Quote Originally Posted by horngeek View Post
Funny thing is, I'm pretty sure it's still one of the most reliable and painless methods of execution, the rep it's gotten is just so bad no one who uses the death penalty uses it.
That's a bit of a tangled one. Though no one has done experiments for awhile (at least not legally), there are a few camps on the topic just by reasoning through the problem. The current camps are:

1) Oh yeah, dude's dead.

2) It's possible, however unlikely, that the blade of the guillotine is so fast that some individuals do not pass out do to shock, so theoretically they'd be conscious until their brain runs out of oxygen in 6-13 seconds.