The death penalty is the highest form of punishment for a crime in this country, usually reserved for really, really grievous murders or high treason (which hasn’t happened recently, we haven’t had any Communist infiltrators as of late—hopefully).

But lately, we can’t seem to get one right.

thanks to California law, this guy can never be executed.  

we still don’t know just how many murders he was responsible for, but he’s currently serving a life sentence for nine.  

by the way, he just got married!

The problem?

The drugs we are using are too weak.

Celebrities left and right seem to be executing themselves via very enjoyable methods quite frequently, yet we seemingly can’t administer a lethal injection without screwing it up?

It took Clayton Lockett, who was strapped to a comfy gurney, 30 minutes before he died of a heartattack because his vein burst, not under 10 like the drug cocktail promised.

it’s like dying inside a Tiffany’s box

Which was a far more humane way to go than his Stephanie Neiman, the victim he repeatedly raped and buried alive.

History has a way of repeating itself, and doing so worse the second time around.

Joseph Rudolph Wood was recently executed in Arizona, but it took him “nearly two hours after the lethal injection began” to die.

He was administered a drug cocktail, which clearly was not powerful enough to kill him right away.

Seriously, do we have a shortage on NyQuil and cyanide?

Actually, we do have a problem. We’re creating drug cocktails that are weaker and more experimental.

Why? What happened to the good stuff?

But of late, these drug cocktails have run into more practical problems. Until quite recently, the anesthetic of executioners’ choice was usually sodium thiopental. But then its only United States manufacturer quit making that drug under pressure from anti-death-penalty activists. And the European Union has had strict export controls on drugs that could be used in executions since 2011; they can’t be sold to U.S. prisons.

Faced with this problem, as Liliana Segura has reported in The Nation and The Washington Post, states have been scrambling to find another solution. What this has meant on the ground is that they are trying out other cocktails, and seeking out drug suppliers of more questionable origins.

So let’s review.

The EU makes the good stuff, but won’t export it to us (that’s what we get for protecting them? Let’s see if we bail them out the next time they’re invaded).

The only U.S. maker was shut down by anti-death-penalty activists.

you know them.  they’re people who are confused by this graph

So why do anti-death-penalty activists hate those on Death Row so much?

Why would they rather have them killed with substandard drugs?

Here’s why: secretly, they don’t care about anyone on Death Row or how they feel when they’re executed.

Anti-death-penalty activists care about themselves.

They care about how it makes them feel that they take some phony moral high ground against the death penalty.

In reality, they’ve managed to eliminate our most humane method of execution: sodium thiopental.

They’re not in it for the humanity.

The more people are executed, the less “humane” it is, the stronger their cause.

Talk about a group of people leaving bodies in their wake.