What's Excruciating

Following on from recent research in Ohio and Oklahoma, the Christian state of Arizona has carried out another human experiment, with results that are just and humane according to the state governor. The object of the exercise was injected with drugs so humane that the Christian state of Arizona won't tell anybody where they came from, and took just under two hours to die, gasping for breath the while. At least one American jurist has argued that the lethal-injection method as a whole is "doomed to failure" and that people should accept brutal methods for a brutal process: “I personally think we should go to the guillotine, but shooting is probably the right way to go,” he said. The guillotine, of course, has unfortunate political connotations, being bound up with notions of liberté, egalité, fraternité to which most of the United States has long ago stopped pretending to subscribe. Shooting, on the other hand, has the virtue of simplicity (any high-school kid can do it), and the advantage that America is not as yet a net importer of guns and ammo.

“What I saw today with him being executed, it is nothing compared to what happened on August 7, 1989,” said the sister of one of those whose murder was expiated in today's experiment in payback. “What's excruciating is seeing your father lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying in a pool of blood.” As long as America is committed to the Christian values of blood vengeance and a life for a life, perhaps the way to go is simply to take Big Government out of the equation altogether, and give surviving relatives the chance to polish off the condemned for themselves.