Lethal Injection

Last November I had to have my elderly dog, Crissy, put to sleep. It was a painful choice but the one part of the experience that I found comforting was how peaceful the process actually was. They gave her an overdose of a barbiturate and she simply let go of life in the most peaceful and painless way possible. I remember wondering at the time why our prison system doesn’t use a similar method for carrying out the death penalty.

It seems, however, that is just the question others have and are bringing before the Supreme Court. Our current method is terrible. It is bad enough in my mind that our government even uses capital punishment at all. I would prefer that they didn’t but on a day to day basis, it isn’t the biggest issue to me. This is mostly because I live in a state that does not have capital punishment and I feel reluctant to involve myself in the politics of states where I do not live. Nevertheless, any improvement in that area is a positive in my book. And if states are going to insist on continuing to have a death penalty, I think that the very least they can do is to use the most humane method possible.

If a method of putting people to death isn’t considered good enough for dogs, we might want to rethink the method.