“The US Death Penalty’s Horrific Reality”

Close your eyes. Just for a moment. Let the words “human experimentation” settle in your mind. What do they summon?

Maybe you picture the cold, endless corridors of 1920s psychiatric asylums, where patients were strapped to gurneys, their skulls cracked open while doctors scribbled notes on their agony. Maybe it’s the stench of ammonia in Nazi death labs, where prisoners, stripped of their humanity, were injected with poisons just to measure how long a body could resist. Maybe it’s something even worse—the realization that this isn’t just history. It’s happening now.

Hollywood has long turned these horrors into nightmares on screen. ‘Session 9’ (2001), ‘Gothika’ (2003), ‘Stonehearst Asylum’ (2014), ‘The House on Haunted Hill’ (1999)—all feeding off the terror of institutions where the vulnerable became unwilling test subjects. Then there are the Nazi horror grotesqueries—‘The Human Centipede’ (2009), ‘Dead Snow’ (2009)—stories so extreme we comfort ourselves by believing they could never happen again.

But they do. Not in secret bunkers. Not in abandoned hospitals. They happen in execution chambers across America. Right now.

Prisoners, strapped down. Conscious. Gasping. Convulsing. Injected with chemicals their executioners don’t fully understand. Bodies burning from the inside out, drowning in invisible poison. This isn’t justice. This is human experimentation, sanctioned by the state.

Ia Generated Dall-E

A government that kills but does not know how to kill. That is the United States. For decades, it has clung to the illusion that executions are clean, quick, just. That they serve a purpose beyond raw vengeance. But reality keeps tearing through the lie—one failed, agonizing, monstrous attempt after another.

In 2014, Clayton Lockett was injected with an experimental mix of drugs, meant to send him into death swiftly, quietly. Instead, his body seized for 43 minutes. His veins collapsed. His muscles spasmed uncontrollably. His muffled screams cut through the walls of the chamber as he thrashed against his restraints. He wasn’t executed—he was tortured to death. Witnesses sat frozen, trapped in the nightmare of watching a man be slaughtered by incompetence.

A decade later, Kenneth Smith was the first to be subjected to nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama. A method never before tested on a human being. He gasped violently, his body shaking, his lungs screaming for oxygen that would never come. Scientists had warned about the risks—pure suffocation, blind panic, prolonged suffering—but Alabama moved forward anyway, desperate to finish what their botched lethal injection had failed to do in 2022.

These men weren’t executed. They were test subjects. The state may as well have donned white coats and stood by with clipboards, noting how long a human body can withstand chemically induced agony. And history tells us exactly where this leads. When the Nazi regime mutilated prisoners under the guise of “scientific progress,” the world recoiled. The U.S. now commits the same crimes and calls them “humane alternatives.” The result is the same: a strapped-down body, gasping, convulsing, fighting for a death it can’t escape.

With pharmaceutical companies refusing to be complicit in state executions, states have been scrambling for new ways to keep their killing machine alive. Instead of admitting the system is a failure, they have resurrected the horrors of the past.

Arizona, Alabama, and Oklahoma are reviving the gas chamber.  Tennessee has reopened discussion on using the electric chair.  South Carolina has already resumed executions by firing squad.

This is not about “justice.” This is state-sanctioned brutality, repackaged for a modern audience.

Stop pretending this is a search for a more “humane” execution. This is a government so addicted to death that it will exhume the worst of history’s atrocities rather than admit its failure. These states are dragging execution methods out of the filth of history, resuscitating methods once deemed too monstrous even for the last century. The gas chamber—the weapon of genocide. The electric chair—a machine of botched, screaming deaths. The firing squad—ritualistic slaughter by bullets.

These are not solutions. These are the dying gasps of a system that should have been buried long ago—a system that has swapped the noose for syringes, bullets, and poison clouds but remains fundamentally unchanged. This is not punishment. This is killing for the sake of killing.

We have seen this before, and we condemned it. The Nazis strapped men, women, and children down and justified their torment as “necessary.” America does the same today, hiding behind words like “justice” and “closure.” But what justice is there in watching a body thrash, seize, and suffocate under a state experiment? What closure exists in a gaping mouth, bulging eyes, and lungs clawing for air that will never come?

We swore this would never happen again. That we would never look away while human beings were strapped down and tortured in the name of progress. And yet, here we are. The names have changed. The setting is different. But the horror remains. The execution chamber is a slaughterhouse, and every new “method” they devise is just another grotesque attempt to disguise what has always been true: this is not justice. This is torture.

You tell yourself you care about suffering. You check your shampoo, your makeup, your skincare for “cruelty-free” labels. You refuse to wear fur, refuse to support factory farming, refuse to buy from brands that test on animals. You sign petitions, raise awareness, demand an end to needless suffering.

And yet, right now, human beings are being used as guinea pigs in execution chambers across America. Their bodies seize. They gasp for air. They burn from the inside out. The state straps them down and experiments on them, injecting them with untested drugs, suffocating them with poisons never meant to be inhaled. It does not matter what they have done. It does not matter who they were. No human being deserves to die like this.

You cannot call yourself against cruelty and turn away from this. You cannot claim to believe in justice and accept a system that murders people like test subjects in a failed experiment.

How many more bodies must convulse before you say enough? How many more suffocating lungs, eyes frozen in horror, will it take before you realize this is not punishment—this is the worst kind of torture?

The execution chamber is not a place of justice. It is a slaughterhouse masked as a courtroom sentence. And the longer you stay silent, the more complicit you become.

How long before they start selling tickets?