Hawke's Bay Herald/June 4, 1890/Euthanasia for Murderers

The Lancet, discussing a recent proposal that murderers should be narcotised to death in a lethal chamber, says:— "First and foremost is the question whether it is advisable to give to murderers, and to them alone, the privilege of being deprived of life by absolute euthanasia. What have they, of all me, one that the pains of death shall not fall upon them? And why should they, of all men, go out of existence in a gentle sleep, knowing no more of their death than of their birth. The common theory is that by taking the life of criminals the law deters others, by the awful dread of the penalty, from committing the crime for the punishment of which the penalty is cast. Is euthanasia likely to be a deterrent? No man who has been in the practice of medicine for five years would admit anything of the kind. Practitioners of medicine learn very soon of the history of those, by no means a limited class, who would willingly die at any hour were it not for fear of the suffering that might attend the supreme event. If men never committed suicide, or if we could trust a man under sentence of death to his own devices in his cell, with appliances for suicide at his command, there would be some reason in the argument. But when we know that life is so little valued by a large class wearied of it, and that many would gladly seek death if the latter would only come without a pang, it is surely the perfection of folly to offer that class the very method of death which it does not fear. Such a proceeding is like offering a premium on murder. Why, then, alter the present state of things? In the present method of execution by hanging there is not one bit too much of the deterrent element; for, as it is well known physiologically, there is no infliction of special agony beyond that common to dying from any sudden and violent mode of death."