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.
