The three-drug cocktail. It’s just a quick sting.Sodium Pentothal is injected as an anesthetic. Thirty seconds go by and unconsciousness sets in.

Lethal injection is used in almost every single execution state but recently it has been receiving major criticism from the Supreme Court, according to a New York Times article Oct. 18.

Texas accounts for 405 of the 1,099 lethal injection executions since 1976.

According to the article, the Supreme Court halted cases of lethal injection in Kentucky to “review the constitutionality as a method of execution,” just hours after the last execution happened in Texas.

Next, Pavulon is injected. Two minutes pass and the neuromuscular blocking chemical causes paralysis.

Whether it be shooting, hanging, gassing or electrocution, all methods of execution seem inhumane. After developing a nearly painless way to administer execution, somehow lethal injection is now called “cruel and unusual” because “there is mounting evidence that prisoners may have experienced excruciating pain during their executions,” according to the 2007 Human Rights Watch Report listed on the Death Penalty Information Center Web site.

Four minutes elapse and the Pavulon is squeezing the lungs causing shortage of breath.

Cruel and unusual punishment is what innocent victims experience at the hands of the inmates on death row. I believe the punishment should fit the crime.

Most people who have been executed have died more quickly and less painfully than those they murdered. On top of that, they are living better lives on death row than on the streets.

As unethical as it sounds, death row inmates should die in the same way their victims did. Example: If a killer stabbed someone multiple times, he or she should be murdered by being stabbed also.

It’s as simple as that.

In an interview with TalkLeft, a political magazine, last month, Jay Chapman, the creator of the lethal injection, said he had a few suggestions for a quick and painless death.

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with the guillotine,” he said. “It can be operated by an idiot and it is a very effective instrument.”

I will not go as far as to say the guillotine should be implemented, but he has a point. Sooner or later we are going to stop death by execution altogether, which is going to the 2 million prisoners who are in the U.S., according to the most recent research conducted by the Sentencing Project in 2006.

Overall, the Supreme Court will find some way to keep delaying each execution until it get its way. It is not cruel and unusual punishment – it is punishment that is deserved.

Potassium Chloride is injected. Two minutes later the toxic chemical causes cardiac arrest.

You’re dead.

Jordan Haygood is a junior news-editorial journalism major from White Oak.