Only the most extreme of all manslaughter crimes should be tried under the death sentence and each person has the right to appeal to a higher court or to be able to petition for pardon of the sentence. The death penalty is the pre-meditated and cold-blooded killing of prisoners in state custody. It is the same as if a murderer was to call up his victim and tell that person that on a certain date he/she was going to kill them? What anguish and emotional trauma do you think that person would go through waiting to die? This is exactly what the state judicial system does to death penalty victims. .
The thought that the execution process is painless has yet to be proven. If administering 100 volts to a man's sensitive areas evokes moral condemnation, how does a state condone the administration of 2,000 volts to a human body in order to cause death? The physical pain caused by electrocution, gassing, hanging, poisoning, or shooting - the five methods of execution used in the United States - cannot be justified. Paralysis of organs, burning of flesh, asphyxiation, tearing of the spinal cord, or the explosive destruction of organs, are all the end results of each type of execution. Does this sound like a humane way to treat a person? These methods are not infallible either! In a 1990 Florida execution, a malfunctioning electric chair caused flames to shoot up six inches into the air from the condemned persons head. In 1992, in an Oklahoma execution by lethal injection, the condemned had a violent reaction to the drugs used. The poor prisoner gasped and gagged violently, the muscles in his neck, jaw, and abdomen went into violent spasms, and he endured this torture for eleven minuets before he finally died. In 1994 it took five minuets for David Lawson to die in a gas chamber in North Carolina. During that time he screamed, "I"m human! I"m human!"(Web page Amnesty International).
