Why is Electrocution still used in the U.S.?

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And you’re making a strawman argument by saying I appeal to history. I said valuations of damages have varied throughout history, meaning what constitutes appropriate compensation is always up for debate. Of course the historical use of something doesn’t make it right.

But you can’t go wrong when ethics and morality are based in objective reality.

Objective reality has nothing to do with whether or not to have the DP.

If you do have DP, that's an objective reality, but whether to re-instate or abolish DP has nothing to do with objective reality. It's a matter of opinion.

If you want to base ethics and morality, which are all subjective opinions, on objective reality, you should at least exempt the mentally ill from the DP, because they had no control of themselves, they could not prevent becoming murders. Objectively speaking.

But you seem to completely ignore scientific facts, all you want is to be manipulative and claim your opinions as being objective, while they're anything but objective.

You're not worthy of any discussion.

As I said, it’s not as simple as being strictly my opinion. There is and has always been a human tendency to return like for like. Governments exist in part to keep people from running around getting revenge on each other. You cannot put an equivalence on taking life, meaning that if murder occurs, the d.p. is required. That is reality-based and objective.

Besides, less than 1% of court cases involve criminal insanity, only about 26% of those are even successful, and nearly all, like 9 out of 10 of those, had a previously diagnosed condition. There is an extreme unlikelihood that mental incapacitated person is even capable of committing a crime because doing so requires a degree of intelligence. That would be like someone hurting someone while sleepwalking, or diabetic, or epileptic, in which case a person is more likely to be harmed through an accident and not deliberate action. But then anyone around these people could see and avoid them. It would be extremely rare that they could hurt someone. And the same applies in mental retardation. Any reasonable person, or even a child, could know someone’s not right in the head and steer clear. For a mentally ret*d person to go after a person (who you’d expect to avoid a mentally ret*d person) and kill her would still require volition and an understanding of the consequences: You set out to kill that person; after you kill her, she’s dead, which is really the whole point of killing people. A criminally insane defense MIGHT hold up, but given the rarity of incidence and actual success of the c.i. defense, I wouldn’t try it. The fictional A Time To Kill by John Grisham explores the idea of temporary insanity plea, but the real story is a philosophical exploration of revenge, something that Ford County, Mississippi takes for granted in the story.

Refusing to understand anything is never a crime, but refusing to understand crime is never an excuse for it. I’m a bit puzzled, though, on the idea of autism automatically being labeled a mental illness. It’s disturbing that you would want neurodiverse people labeled as insane (mentally ill). For what purpose? To excuse something that, say Elliot Rodgers did when he killed all those people and himself? I suppose Elliot Rodgers is innocent because he was mentally ill and it’s everyone else’s fault for being Asians, Chads, and Stacys. You are also disturbingly specific in how you define mental illness: “...like Autism, Schizophrenia, and Anxiety.” I know you aren’t restricting a def of m.i. those things, but it is interesting nonetheless that you mention those by name. I enjoy my job, but it is a source of anxiety for me. Am I justified for killing my boss? I have 4 children from almost 14 down to 10 months. Am I justified for killing my teenager because he has hormonal drama or my 10 month old because her diapers smell too bad? You may honestly not realize it, though I find that hard to believe, but you are basically giving everyone a license to kill by blaming it in one disorder or another.

And that’s where objective reality kicks in. If we really are allowed to kill people for whatever reason, if we even need a reason, then the insanity plea is nothing more than an invitation to mob rule and mob justice. Those things cannot exist, however, because people will, acting on their own self-interest, band together to protect each other and go after people trying to harm them—you know, like a government. In the face of murderous groups and individuals, this equilibrium is reached every single time. Even hippie, free-love communes ultimately end up adopting rules—and speaking of free love, the willingness of so many people to engage in it dropped sharply after the HIV/AIDS pandemic began. When you see that mental illness CANNOT excuse bad behavior and things like murder, when you see that there are consequences for committing murder, casually pleading insanity, and WINNING, because people will get sick of it and come after you if it ever gets out of hand, you won’t be so apt to excuse it.

The fact that the insanity plea very rarely works is evidence that the west hasn’t quite completely lost its collective mind...at least not yet.

