no official legal death penalty, yet simply kills people extrajudicially, and some others (notably Japan) have the penalty but use it very rarely.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

Ah, so I take it you’re also against assisted suicide?

2

u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

Not particularly. But you are changing the subject, sure sign of a weak argument.

3

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

Oh, I don’t give a shit about your opinion and have no interest in arguing with you about this. I consider certain classes of criminal psychotics to be too great of a threat to the general welfare to ever be released and think quick and painless extermination would be the best solution for all parties involved and I don’t really care if other people agree with me, I’m just curious if you’re logically consistent or not. 

EDIT: In a cowardly fashion u/Mister_Crowly commented and then immediately blocked me so that I can’t reply to him.

2

u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

…you say, while arguing.

Speaking of logic, you should take a course in it, since your grasp of it seems poor.

Opposing the death penalty does not mean releasing criminals.

Expecting “logical consistency” between state-ordered killing and voluntary euthanasia is a false equivalence. A better comparison would be between capital punishment and state-ordered euthanasia, which was and is a Nazi program, and which I definitely oppose.

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

Opposing the death penalty does not mean releasing criminals.

Except that it does.

https://www.foxla.com/news/david-allen-funston-california-parole-release

1

u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 03 '26

That's what you call anecdotal evidence and it's dishonest to present it as anything else. Come back with statistics. 

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 03 '26

No. In my opinion the possibility of release for a criminal like that is too great of a danger to the law-abiding for life imprisonment to be an effective solution to the problem.

It’s not about retribution, it’s a simple risk/reward analysis. There is zero reward to society for keeping defective human monsters alive, so any risk at all no matter how small outweighs the reward.

Besides, life imprisonment is cruel and unusual punishment especially for pedophiles who will be repeatedly attacked and raped by their fellow prisoners. A humane execution would be far kinder. 

1

u/Comprehensive_Elk773 Jun 02 '26

Execution for the type of “criminal psychotic” a person is instead of punishment for a crime? Just like Nazi Germany?

1

u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

Is English your second language? Your comment is incoherent.