From: kurt@eskimo.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subject: Re: More about Wes (really, contradictions & FUD about death)
Organization: -> ESKIMO NORTH (206) For-Ever <-
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Distribution: pnw
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 00:27:42 GMT

mikeq@freddy.CNA.TEK.COM wrote:
: According to the autopsy report, Dodd died of strangulation (slow) rather than
: by his spine being snapped (quick).

Funny, I had heard that it was a combination of both.

I also heard that Dodd selected hanging because he had strangled one
of the kids he molested.  Does that imply that Dodd thought he'd die
by strangulation?  Or was a break-neck military-style hanging just the
closest thing the state offered?  Makes me wonder how much the DOC
bothered to inform Dodd about the method of death he chose, or how much they
know about it themselves.

People seem pretty confident that Dodd was rendered unconscious
almost instantaneously, but how do they know?  Especially in light
of the fact that the principal non-verbal communicator of consciousness,
pain, and a host of other mind/body conditions was covered by a hood?
If the neck were broken, I would expect to hear a *snap*.  Other sounds
might be equally informative.  Did anybody
think to get an audio track when they measured (timed, so I hear) the
execution?  For that matter, as long as we are going thru all the pomp
and circumstance of a state-sponsored execution, why not instrument Dodd
with some data-gathering equipment (EEG, EKG, etc) and wide-band telemetry
and get as much info as possible? Why *not* video-tape the execution?
It seems to me that the the latter, at least, would be a minimal quality-
control measure that the DOC people would do on their own initiative.

It also makes me wonder if there's bad info in the "army manual".

It's really funny to hear people *defend* the death penalty by making
assertions about the likely duration of consciousness, subjective amount
of pain experienced, etc., when their squeamish liberal sensibilities
won't let them find out for sure.  That's a pretty large contradiction!

: Now, if the state can't murder a guy any more efficiently than that, they
: should call on a professional. Like, maybe, a mob hitman (.22 behind
: the ear), teenage gang member (Uzi), or right-to-lifer (pipe bomb).
: 
: Mike

We have been slaughtering each other for thousands of years
and we don't even know how to hang a man, and so we've developed
"humane" methods like lethal injection!  Isn't that wierd?
Are we all hypercivilized or what?  How has a whole body of knowledge,
painfully built up over hundreds of thousands of deaths, been lost?
Do we all have a case of selective memory?

To preserve our sensibilities from presumably barbaric horrors like hanging,
we develop horrific parodies of medical procedure like lethal injection, and
then attempt to say that one method of dying is "more humane" than another.
I presume that people saying that must mean that less physical pain is
experienced with one than the other.  It would seem to me that the psychological
pain of one method of execution over another might be about equivalent (much
more significant than physical pain IMO).  Try as I might, putting myself
in the shoes of somebody awaiting imminent death by hanging vs. imminent death
by lethal injection doesn't perturb "the diff-meter of humane-ness".

It sure is interesting, the methods we (as a society) develop to insulate
and distance ourselves from the deaths of others.  About as interesting as
the methods we as individuals develop for the same end.

I vaguely remember that crystal may have mentioned this, but if she
didn't, IMO Dodd rather neatly conned the state into doing up his
suicide for him.

One thing that could have been done, both with Dodd and Bundy,
is to keep them alive, but subjects of medical research for the
rest of their lives.  IMO the idea that people like that are *miswired*
or have *missing* *parts* from their brains, that makes them not-quite-
human, is rather compelling.  Whatever is "missing" may be not strictly
biological in nature -- we are treading unknown ground here -- but, for
example, if language acquisition is an "innate property" of the young
human brain, as Chomsky believes, there may be other "innate properties",
of which "empathic distress response" may be one;  I speculate that it
is the latter, or something similar, that both Dodd & Bundy lacked.
How would we ever know?  Of course, no guarantees either way.

Thing that bothers me is that we don't seem squeamish about killing somebody,
although we refuse to look at their face as they die, so we don't really
learn much about what we do to that person, except that they're dead at the
end of the process.  It's almost like we didn't want to know.  I'm sure
it's partly related to the convention of having several executioners, all at
dummy controls but one -- it allows the state to "have it's cake and eat it
too", i. e. to execute it's enemies without their deaths being on any
individual's conscience.  That hypocritical sort of thing has always
bothered me.

It's like the state gets to do the dirty nasty things everybody wants done
but nobody is willing to take individual responsibility for.

I wish people would talk less about the state being involved in executions
and more about whether it ought to exist at all.
-- 
kurt@eskimo.com kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subvert the Anti-Gands!		F-IW	MYOB