Supremes at work

The Supreme Court will hear a case about lethal injections of death-row prisoners.

I’m against the death penalty for four reasons. First, I think it’s wrong for the state to kill in order to show it’s wrong to kill. Second, I don’t think the application of the death penalty is evenly applied to all prisoners. Also, I know it’s expensive to keep giving almost unlimited appeals, and that it would be cheaper just to keep people in prison indefinitely, and finally, I just can’t be convinced that there’s any deterrence to be had from it.

But this particular case mystifies me because it refuses to deal with the heart of the matter while getting very involved in the minutiae of the process. The case centers on the 8th Amendment rights of the prisoners to not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.

On the one hand, does it really matter if the prisoner suffers excruciating pain before dying? Doesn't that serve the revenge-sense that the application of the death penalty feeds? Thinking in revenge-mode for a moment, did the prisoner worry about the excruciating pain the victim would be in? And if he had actually worried about that, or took time to comfort the dying victim, would his sentence have been lessened any? I don’t think so.

How is being killed by any method, as applied to the prisoner or his victim, not cruel and unusual? I see this case as just so much mental game-playing.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080107/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_lethal_injection