[QUOTE=ewmayer;397573]Around the neck - this setup has been featured in many 'terror on the XYZ' tv-episodes/movies - is better.[/QUOTE]Not as messy perhaps but if all you want to do is severe the head, a carving knife, axe or guillotine will do just as well with even less mess. Unfortunately, the brain is left functioning for a short while. My proposal avoids that.

[i]The Atlantic[/i] has a current piece on this very topic (underlines mine):

[url=www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/gas-chambers-electric-chairs-and-firing-squads/387706/]How to Execute People in the 21st Century[/url]: [i]As drugs for lethal injections grow scarce, states are reverting to earlier methods of execution, once abandoned for their flaws.[/i]
[quote]More botched electrocutions followed over the next few decades, [u]but the Supreme Court, which has never struck down a method of execution as unconstitutional[/i], refused to intervene. In a particularly graphic dissent in 1985, Justice William Brennan described the physical damage that the electric chair produces at length:
[i]
Witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks."[/i][/quote]
On lethal injection, a puzzling-seeming fact (underlined):
[quote]Lethal injection enjoyed tremendous popularity for two reasons. First, [u]it produced an unparalleled record of seemingly painless deaths under the standard three-drug cocktail of sodium thiopental, vercuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. New drug cocktails have since negated this advantage[/u]. Second, and perhaps more importantly, lethal injection strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. But such associations cut both ways. As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms.[/quote]
Does anyone know why the seemingly-foolproof 3-drug cocktail was abandoned? Worries about one of the dugs being habit-forming, perhaps? /sarc

[QUOTE=ewmayer;397885]Does anyone know why the seemingly-foolproof 3-drug cocktail was abandoned?[/QUOTE]Perhaps because ...[QUOTE=ewmayer;397885]As drugs for lethal injections grow scarce ...[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=retina;397886]Perhaps because ...[/QUOTE]

Holy cognitive 'gah!', Batman! Or perhaps 'twas an early-onset 'senior moment'.

So preferred drugs are growing scarce ... because their manufacturers don't want to be associated with the practice of lethal injection? If true, I can see the reasoning behind that, but one core aspect of the issue which is still puzzling, and which I've seen precious little coverage of in the media: humane euthanasia of animals - including belovedly anthropomorphized pets, as seen in many a weepy YouTube video -is widely accepted and practiced in self-proclaimed 'advanced' societies. Despite its almost-universally-accepted 'humanness', there is still a raging debate about whether we humans ourselves should legally have such an option. From the Wikipedia page on [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_euthanasia]Animal Euthanasia[/url]:
[quote]Pets are almost always euthanized by intravenous injection, typically using a very high dose of pentobarbital or sodium thiopental. Unconsciousness, respiratory then cardiac arrest follow rapidly, usually within 30 seconds.[3] Observers generally describe the method as leading to a quick and peaceful death.[/quote]
Those drugs - having been developed for human use - have the same effect in humans, and are clearly not in short supply; similarly for the drug(s) used by vets who prefer the 2-step method (drug A to induce unconsciousness, drug B to stop the heart.) Why do we need to reinvent the wheel for doing the same to humans, whether 'compassionately', or in the carrying-out of a death sentence?

Humans' self-view as 'special' behind this, perhaps?

[QUOTE=ewmayer;397885]Does anyone know why the seemingly-foolproof 3-drug cocktail was abandoned?[/QUOTE]I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you.

Seriously, it works out to availability. At least one of the drugs is manufactured outside of the USA. They don't want to sell it to anyone that will use it for CP.

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;397897]I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you.[/quote]
As long as you give me a few weeks to tidy up my affairs and do so humanely...

