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Americans
may shudder at the barbarity depicted in videos showing public executions by the
governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, but the fact remains that alone
among all Western countries, the United States is a death penalty
country.
Though the death penalty is legal in the majority of American
states, only a handful of them actually carry out executions, numbering in the
few dozens annually. Part of the reason the American public maintains a
steadfast support of its government killing convicted murderers is due to the
cloak of secrecy covering executions and that the most common form of execution,
lethal injection, is sold to the public as a medical procedure, akin to putting
a sick animal to sleep.
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