Executed in the USA

The procedure was, right from the start, much more pleasant for the witnesses. For the condemned, not so much.

Some experts claimed that the paralytic drug might have actually have left the condemned conscious but unable to move or speak as the other chemicals destroyed their internal organs. That was the basis for the recent appeal to the Supreme Court.

But no dice.

"Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of 'objectively intolerable risk of harm' that qualifies as cruel and unusual," wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

In the short term, it’s unlikely that the US will be able to make inroads on China’s status as the official Olympic champion of executions, since the ruling leaves scope for further appeals.

But there’s a broader contradiction implicit in the whole concept of humane executions. Let’s say the American prisons developed a new technology that allowed prisoners to be killed so efficiently that no-one - neither the inmate, the executioners nor the witnesses - felt a thing.

How would you describe that kind of emotional anaesthesia in the face of human extinction? The clinical term is "psychosis", and the attempt to induce it seems a very strange goal for a legal system.