We haven't—and won't—find an acceptable execution method.

There is one good reason—and only one—to support the death penalty: some crimes are so heinous that no other punishment seems to fit. On the other side of the ledger is a list so long that it explains why support for the death penalty in the US has dropped to 52%, its lowest level in fifty years.

One problem that is especially clear is the difficulty of finding a method of killing a person that (1) is sure to work quickly and with little or no suffering, and (2) minimizes the trauma to the people who carry out executions. Granted, some people aren’t on board with minimizing the suffering of the condemned, but most are.

The problems with finding an “acceptable” method of killing people are summarized in this New York Times article. (It’s a gift article.)

We all know the story on the first aspect. It turns out you can’t strap a prisoner into a chair and pass electricity through him in a way that will reliably kill him quickly and relatively painlessly. And to the surprise of many, lethal injections—which anyone would be forgiven for thinking could be carried out without terrible suffering—cannot reliably be carried out that way; a subset of those executed by lethal injection appear to suffer terribly.

As the article points out, there are methods of execution that would be quick and painless, including a gunshot at close range into the brain stem. But the only way to make such a method work is to hire cold-blooded sadists to carry it out. Otherwise, you trade the suffering of the condemned for severe trauma to the executioner.

The trauma to prison personnel is an aspect of the death penalty machinery that doesn’t get enough attention. Many years ago, when Texas was executing as many as forty people per year, NPR did a story about the toll it took on prison personnel, and I am haunted by it to this day.

Add the difficulty of finding an acceptable method of execution to the other problems with the death penalty—its unequal application across race and class, its staggering financial cost, its failure to deter, its irreversibility in a system that has already condemned the innocent, and its prolonged psychological toll on everyone it touches—and the case for abolition becomes clear to anyone who is neither uninformed nor among that sad group who favor sending people to their deaths in inhumane ways.