Arizona is preparing to conduct
executions of its death row inmates
by using gas chambers.
I'm not kidding, not only are they
planning on using a gas chamber in
order to make this happen, they're
planning on gassing death row
inmates in the exact same way Nazis
gas Jews and Auschwitz, by using
the same materials in the same way.
And one thing you should keep
in mind if you happen to be
a proponent of the death penalty,
which I of course have not.
But if you are, we do have
constitutional protections against
cruel and unusual punishment.
And so the real question is,
is this cruel and unusual?
And the answer is, unequivocally,
yes.
So lemme give you those details.
First, this was a story that was
broken by the Guardian and so
Ed Hillington over at the Guardian
was the one that reported on this
and the details are pretty brutal.
So documents obtained by
the Guardian revealed that
Arizona's Department of Corrections
has spent more than $2,000
in procuring the ingredients to
make cyanide gas.
The department bought a brick of
potassium cyanide in December for
a little over $1,500.
It also by the way purchase sodium
hydroxide, or hydroxide pellets and
sulfuric acid,
which are intended to be used to
generate the deadly gas.
The gas chamber itself, which was
built in 1949 and disused for 22
years for good reason, by the way,
has been dusted off and according
to the department refurbished.
So, death row inmates in Arizona
will be given a choice, right?
Wow, how nice they get a choice.
And the choice is between a gas
chamber or a different,
awful method of being executed.
As the Guardian writes,
inmates who choose the gas chamber
are strapped Into a chair in
the center of the vessel.
Colored levers are then used to
drop the sodium cyanide into a pot
of sulfuric acid under the chair
releasing the deadly
hydrogen cyanide into the air.
And again, I want to just emphasize
this was the exact method used in
in Auschwitz and we're now using it
here in the United States in
the state of Arizona.
In the near future in order to
execute death row inmates and
as we've talked about
on this show multiple times.
The issue with,
well one of the many issues with
the death penalty is that far too
often we found evidence using DNA
of innocent people who had been
wrongly convicted for crimes and
were sent on death row.
And luckily there were cleared of
wrongdoing or exonerated as
a result of DNA evidence.
That in and
of itself should persuade people
that maybe we need to rethink this
whole death row execution method of
punishing people for
crimes they've committed.
We should also be considerate of
the fact that again,
we are supposed to have
constitutional protections against
cruel unusual punishment.
And when you look at the history
of this method of execution clearly
there is some evidence of cruelty
and unusual punishment.
So for instance, the last person
who was executed in the state of
Arizona, not by a gas chamber, but
by these lethal injections was
Joseph Wood in 2014.
Joseph Wood took almost two hours
to die when Arizona experimented on
him with 15 doses of then little
used concoction of
lethal injection drugs.
An eyewitness told the Guardian
that he counted would gasp and
Gulp 660 times.
Now when it comes to
gassing death row inmates,
the last time that happened in
the state of Arizona was in 1982.
And it was incredibly brutal.
So Walter LaGrand a German national
was sentenced to death for
a 1982 bungled armed bank robbery
in which a man was killed.
The Tucson Citizen published
an eyewitness
account of his 1999 execution.
So his crime was in 1982, and
his execution was in 1999.
In which he displayed agonizing,
choking and gagging and
took 18 minutes to die.
So I don't know, I mean,
you guys decide for yourselves,
does that sound like cruel and
unusual punishment.
Lemme give you more.
The Tucson Citizen published
an eyewitness account of his 1999
execution in which he displayed
agonizing, choking and gagging and
took 18 minutes to die.
The witness room fell silent as
a mist of gas rose much like steam
in a shower and Walter Legrand
became enveloped in a cloud of
cyanide vapor the Citizen reported.
He began coughing violently three
or four loud hacks and
made a gagging sound before falling
forward.
The newspaper recorded that over
many minutes, the inmates had
an arms twitched and
his hands were red and clenched.
So again, there's the issue of
executing death row inmates and
the flaws in our justice system.
The very fact that innocent
individuals get convicted for
crimes that they did not commit,
that already is a huge problem.
And then you couple that with these
methods of executing people,
either by lethal injection which is
an option in Arizona or by this gas
chamber, which is Is very soon to
be another option in Arizona.
And so when you weigh what we're
supposed to be protected by
the US Constitution against these
forms of executing people.
We really need to ask ourselves
are we comfortable in easily
signing off on those constitutional
protections in an effort to get
vengeance against someone who might
be wrongly convicted of a crime,
that's really the question to ask
here.
And it is kind of incredible how
these red states have decided.
Yeah, we're not going to evolve on
this issue.
In fact, we we want to devolve on
this issue.
We want to bring back
firing squads,
we want to bring back gas chambers.
We want to use lethal injections
with drugs that haven't really been
fully tested and
could actually make the entire
process much more painful for
the inmate that's being executed.
All of these things we've seen
happen in red states that have
refused to do away with their death
penalties.
And what do you really think about
the impacts on our constitutional
protections?
And also the flaws in our criminal
justice system.
It really makes you wonder if we're
ever going to really rethink how we
respond to crime in this country,
because clearly it hasn't worked.
I mean the death penalty hasn't
served as a deterrent we're
experiencing a giant spike in
homicides in the United States as
we speak.
Even as these red states
are rolling out more
draconian methods and practices in
regard to the death penalty.
What we're doing with our overly
punitive justice
system isn't working.
I'm not saying to be easy on crime,
there's no question about that.
I'm not saying that we should just
let people who have murdered others
just roam the streets free,
I'm not saying that.
But clearly what we're doing these
punitive measures haven't worked.
We have incredibly high recidivism
rates where people serve their time
in prison, their release,
and then before you know it,
they're back in prison.
Which means that there is a lack of
rehabilitative characteristics in
our prison system, clearly.
And we spend so much money on it,
we spend so much money on failing
and instead of maybe changing
course, maybe going in the right
direction for once.
You've got red states that have
decided no, we're just going to
devolve further.
We're going to go in
that direction.