This afternoon the Supreme Court stopped the execution of a man who was scheduled to be put to death in Ohio at ten this morning.
From a legal perspective, this could be a very big deal as it takes one more substantial step toward a temporary moratorium on many of America’s executions.
Here’s why. The stay had zero to do with whether Kenneth Biros was guilty or not. The 48-year-old Biros admitted to killing a 22-year-old woman who spurned his romantic advances, then scattering pieces of her body across two states.
The Supremes weren’t looking at whether Brios should be executed. They were looking at the way he would be executed—namely by lethal injection—which they deemed may, in fact, be cruel and unusual. In a one sentence order, SCOTUS agreed with a U.S. District Court ruling that the execution ought to be stopped until everybody can better sort out the facts of the matter. This is a significant development in a drama that’s been playing out over the past year in law suits across the country in which a growing number of lawyers and doctors have argued that, far from being painless, lethal injection is all to often clumsily administered and painful to the point of torture.
Just give the condemned person a menu with execution options and let him pick one.
All this fastidiousness about the Death Penalty just shows how hypocritical we are. “Humane” executions? If we really thought it was a deterrent we’d want it as ugly as possible. No forget it. If you think it is a good idea then why the squemishness? If you don’t you’ve got a much easier time – morally and factually.
But when did that ever enter the equation?
Deterrent prevents 1000 murders the first year
Saudi Arabia uses public beheading as the punishment for murder, rape, drug
trafficking, sodomy, armed robbery, apostasy and certain other offences. Forty
five men and 2 women were beheaded in 2002, a further 52 men and 1 woman in 2003
and 35 men and a woman in 2004. Executions rose in 2005 with 88 men and 2 women
being beheaded and then reduced to 35 men and four women in 2006.
The condemned of both sexes are given tranquillizers and then taken by police
van to a public square or a car park after midday prayers. Their eyes are
covered and they are blindfolded. The police clear the square of traffic and a
sheet of blue plastic sheet about 16 feet square is laid out on the ground.
Dressed in their own clothes, barefoot, with shackled feet and hands cuffed
behind their back, the prisoner is led by a police officer to the centre of the
sheet where they are made to kneel facing Mecca. An Interior Ministry official
reads out the prisoner’s name and crime to the crowd. Saudi Arabia uses a
traditional Arab scimitar which is 1000-1100 mm long. The executioner is handed
the sword by a policeman and raises the gleaming scimitar, often swinging it two
or three times in the air to warm up his arm muscles, before approaching the
prisoner from behind and jabbing him in the back with the tip of the blade,
causing the person to raise their head.
Then with a single swing of the sword the prisoner is decapitated. Normally it
takes just one swing of the sword to sever the head, often sending it flying
some two or three feet. Paramedics bring the head to a doctor, who uses a
gloved hand to stop the fountain of blood spurting from the neck. The doctor
sews the head back on, and the body is wrapped in the blue plastic sheet and
taken away in an ambulance. Burial takes place in an unmarked grave in the
prison cemetery. Beheadings of women did not start until the early 1990’s,
previously they were shot. Forty women have been publicly beheaded up to the
end of 2006. Most executions take place in the three major cities of Riyadh,
Jeddah and Dahran. Saudi executioners take great pride in their work and the
post tends to be handed down from one generation to the next.
Above was from:
http://www.richard.clark32.btinternet.co.uk/behead.html