Botched executions have been competing with downed airplanes for 24/7 news coverage lately. Here’s the latest on the former:
It took Arizona nearly two excruciating hours to execute Joseph Wood with drugs whose source the state concealed. Executions in California have been on hold since 2006 because of problems with lethal injections. Last week a Southern California federal judge cited the delays in declaring the state’s death penalty system unconstitutional
(SFGate, July 25, 2014)
I hasten to disclose that I’ve been categorically opposed to the death penalty all my adult life:
I did not plead for his life as much as I argued for the abolition of the death penalty. If his execution serves any sensible purpose, I hope that it intensifies the debate on whether the specious penal purpose of the death penalty justifies the corrosive effect it has on our humanity and morality.
(“Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams Executed!” The iPINIONS Journal, December 13, 2005)
That said, the irony is not lost on me that prison officials are botching executions because of their oxymoronic mandate to perform them “humanely.” After all, this makes about as much sense as a rapist pleading for leniency by claiming that he did it “gently.”
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
(Amendment VIII, U.S. Constitution, December 15, 1791)
But, if state governments insist on killing people to punish them, the least they can do is do this right. It is as inexcusable as it is unconscionable that their cocktail of purportedly lethal drugs is doing more to torture than to kill. This is why I actually agree with the right-wing NRA nuts who are calling for the return of the firing squad.
After all, there’s no gainsaying that firing a few bullets into the heart would be more lethal and, therefore, more humane than shooting experimental drugs up the condemned person’s vein. What’s more, given that gun violence has become as American as apple pie, execution by firing squad could hardly be deemed cruel and unusual.
Unfortunately, even though cruel and increasingly usual, botched executions are the least of the problems plaguing America’s capital punishment enterprise. For surely it’s even more inhumane that rank incompetence, corruption, and racism cause the criminal justice system to sentence far too many innocent people to death:
Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department, as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab, has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said…
The inquiry includes 2,600 convictions and 45 death-row cases from the 1980s and 1990s in which the FBI’s hair and fiber unit reported a match to a crime-scene sample before DNA testing of hair became common.
(Washington Post, July 29, 2014)
Frankly, botched executions seem a fitting end to a process that so often makes a macabre mockery of any notion of justice.
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Stanley Williams…