Personally it's the method I'd choose if it came down to it. I'd want the motherfuckers who killed me to have to look me in the eyes when they did it. It would sure beat dying in some antiseptic environment strapped to a gurney and getting injected with shit.
I agree, personally.
Most methods of lethal injection are also pretty easy to botch in a way that makes them agonizing rather than painless, especially the most common cocktails used in the US. They use three drugs starting with a sedative (usually a barbiturate), but the chemical that actually causes death is potassium chloride. It's a salt that, in overdose, makes the heart stop beating. It's also known to cause a sensation that feels like you're burning to death from the inside out, which is why the sedative is given first, ideally leading to unconsciousness.
The word "ideally" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. We don't actually know how often sedation fails, because the other drug in the mix (pancuronium bromide) causes paralysis of all the voluntary muscles, but we know that it's not exactly reliable. Some states have tried using a sedative alone or in combination with a potent opioid like hydromorphone, but Ohio's first attempt to do that ended so badly that it scared the state off of capital punishment altogether. Opioid overdose sounds like you'd just drift off, but the man they executed actually struggled to breathe for almost half an hour before succumbing.
The reality is that the human body
really wants to stay alive and, with the exception of a few causes that are so rare in nature that there's no reason for the body to be able to detect and avoid them (particularly inert gas asphyxiation, where a concentrated, chemically unreactive gas like nitrogen or argon is used to displace oxygen from the lungs), the only reliable way to make death painless is to do sudden, catastrophic damage to a vital part of the body. A painless death is usually a fast death, and a fast death is usually a violent one. If what legislators really cared about was minimizing suffering, the best methods would be things like decapitation, point-blank execution with a bullet to the brain, or even putting the prisoner in a small space with a bomb and setting it off. It's really not about being humane, though. It's about being "civilized". The fact that lethal injection involves being strapped to a gurney in an antiseptic environment isn't a bug or even a feature, it's literally the whole point. It looks clinical, professional, and impersonal, more like a medical procedure than a killing. Chopping heads off looks barbaric to modern people in the Western world, putting a pistol to someone's head feels like something a military dictator would do to a captured dissident, and reducing someone to pink mist leads to a scene of corrections officers in hazmat suits scrubbing gore for over an hour. Even inert gas asphyxiation, a completely painless and bloodless method where the person being executed
actually does drift off peacefully, is a problem since gassing people has negative connotations that are hard to move past.
We, as a society, really need to face up to what we're doing if we're going to be killing people to enforce the law. Whatever the original intent, lethal injection isn't humane, it's just clean. Even if I knew for certain that the process would go off without a hitch, I would probably choose a firing squad instead just because I would want to die at the hands of someone with enough integrity to admit they were killing a human being. The next person in line can go with the guy who puts on a white lab coat in order to play doctor if they want, but I wouldn't want to know that I was going to be killed by a coward. Hiding from the weight of your own actions behind a wall of symbols and imagery so thick that it would make Foucault cream his pants while describing it is worse than just refusing to do it, because at least refusal is an honest choice.
