“Letter from Belgium: The Death Treatment” is a great article by Rachel Aviv about what it looks like to have legal euthanasia. One big issue seems to be the kind of people who are attracted to work in this industry and or be customers. It turns out not to be just average physicians putting metastatic cancer victims out of their misery.
[Separately, the article does not mention any technical difficulties with euthanasia. The problems that lead to epic legal fights regarding capital punishment here in the U.S. don’t seem to occur in Belgium.]
Related:
Physicians generally don’t participate in executions in the US (it’s viewed as violating the Hippocratic Oath) and drug suppliers are reluctant to supply the correct drugs so it’s not surprising that there are problems with executions. These problems are then used as arguments against capital punishment. People are pretty easy to kill. If it is occasionally botched it is because those who are against capital punishment to begin with are throwing stumbling blocks on the path.
Generally speaking, in order to be executed in the US you have to be guilt of a pretty horrific crime and the murderers rarely give thought to lessening the suffering of their victims, so if the criminal being executed suffers a little during his execution, this doesn’t impress me as a compelling argument against capital punishment.