I’m opposed to the death penalty, but not because I think that no one deserves to die for their crimes. The two men who were on Death Row and set to be executed in Oklahoma last night both deserved to die for their crimes. One raped and killed an 11 month old baby. The other executed a girl who had just graduated from high school after carrying out a home invasion, carjacking her car, and kidnapping her. There’s no one disputing their guilt.
But there are at least three problems. The first is that innocent people do occasionally get convicted of capital crimes. Once you kill someone, you can’t unkill them if it turns out you convicted the wrong person. The second is that there is a lot of wisdom in our religious traditions that counsel that we shouldn’t judge lest we be judged, and that we should forgive those who trespass against us, so that we might be forgiven for our own trespasses. The third is what everyone is talking about today, which is that it’s hard to kill people in a humane way that doesn’t entail constitutionally-banned cruel and unusual punishment.
Personally, I don’t know why they can’t just give people a lethal injection of morphine. First, anesthetize people like you would for a major surgery, and then jack them up with enough opioids that they stop breathing. They’d never feel a thing and they certainly wouldn’t feel any pain. Why all these exotic cocktails of medicines? I’m sure there’s a reason, but I’m also sure my solution would work and wouldn’t be particularly traumatizing for anyone if it didn’t.
But, rather than getting more efficient at killing people, maybe we should work more on understanding that we’re better off getting rid of the death penalty since it’s never going to be error-free. Letting some people live despite the fact that they deserve to die isn’t going to hurt us. Not really. Not like it hurts when we kill the wrong person. Not like it hurts when the cocktail of drugs produces a cruel and unusual death.
Those woozy Europeans.
Two inmates from Oklahoma lost appeal to know substance of “lethal” drug cocktail. Reaction from the White House was immediate and damning.
The U.S. has a poor record on human rights. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture years pretty much clinched that, but even before that the death penalty kept us in bad company and made us look less credible on human rights:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/abolitionist-and-retentionist-countries
There’s simply no rational reason for it. And despite the blood lust for state sponsored revenge on some cases, the system doesn’t exist that can implement the death penalty fairly.
Scott Turow:
For an amazing story, here’s a link to a story from my previous parish about a woman whose son was murdered and how she responded to the murderer:
http://outreachextensions.com/docs/A_Justice_That_Heals_Resource_Guide.pdf
If we were at all serious about justice, we’d rethink our entire approach to it. As it is we’re obsessed with punishment and revenge at the expense of prevention and rehabilitation.
Decades of study into social and psychological systems have shown us time and again that when populations are put under pressure, a predictable percentage will commit certain kinds of crimes. We know for example that austerity measures leads to social unrest and violence. We know that people with otherwise perfectly fine moral compasses will steal if it’s a matter of feeding their children. We know that people put into desperate and hopeless situations more easily cross the line into not caring about the consequences of their actions, especially when there are no positive outcomes available.
And all that’s completely apart from the segment of the penal system designed more or less specifically to harass people of color and undocumented immigrants.
Yes, there will always be psychos and attention seekers that will commit horrible crimes, but the vast bulk of our prison population is not comprised of such individuals. If anything, we’re doing exactly the opposite of what a rational actor would do in order to lower crime and incarceration rates by instead creating an economic sector dependent upon profits extracted from prisoners.
So yeah, a culture that genuinely prides itself on valuing life and individual rights should be horrified at even the possibility of wrongly executing innocents, regardless of the method used, or for that matter wrongfully imprisoning innocent people. We ought to compensate victims of wrongful incarceration for the irreplaceable years of lost life and mental (and physical) anguish, but we can’t even be bothered to do that.
We don’t care about justice. The most charitable conclusion one could arrive at is that we care about the appearance of justice, but really, we can’t be bothered to work too hard at it. We care about revenge and bringing suffering to those we deem deserving of it. Whether or not they’re guilty of any actual wrongdoing, they’re guilty of belonging to the wrong social class, and when you look at the statistics, that’s the worst crime of all.
I don’t think it matters one whit to most supporters of the death penalty that an innocent person will occasionally slip through the cracks and be killed. It’s simply looked on as “the cost of doing business”. And the reason they can so blithely ignore this reality is because there is exactly a zero percent chance that anyone they know, or even anyone who is remotely like them, will ever face the possibility of even an erroneous conviction, much less one for a capital crime.
