US execution delayed over suicide
2010-09-22 08:38
Atlanta - The Georgia Supreme Court is delaying the execution of a condemned man who attempted suicide hours before he was to be put to death by injection.
The court’s order on Tuesday postponed the execution of Brandon Joseph Rhode until Thursday to give the 31-year-old a chance to file a new mental competency challenge.
Defence attorneys say executing Rhode would violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Rhode was scheduled to die for the killings of a 37-year-old man and two of his children during a burglary.
Suicide attempts have occurred on death row, but they are rare. Ohio inmate Lawrence Reynolds overdosed on antidepressants hours before he was to be taken to the death chamber in March.
He recovered in a hospital and was executed a week later.
It’ll be much cheaper to give these guys some sleeping pills to do themselves in…how inhumane to get them fit for the chamber/noose/chair/injections/guillotine/firing squad. That says something about revenge and retribution doesn’t it? >:(
i think the point these okes are trying to make, is that they will take their own lives, and the state wont. a kind of last ditch flipping the bird.
maybe they think they are taking away the state’s power over them, by taking away their excecution of the inmate.
i can understand that kind of rebellion, but one must allso know, that someone who is on death row, is more than just a little batshit crazy, and sending them off to be analyzed by a shrink, is kinda redundant.
So that the authorities can never be accused of practising euthanasia or killing an unfit person, rather than administering justice to someone in full possession of all his/her faculties. In those US states that have the death penalty (not all of them do), the federal rules expressly forbid execution of criminals, however horrific their crimes, if they have physical and/or mental deficiencies beyond a certain threshold.
Yes it is, and the dumbness starts already with having a death penalty. It’s state-sanctioned revenge, nothing less. The argument that it acts as a deterrent is thoroughly bogus.
i would rather have the inmate, work, earn a salary (however they can manage that), and have his salary go to the victims family, for as long as the fucker lives.
why should the wanker live off us, the taxpayer, parking off, having a nice holiday untill he gets the needle?
that hardly seems fair.
Scientific studies have consistently failed to find convincing evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than other punishments. The most recent survey of research findings on the relation between the death penalty and homicide rates, conducted for the United Nations in 1988 and updated in 2002, concluded: "... it is not prudent to accept the hypothesis that capital punishment deters murder to a marginally greater extent than does the threat and application of the supposedly lesser punishment of life imprisonment."
(Reference: Roger Hood, The Death Penalty: A World-wide Perspective, Oxford, Clarendon Press, third edition, 2002, p. 230)