Maybe it's time to do away with the death penalty.

There has been much talk lately about capital punishment: a government putting someone to death. In fact, a case concerning this is before the Supreme Court right now. It's about whether the three-drug cocktail currently administered causes the convicted to endure undue pain. It's a legitimate argument in that we, as a government, may kill someone but have to do it in the least painful way possible. We are not judging them on their particular crimes and punishing them in accordance but are trying, as efficiently as possible, to kill them humanely. We have an obligation, as a nation and an elected government, to be sure we're doing this. They used to hang people or shoot them. I'm sure both methods were quick, but I'm not sure about painless. What if they shot you all over your body but didn't put one in your heart? Wouldn't that hurt a lot? Or what if -- as happened many times -- the rope around your neck broke, and you had to get re-hanged? Would this be considered undue pain? Let me be straight: I think there are certain people who should be, painlessly and mercifully, dismissed from this life because they've broken the rules in such a way that we can't trust them ever again to be in our midst. But . . . we make so many mistakes that it's almost a national tragedy. If you're poor, you're going to get crap representation, someone paid very little and probably pissed that he's not making more. I suspect that we, The United States of America, land of the free and all that, kill more than a few innocent people every year. If we're going to keep the death penalty in this country, we have to come back to the current issue: the 3-drug cocktail. One is the knock him out, another is the paralyze him so he doesn't jerk around on the gurney, and the last is to stop his heart. Apparently the problem arises in step #2. The drug to keep him still, it's alleged, also keeps him from saying whether he's in pain. That means, to me anyway, that he's still awake. So why didn't drug #1 knock him out? I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I've been so drunk that they could have cut off my feet and I probably wouldn't have noticed. Is it really that hard to knock a guy out? I don't think so. Maybe it's time to stop executing people. Maybe the Europeans, and most of the civilized world, are right. But if we're not ready for that in this country, if we have to keep killing people we are convinced have killed other people, let's at least try to see these poor doomed souls into the Great Unknown with a modicum of mercy by finding the least painful method we can. I say put them to sleep forever. It's proven and it's even relaxing. Close your eyes now . . . sleep . . . Why in the world don't they just put the guy/girl in a room and pump in carbon monoxide? Good Lord, we lose whole families this way every year! The poet Anne Sexton left this world just this way, in her garage with the car going, trapping all those noxious fumes in a small space and, basically, putting her to sleep. Forever. Back to the Supreme Court case. Maybe it's time to bring back the guillotine It was invented a couple of centuries ago in France to be a more humane way of dispatching a person than existing methods. And you have to admit that it's fast: your head's off, and you're dead, in a second or less. But what the French probably didn't think about was the horror, the absolute terror, that must have taken over the minds of the condemned persons. Talk about undue stress! I also don't think that our Supreme Court -- whatever its make-up -- would ever again vote for hanging or shooting squads as ways to execute convicted murderers. We're getting squeamish about the whole idea of governments killing people. We're starting, as a nation, to think that maybe the Europeans are right when they just sentence everyone to life in prision. But we don't necessarily like it. We haven't had Europe's troubled past; we've had our own. And we think that, out here in the West where we're making our own rules, certain people viloate the rules we've set down and, in extreme cases, have to be eliminated. Europe has suffered wars that have devastated their populations and have to re-build, minus whole families who vanished in The Holocaust. They have some things to tell us. So . . . although I do think certain people -- like Jeffrey Daumer with human heads cooking in his pots -- do deserve to be escorted, painlessly, to the afterlife, I think it best to concur with more established democracies and go with Europe on this one. Okay, commit them to life in prison. And we will all pay for it. Let's grit our teeth and get on with it. Doing what it right is often difficult, sometimes downright distasteful.