I am not an absolutist when it comes to the death penalty. I do believe there are crimes so heinous that the death penalty can be warranted. But I have very deep ethical concerns about how it is so randomly applied, and the huge variance in how this issue is handled by the states. Until we can resolve these kinds of issues, I don’t think we should be executing anyone in this country. We need to have a clear definition of what constitutes a capital crime and it MUST be applied equally across the nation. And the fact that a convicted persons right to use newly found DNA evidence to help with their possible exoneration will depend solely on where you happen to be convicted is just about the worst kind of shameful travesty I can imagine.
The whole process is so fucked up as to be completely absurd. And given the insane death penalty fever that we have in some states, yesterday’s clusterfuck in Oklahoma was entirely predictable. That was the culmination of a conscious decision by Mary Fallin to kill this guy, by hook or crook; because that’s what good, tough on crime conservatives do.
What I’ve discovered tonight about the extraordinarily coercive actions that Governor Fallin took against her State Judiciary in order to force through this horrible incident shocks my conscience. If anyone ever deserved to lose their office over a misdeed, this awful person who holds the Governor’s office is the one.
And this 2-week “independent review” is going to be a total sham, a mere interruption in Oklahoma’s killin’ of African-Americans. The extraordinarily thin silver lining is that the executions of these laws in Confederate States (not just Oklahoma!) are so clearly administrations of cruel and unusual punishment that the Supreme Court will be hearing cases that are going to shock the consciences of the Justices as well.
OK, maybe not Thomas. His soul appears to be a dead, shriveled thing.
how many innocent people are you willing to kill?
if the answer is 0 then you’re against the death penalty
if the answer is greater than 0 then you’re for the death penalty
Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins are commies anyway:
As an attorney, one of the primary reasons I’m against the death penalty is that it costs 20 times as much to kill someone as to imprison him for life. That takes into account the cost of all the appeals to which a death row inmate is entitled. Consider court time, including the salaries of the judges and court staff, attorney time (with the state paying the costs of both the prosecution and defense) over and over again.
It’s been well researched and the results are fairly conclusive that there’s no deterrent value to killing people. In fact, it may glamorize murder for a certain segment of the sociopathic population, and then lastly but most importantly, there’s the fact that lots of innocent people get convicted. When a person of color is up against the full power of the state with a white judge and white jury, there can be a lot of prejudice at play. Prosecutors are known for thinking along the lines of, “Well, hell, if he’s not guilty of this crime, surely he’s guilty of something else.”
As a veterinarian I’m bewildered that states can’t figure out how to inject a lethal cocktail quickly and without causing physical suffering. Or rather, I’m bewildered that they find it necessary to cause suffering at the end, as if the sentence of death is not enough.
The cocktail reported for this execution is ridiculous: midazolam is too mild a sedative to be typically used to induce unconsciousness. The second drug is a paralytic agent that (used alone) leaves the brain aware. And the third is the lethal agent, which is also not an anesthetic, painkiller or anxiolytic. We would never use this combination for euthanasia of a companion animal.
As another veterinarian, I’m completely with you on this. It’s quite apparent that suffering is part of the intent, unlike OUR euthanasias. If simple death was the desired outcome, a simple and fast IM injection of medetomidine would overcome any resistance (which I assume is at least part of the problem of getting a decent IV line – IV drug abuse doubtless plays a part as well) and then any number of medications could be humanely delivered, resulting in death.
But because there appears to be a strong desire that the person sentenced to death must be AWARE of the impending act, well, gotta keep ’em awake as long as possible. Completely reprehensible.
“The cocktail reported for this execution is ridiculous:”
And the thought process behind coming up with the cocktails is equally ridiculous: First we’re gonna knock em out, then we’re gonna paralyze them, then for grins and giggles we’re going to finish it off with an chemical erosion of the circulatory system! Great fun for all!
It gives the term “drawn and quartered” new meaning, and that’s not even done by beating dead horses…
I’ve wondered that too, about why don’t they give death row dudes an overdose of heroin.
Why don’t you either just use a bloody axe and stop the pretence of civilisation and decency or admit it’s indecent and uncivilised and abolish it?
