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Assuming they whack you with enough electricity, you die in seconds after they switch you on.
Lethal injection's a different story...WAY too many people have come out of the anesthetic they give you as the first drug...while the second drug, which stops your breathing, is working. That shit takes several minutes to do its job, and from what I've heard it's a painful drug to have in your system. Think about that poor asshole they injected in Ohio--the one who turned his head and yelled at the execution team, "this isn't working."
This is kind of a neat editorial written many years ago by the man who invented the electric chair...
We are living in an age of the world's history which requires every individual to live in obedience to
"law and order" established by civilized governments. The laws of any country which have for their object
the correction and regulation of human action and to determine between the right and the wrong are
progressive in their nature, like other institutions of the world. France has taken the lead among nations by abolishing the death sentence -- the most barbarous of all laws -- be it ever said to her credit!
I have always leaned toward the side of that justice which demands that capital punishment be abolished. I have, however, fathered electrocution as the most humane method of execution, and this method has become the law of several states. This mode of legal execution was brought forward by me owning to the fact that it is the quickest and most certain of all death penalties. Nevertheless I am for the banishment of this most barbarous practice. This relic of the dark ages is one of the evils afflicting the enlightened civilized nations of the present era.
In reality capital punishment is only legalized murder. Justice does not go with human passions, and a perfectly dispassionate and unbiased judgment is a myth. The chief aim with a true surgeon is to save a limb, not take it off. So it should be with the state.
The making of a man and citizen is a tremendous undertaking, and so long as the law acts not as a protector and developer of childhood and youth into manhood, saving it from the lurking and insidious foes to heath and virtues that are the true menace of our civilization, so long criminals and murderers will be made by the very law that later steps in to condemn them.
The state is inflicting capital punishment upon a murderer is like the false mother in the judgment of Solomon -- she prefers a dead son to a son whom she can reclaim by justice seasoned with mercy. The true mother should redeem the criminal by keeping him out of harm's way, while at the same time promoting his moral and spiritual welfare and making him by proper punishment and suitable work a useful though restricted member of the State.
If capital punishment were abolished, would murderers suffer any less, since they would receive not only the punishment still open to infliction by the law but also the retribution? In Thibet, for the citizens of which we feel so great a ontempt, there is a reverence for that very principle of life that our civilization might do well to follow in many respects, and when where, if there are willing to suffer from the inroads of vermin, at least every man's life is sacred to the law that created him.
The true scientific solution of the difficulty is to redeem the murderer, like other criminals, and to give him a change to work out his salvation on principles dependent upon a true civilization, rather than that bequeathed to us from the middle ages.
When we can produce Life let us take it; until then let us utilize the punishment of criminals for the benefit of the state. As Walpole said, "The worst use to which you can put a man is to hang him."
The greatest argument against capital punishment is that the principle of life must not be violated. The law of justice is unquestionable a life for a life. Yet the active principle of life is so beautiful a fact, so mysterious, so baffling in all its workings, so insoluble even to science -- that
is so profoundly bent upon concealing it -- that the scientist confronted with this problem must cry out "Do not destroy that beauty which it is our despair to solve; hold your sacrilegious hands from the crime of destroying that which you cannot restore and which you cannot even understand." It is true that the murderer, sending out of this world a human being in the vigor of life "with all his imperfections on his head," challenges and deserves justice; and there it was that in distant ages the crude ideas of barbarism could find no better solution of the problem than by taking, with all possible tortures, the life of the murderer. Civilization in the course of time gave him a chance for life by instituting a trial before "a jury of his peers." And our so-called civilization has found no improvement upon this system.
France, foremost, calls the halt to capital punishment. The American nation cannot help but follow this lead.
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