Last edited by Cornflake on 28 Jun 2021, 7:53 am, edited 1 time in total.: Removed some personal attacks

Reason why we need to bring back mental institutions and asylums. US prisons have become those anyway and I am against capital punishment on the mentally ill and intellectual impairment. I mean back in the days we used to just lock them in mental institutions than killing them unless they were intellectually impaired. We have always killed people with intellectual impairments but those with mental illnesses, we would lock them up in mental wards for life.

I respectfully disagree that you can spare anyone the dp, but I think everything else you said is EXACTLY RIGHT.

Some of the problems of institutionalizing the insane is abuse from hospital staff and operating costs. Well...heck, what are we paying all these taxes for if not for protecting citizens? So you stick it to staff when they abuse patients, and you train staff about use of reasonable force. Bring in good doctors and plenty of psychiatric students and interns. I don’t mind my taxes paying for that.

But I think the drive towards shutting state hospitals down is more to benefit drug companies and also to get more people out “in the wild” so they can be exploited politically. I’m serious. The kinds of rich and powerful people who gain from letting the insane run loose are not the kinds of people who are themselves ever in a place where they’d be close to the mentally ill. The Elliot Rodgers types aren’t going after ivory tower elites. They’re going after Chads and Stacys. So what do THEY care if a mental patient is out massacring white college kids? They see things like that happen, and their knee-jerk reaction is “gun control.” But when someone tries to kill Ronald Reagan, they just say, “oh, that poor, poor man!” and let him go (full disclosure, Hinckley was institutionalized until 2016. I’m referring to the insanity plea that ultimately shifted the federal government back closer to M’Naghten. I find it difficult to believe that the court so easily buying the insanity defense during a conservative administration is anything less than politically motivated). Locking them up accomplishes many objectives, among them getting greedy drug companies out of the picture, making sure patients ARE getting the meds and other therapies they actually NEED, and eliminated exploitable victim classes to support greedy politicians.

If we had that, you wouldn’t have insane criminals running around killing people. You could stop these violent people before they kill the FIRST victim. That would make the whole executing mentally ill point moot since patients would be physically unable to hurt anyone.

STOP YOUR TROLLING! I'm going to report that one to the mods.
Your entire post is turning personal against me, accusing me of planning a crime like murder.

I'm not planning on murdering anyone, but everyone - including you - can become insane from a disease, causing you to murder someone.

Btw. If someone is capable of planning murder, they're likely not insane.

So we basically put them down like animals then.

What is even the point having the cruel and unusual punishment laws if we won't even use them? It's been since 1984 that it's cruel and unusual to put people with mental illnesses to death for murders.

Gosh, I was hoping for a discusion on the merits of different execution methods but the thread devolved into an argument about whether execution should be practiced in the first place.

If I were to be executed, I would prefer the firing squad.

I would rather be drawn and quartered than get the electric chair.

It’s been since longer than 1984, actually. The dp in the USA is waaaaaay overhyped. With regard to mental illness, the gold standard for the insanity defense in the US is the M’Naghten rules. As I mentioned before, the insanity defense is rarely actually used, only succeeds about 1/4 of the time, and nearly always involved someone who was ALREADY DIAGNOSED with mental illness before the crime was committed. I’m not wasting time getting bent out of shape over something that really isn’t something worth discussing in this country. I’m more concerned with the philosophical and ethical/moral arguments involved.

So...looking at it objectively, a crime deserves the dp when the criminal purposefully, unjustifiably causes death. My argument, if you can call it that, is that mentally disabled people are not going to think it through enough to reach that level and commit an action that is often ordinarily too complex. The cause of death is basically accidental. If it’s something that was entirely involuntary that the accused couldn’t possibly have controlled, then, yeah, it’s the equivalent of an accident. Those aren’t the kinds of things worthy of the dp. Then it’s a matter of proving that the insanity defense actually applies. In MOST CASES it does not.

For reference, this is the M’Naghten Rule:


The presumption of sanity means that the defense has the onus to prove insanity. In the USA, the burden of proof had been on the prosecution. This was shifted to the defense in recent decades, and courtroom procedures became much more difficult after Hinckley. Hinckley led to a more stringent revival of M’Naghten in the US. That means incidents like Hinckley are highly unlikely to ever happen again, and even people like Rodgers are extremely unlikely to get away with murder via the insanity defense. The problem with Rodgers is it would be extremely difficult for his defense to prove that he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong.

