I have been following the story of Kenneth Eugene Smith with a sense of morbid fascination.

Back in 1989 he was found guilty of murder. The jury said he should be jailed for life but the judge overruled this and condemned him to death [a practice which has since become illegal].

Smith then languished on Death Row for thirty years living with the knowledge that the state intended to kill him. I might point out that if he had been given a life sentence he could possibly have been paroled by then? Thirty fucking years?

Anyhows they finally got around to killing him by lethal injection. They strapped him down and spent a couple of hours sticking needles in him before giving up and sending him back to Death Row. That must have done wonders for his mental state?

A couple of years later they decided that needles wouldn’t work so they went about another way of killing him. They decided to do it by making him breathe Nitrogen. Now Nitrogen is an inert gas. We all breath it all the time and it doesn’t do anything except fill our lungs. It’s the Oxygen which keeps us going. But they were to deprive Smith of the Oxygen bit, so basically they were suffocating him. But suffocation or strangulation deprives the victim of air so he [or she] can’t breathe at all, but in Smith’s case he will be able to breathe normally but it won’t do him any good – a nice slow tortuous way of killing someone.

This method had never been tried before. They reckoned he would be unconscious in seconds. In fact it took half an hour. That must have been very nice for him? Very humane?

America baffles me. They profess to being world leaders in just about everything and very religious and all that, yet they seem to be incapable of murdering their own criminals. The have tried hanging, electrocution, gassing and shooting and none seem to have any humanity. They are incapable of murdering someone quickly and painlessly. There are thousands of DIY suicides every year where presumably the person chooses an easy path so why is the state so incompetent?

Why don’t they push their victim in front of the New York to Boston express? Messy but instant and effective.

Why don’t they drop their victim off a hundred foot tower? Not so instant, but guaranteed.

Drop a one ton slab of steel onto the victim? Again instant but rather messy.

A bullet into the back of the head. Instant, relatively clean and is tried and tested by other world regimes..

Or why not just an overdose of their drug of choice, from heroin to sleeping pills? A happy way to go?

Why don’t they just ask Dignitas?

They seem to be determined to murder their victims, firstly by giving them advance notice of years, even decades before trying to kill them in weird and inhumane methods.

That just doesn’t sit comfortably with their “world leaders” profession?