Thailand to consider lethal injection for executions

BANGKOK (AFP): Thailand’s cabinet will tomorrow consider whether to introduce lethal injections for executions in response to mounting claims that the current use of firing squads is barbaric. “People are horrified that convicts are currently shot to death,” Deputy Interior Minister Vattana Asavahem told reporters this afternoon. The idea of lethal injections was floated in 1996 but never reached the cabinet. Using lethal injections would cost the Corrections Department 1,000 baht for each (27 dollars) prisoner and 33,000 baht to prepare execution rooms, officials said. If the plan is approved by the cabinet, it would need to be endorsed by parliament before becoming law. Some 297 people have been put to death in Thailand since capital punishment was reinstated in 1996 after a eight-year break. Early in the 1900s Thailand beheaded condemned prisoners, but in 1934 switched to the firing squad with two machine guns.