most instant death. The "drop" is based on the persons weight to deliver 1260 pounds of force to the neck. 1260 is divided by weight to come up with the height in feet for the drop. This is to assure neither beheading nor strangulation. For the firing squad there is reportedly no protocol to the procedure, but it involves a five-man team, one of who will use a blank bullet, so that none of them knows who was the real executioner.
             Death penalty supporters argue that executions cause hardly any physical pain and result in a fast death. This justifies accordingly capital punishment as humane and not cruel. Admitably there are only a few cases known that have led to a slow painful death. On December 14th 1988, already two minutes into the execution the syringe came out of Raymond Laundry's vein, spreading deadly chemicals across the room towards witnesses. It took the execution team fourteen minutes to reinsert the catheter in to the inmate's vein (Jenkins, page 92). Another case known occurred in Oklahoma on March 10th in 1992. Two minutes after the drugs were injected the muscles of Robyn Lee Parks began to react spasmodically to the serum. Parks started to gasp and violently gag until he died eleven minutes later.
             In the 8th amendment the founding fathers prohibited cruel and inhumane punishment. In the United States these terms unfortunately refer to the method by which a person is put to death and therefore the death penalty is still legal. Most democracies consider the killing of a person as cruel and inhumane and therefore capital punishment is no longer in use. Although most people die swiftly and probably without much pain I do not believe that it validates execution as humane. Can killing be considered humane? Would anybody call it a humane death when a murderer kills his victim within a second by chopping his head of? Definitely not.
             There is a lot of controversy whether capital punishm...