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Gas chamber, hands down. Read the California federal court decision holding the gas chamber to be unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment. It recounts the agony in technicolor. Some of the prisoners even manage to break their own arms while they are strapped in. The Arizona warden did one in the early nineties and said that he'd resign if he were ordered to go through it again. I've had a client in the office who was a former prison guard from a Southern state and who participated in several executions. Not a squeamish guy at all. He looked at what happened in the gas chamber the first time he was required to assist. He never watched it again. He told me that no one ever looks at it a second time. They turn their backs.
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
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