Death Penalty

Recently, I read that states that impose the death penalty are having trouble securing sodium thiopental, one of the drugs used in a cocktail to hasten the execution of a criminal. The drug is manufactured but evidently those who manufacture it are unwilling to sell or restricted from selling to states intending to use the drug for death sentence purposes.
This puts the guy waiting to die in a bind. Does he pray the state will be thwarted from obtaining the drug, in which case they might resort to something more macabre? Or does he pray the state will obtain the drug, which would only precipitate his death?

This dilemma has its origins in the state's need to find a drug cocktail that will insure the executionee  not be subject to harsh and usual punishment but rather enjoy a benign, peaceful death, without suffering. Yet, for most people who have suffered the tragedy of losing a loved one to a murderer, at least part of their emotions wants the perpetrator to suffer the same agony he or she forced upon the victim. Is that not justice the victim's loved ones proclaim? Very few people want the murderer to go straight to "Heaven."

Still, we go about searching for a nice way to kill a man because, in some idiotic way, we believe we are too civilized to chop the guy's head off with the blade of a guillotine, but we are civilized enough to search the world for a drug that will kill him. Are we not simply playing with our conscience?

Can the murderer ever be of service to the world, or has he or she lost their right and/or opportunity to serve, notwithstanding they are imprisoned?

Do we learn anything by killing a man or woman? About ourselves? About what it means to take another life?

And what about forgiveness? Are we here to forgive the murderer? Forgive him or her for what?

Would it be possible or plausible to instead sentence a murderer to life in a guarded monastery? A monastery in a traditional faith, studying the sacred texts of that faith, observing the imposition of disciplines, rituals, the vows of silence, the absolute surrender to a spiritual life. Not for a year or two, but for at least a decade or more; and only then, after they have been approved by their spiritual administrators, would they be allowed, not as free men or women, but as members of the monastery, observing the same strict disciplines, to serve, for the rest of their life,  the poor, the forgotten, the abandoned of this world.

Would they not then feel, in every act of love they perform - every day of their lives - the horror and terror of what they had once committed?

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