[quote]Seriously, it works out to availability. At least one of the drugs is manufactured outside of the USA. They don't want to sell it to anyone that will use it for CP.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I did a bit of further reading in the last hour which illustrates that for [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentobarbital]Pentobarbital[/url], there is a sole-sourcing issue:
[quote]Nembutal is trademarked and manufactured by the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck, and is the only injectable form of pentobarbital approved for sale in the United States.[4]

In high doses, pentobarbital causes death by respiratory arrest. In the United States, the drug has been used for executions of convicted criminals. Lundbeck (one of many manufacturers) does not permit its sale to prisons or corrections departments to carry out the death penalty.[5][/quote]
Pentobarbital itself is an 80+ - year-old drug, so the issue must be one of sole-sourcing (and likley unwillingness by a US drug company to manufacture it) rather than patent infringement for manufacture.

Similar issue for [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiopental]Sodium Thiopental[/url]:
[quote]It was previously the first of three drugs administered during most lethal injections in the United States, but the US manufacturer Hospira stopped manufacturing the drug and the EU banned the export of the drug for this purpose.[4][/quote]
So US states in which capital punishment is legal have the choice of relying on a very narrow range of still-available drugs, the highly-fraught-for-multiple-reasons option of setting up their own manufacting facility for drugs such as the above (at least ones where there is no licensing issue), or looking at non-drug alternatives which lack the known 'slow, agonizing death in some unavoidable number of cases' aspects of e.g. hanging and electrocution, which is apparently the rationale for Utah's reconsideration of the death-by-bullets option.

And I shall stop belaboring the issue in this thread now - had not been following 'recent trends' in this topic until the Utah story was posted here, apologies for catching up on my reading in public, as it were. If other mods concur, it probably makes sense to excise the recent posts on this theme here into a separate (new or extant) Soap Box thread, e.g. "recent trends in state-administered death" or suchlike.

There is a common and cheap alternative drug available, Propofol which is available in generic forms and is used in nearly every hospital in the world. Though I believe there are supply problems because of lawsuits against some of the major manufacturers--however the amounts needed for executions outside of the state of Texas shouldn't put a strain on world supplies.

You may recall this as part of the drug cocktail that caused the death of Michael Jackson.

It's use as a drug for executions was curtailed by threats from the EU to ban it's importation if it was used as part of an execution cocktail.

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;397897]They don't want to sell it to anyone that will use it for CP.[/QUOTE]Finally, someone is thinking of the children.

[url]http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/someone-did-a-shit-so-bad-a-british-airways-flight-had-to-turn-around-and-land-475?utm_source=vicefbca[/url]

I was on a "Greyhound" about 8 years ago from Villahermosa Mexico to Playa Del Carman.
We sat in the very front row. At the very back of the bus was the toilet and it may have never been cleaned or deodorized.

Whenever anyone went to the very back of the bus and did whatever he/she did that required the toilet door be opened the odor that came to the front of the bus was so pungent we both almost got sick and had to cover our noses for about a minute.. And I have a strong stomach. Oddly no one else seemed to mind; at least not vocally; mind you we were the only tourists on the bus so maybe they were used to it.

[QUOTE=petrw1;398058][url]http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/someone-did-a-shit-so-bad-a-british-airways-flight-had-to-turn-around-and-land-475?utm_source=vicefbca[/url]

I was on a "Greyhound" about 8 years ago from Villahermosa Mexico to Playa Del Carman.
We sat in the very front row. At the very back of the bus was the toilet and it may have never been cleaned or deodorized.

Whenever anyone went to the very back of the bus and did whatever he/she did that required the toilet door be opened the odor that came to the front of the bus was so pungent we both almost got sick and had to cover our noses for about a minute.. And I have a strong stomach. Oddly no one else seemed to mind; at least not vocally; mind you we were the only tourists on the bus so maybe they were used to it.[/QUOTE]

And we were in an airport waiting to board in Toronto about 5 years ago when the announcer said the flight would be delay about an hour because "a passenger soiled a seat". Then half an hour later they said the flight would be delayed another hour because they were changing planes .... it must have been REALLY soiled.

[I]Babies[/I] are passengers, too. [SPOILER]And to answer the rhetorical question that puzzled most of the respondents in the quoted article: for a baby lying on the changing station (that they have there in folded state), to soil the vertical wall is relatively easy. [/SPOILER]