Nevada's Scheme for Lessening I
In Nevada there is about to be introduced a new means of capital punishment. The condemned man is to be unaware of the precise time of his execution. His end will come during the night, in a cell. Gas will be turned on while he sleeps, and unconsciousness will peacefully merge into death.
It is all very simple, and certainly humane, says a writer in a Home paper. Tt has not the suggestive trappings of the scaffold nor the grim mechanism of the chair or the guillotine. The example of Nevada is worth consideration.
Capital punishment as carried out in Britain is painless, physically painless, but what psychological agonies must not the condemned man suffer? No one has sympathy for a murderer, but even such an ill-starred wretch might be allowed to satisfy justice in the easiest manner possible.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.