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Originally Posted by DementedReality
great, so prolonging his death just adds to the punishment. dieing is still the easy way out if your only life option is decades of tortuous hard labour.
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I was reading a book on the death penalty in the states a couple of years ago and the appeals process, where the defence team just recycles every appeal on the book whether its relevant to the case or not.
At a certain point in the death penalty process its no longer about the trial and appeals based on trial error, it becomes about tieing up the system for as long as possible with debating the same merrits about cruel and unusual punishment.
there's one appeal that I read about with an inmate that had sat on death row for 20 years because of appeal after appeal after appeal, and one of his final appeals was based around the fact that he had been inncarcerated and under the threat of the death penalty for 20 years and it had rendered him mentally incompetant so he wouldn't be able to appreciate why he was being punished with death. In other words going through the appeals process represented cruel and unusual punishment
Death penalty law is actually pretty facinating stuff in a grim way.