Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections

Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.

(Also, for many, there’s something wrong with capital punishment, to start with, but that’s a different discussion)

Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.

The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.

The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.

What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?

>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?

My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.

Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.

Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?

I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.

Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)

(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)

She lured a classmate into the woods, slit her throat with a box cutter after torturing her for half an hour, bashed her skull open with a rock for good measure, then brought a piece of her skull to school the next day.

> I was even more of an idiot then than I am now

Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?