And when we talk about knowing something is wrong, we are not discussing ethics or morality. We’re talking legally. Rodgers was well aware, for example, that what he was doing was illegal. So despite Rodgers actually being mentally ill (if we assume that, of course), his mental state would not have been enough to qualify for a successful insanity defense. Rodgers committed suicide, anyway.

You know who DIDN’T commit suicide? Luke Woodham. His lawyers went for the insanity defense. The jury didn’t buy it. Guess what? He got life plus 140 and won’t be eligible for parole until he’s 65. In response, Mississippi passed a law making murder on school grounds a capital offense.

What did we learn? Murder is objectively wrong and requires the death of the murderer. Autistic people cannot be an exception. You have cases, like Adam Lanza. Or Trystan Terrell, even, and in Terrell’s case his autism was nowhere near anything that could justify what he did. What’s tragic, if you’re going to show sympathy for Terrell, is that he’ll rot in prison WITH AUTISM. It seems to me that dp would be much more humane since it will spare him decades of tortured living.

I don’t see dp as necessarily cruel. I see it as much nicer than enduring a lifetime in prison, which in many ways is considerably more cruel. Nobody needed, say, Susan Atkins to slowly fall apart, piece by piece, in prison. That served no good purpose. Death for her would have been both compassionate and would have satisfied survivors’ needs for retribution. Even for someone who is drawn and quartered, at least that person has the comfort of knowing the end is coming soon once the process begins. At least the person being strangled from a botched hanging understands that he’ll black out in a few seconds. I’m all for methods that minimize suffering and are quick. But I do not believe that quick and painless methods are requisite for having the dp. Those kinds of things really are more subjective social constructs. All that matters is that life is repaid with life when it comes to murder.

Unfortunately it was a setup from the beginning. The OP began with attacking electrocution specifically but later ruled out all other current methods. The intention was revealed to be about dp itself rather than any method, hence how we got here.

TBH, there’s not much to discuss when it comes to electrocution. Simply put, electrocution is quick, effective, and,a relatively speaking, painless. It happens that there are botched cases involving Ol’ Sparky, but those instances are exceptional. I’m sure you’ll understand that if I were the condemned, it would not be my first choice. If I couldn’t get the injection, I think I’d rather go with a mild sedative and nitrogen gas.

Am I the only one that finds discussing how you’d choose to die a little creepy?

D&Q versus the chair? No, I’d rather ride the lightening! Maybe add a little extra electrolyte to my wet sponge. I’d rather not have my head burst into flames.

Odds are typically in favor of a clean and near death in the chair, though.

This is so wrong on so many levels. There is lot of ableism in the court system because so many people believe that people with low IQs are not capable of committing such crimes. So their disability gets dismissed in court and their school records and medical records showing that they do have a intellectual impairment. One thing I have noticed is when I read about these cases online, most of them had bad childhoods, were abused, so they end up picking wrong groups of people to be with because they are finally being accepted and when they commit a crime, they usually have someone with them and they are an accomplice to it. Another thing I have noticed about death row inmates is many of them seem to have mental illnesses and low IQs, not just being mentally disabled but have a borderline low IQ, plus abusive childhoods as well. IMO you are more likely to get capital punishment if you have a low IQ or a mental illness.


It's the same thing when an autistic person commits a sex crime or does a violent crime, people then say they are not autistic and are faking it or lying about having it. This is also ableism.

I'm not (necessarily) opposing DP in all cases. But I think that Electrocution is too cruel for most crimes, including murder.

I did actually list a method of execution earlier in this thread. It's on the very first pages of this thread.
It involves giving the inmate an anaesthetic and make sure he/she is at sleep, then put a bullet through the head.

There are lots of crimes or actions/behaviors I'd like to be illegal and which I sometimes think should carry the DP.

But murdering someone as a result of the offender having a mental illness, should not be subject to the death penalty, but treatment in institutions instead. They're not allowed to walk around freely, but they also shouldn't get tortured.

Probably, it's a normal topic of conversation. I'd still like to see some brain scan or something that shows the condemned in the electric chair was knocked out immediately rather than undergoing to a painful electrocution until death. I'm sure we've all been zapped by something electrical at some point in our lives, it's not fun. Personally I'd rather be executed by being out of a plane than any of the other methods.

Then I don't understand how you can defend the electric chair - or the DP at all.

I don't understand how people can defend a position of having other people executed, if they're not willing to feel the experience themselves - one way or the other (witness or inmate).