The cognitive dissonance of modern right wing America is astounding,
They claim to follow a man who stated “to turn the other cheek”, and only those with out sin could “cast the first stone”;
At the same time they bloody thirsty want to kill as many “evil persons” as cruelly as the law allows, twisting and even breaking the law if necessary.
Other wise why the rush to KILL a man and try to hide the facts of how they were going to do it, when they were warned it would turn out as badly as it did.
The governor of Oklahoma has hate filled blood on her hands and claims to be a good “christian” even though she refused to honor the example of the man she claims to follow ……….
We know for sure that heroin will kill you, but first it will give you a moment of pleasure that we don’t think you deserve.
Our pleasure (Us as the State) seems to lie in the torture and punishment.
An excuse I’ve heard is that an opiate overdose is too slow. The desire is to do the deed as quickly as a firing squad, rope, or electric chair.
Arguments that will end up allowing for the end of the Death Penalty:
Giving the state the right to kill under any circumstance cedes far to much power to the gubmint and therefor is killing our freedum.
Or
If Hobby Lobby succeeds, then it impinges on the religious freedom of taxpayers who object and they therefore don’t have to pay taxes that fund it.
Either would work just fine.
To me there is no ‘deserving’ the Death Penalty. It’s an easy way out, in many ways no different than if they hang themselves in their cell, except we fund it, own the nature of their death and never really know if they’ve confronted the consequence of their action in any real way (if that matters).
The Death Penalty will stop when it starts being commonly applied to rich GOP Wall-Street criminals.
Alternately, when an overwhelming majority of american citizens develop a functioning moral conscience.
I’m betting on #1.
We briefly had a society in the 1960s that was working very hard not to create monsters. Now we don’t care about communities, or the stresses that the economy puts on people, or the PTSD reactions that get handed down to the third and fourth generation, or other things that might reduce criminality. We have to have our criminals for religious sacrifice to The Law. Execution is not a reasoned-out act, it is a cultic act of sacrifice “for the greater good” even if the rationale is “at least that on won’t be doing it again”.
The very few really evil people (why is the Hannibal Lector story so popular?) become the justification for routine and racialized murder by the state.
There is no surprise in the fact that this happened in Oklahoma. Apparently, Texas is more practiced.
From the state where there were 13 men on Death Row PROVEN TO BE INNNOCENT OF THE CRIMES THEY WERE CONVICTED OF….
So, yeah, I’m against the Death Penalty
The death penalty requires an executioner. A public employee paid to kill. To ask that of anyone among us is cruel.
Understanding today’s America I would imagine that there would be no shortage of volunteers who would do it for free – it’s not a cruel ask, it’s an obscene ask, and today’s America has eschewed the concept of obscenity…
Those willing or eager to volunteer aren’t suitable for public employment. Except in nations with legal systems still in the dark ages. A terrible idea to allow such people state approval for their murderous impulses.
I hope that was the botched execution and he suffered a lot.
Feel free to troll rate.
Unless I missed a big part of the Constitution, the US justice system does not exist to fulfill your revenge fantasies.
That death row inmate wasn’t the person tortured to death by Oklahoma.
Nice to see how strong your personal anti-torture views are.
What kind of man are YOU?
NOT the one Oklahoma tortured to death,
I’m anti torture even for those who practice it.
Being anti-torture has NOTHING to do with my manliness, but does have LOTS to do with my core humanity …….
Any penalty can be fully carried out in error.
If you are sentenced to 10 years and serve the 10 years when somebody discovers you are innocent, too bad.
If the possibility of erroneous application is good against one punishment it is good against all.
And it’s not good against all.
But I do agree the American justice system is way too sloppy and it would be nice if someone would make it better.
I do not agree that only death penalty cases need to be handled better.
As for religious tradition, phooey.
I am a secularist, and you are suggesting we write religion into our law.
As for humane methods, phooey, again.
How humane do we need to be with people who have shown no humanity at all, themselves?
Not very.
The real points of punishment are revenge, deterrence, and individual incapacitation.
Nothing either avenges or incapacitates quite so effectively as death, and no one seems to think anything else deters more effectively (though one might wonder why not).
But I’m open to transportation for life to some sufficiently dreadful place, I suppose.
Perhaps the Russians would rent us rights to Siberia for the purpose.