"I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture -- that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon them -- but actually set it up to kill them while they sat. They -- get this -- they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, like some obscene image of a commode, producing a fatal gas; or a cap over their head, and their hands dipped in some conducting fluid, to fry their brains. You want to know the punch line? Yeah, [...] give us the punch line. This same state had a law that forbade -- and I quote -- "cruel and unusual punishments!" Can you believe that?"