Capital punishment, which is the legal infliction of death as a penalty for violating a criminal law is the most controversial penal practice in the modern world today. Throughout history it has held various methods and forms including crucifixion, stoning, drowning, burning at the stake, impaling, and beheading. In 2002 seventy one inmates were executed under capital punishment, seventy of those executions were carried out via leathal injection (and one by eletrocution). Death by lethal injection, intravanious dilevery of three deadly drugs,occurs within approximatly seven minuites and is realitively painless. This meathod ...view middle of the document...
It employs hight voltage currents which are passed through the condemed person's body via eletrodes attached to critical sections of the body. Its recent unpopularity has been aided by physiological implications of it's procedure such as severe burns suffered by inmates as well as scorched equipment. The temperature of the electrodes in contact with the inmates skin reach 1900 degrees celcius, and the brain (heavily sheilded and seperated by the blood-brain barrier) reaches boiling point -- such findings are leading doubts as to the humanity of electrocution. An alternate method which has not been recently employed, yet remains oficially a meathod of capital punishment in the united states, is by hdrocyanic gas. Death by inhalation of toxic gas was first used in Nevada in 1924, since then the gas chamber has been much improved, valve control allows the odorless and colorless gas to disperse in a air tight chamber where the inmate is secured on a gurney. Death in a gas chamber takes somewhere between five to fifteen minuites, depending on weather the condemmed strugges to hold their breath or controls inhalation. Several other methods of capital punishment have been employed such as use of guillotine,hanging,and firing squad, which are not currently used officialy in the United States. International theories of capital punishments vary from country to country and the methods range from those deemed archaic by the U.S. to those simmilarly employed.
