The United States is one of the few civilized countries in the world that still practices the death penalty. Nearly all of Europe has abolished capital punishment; so have Canada, Mexico and most of Central America.
But we still practice capital punishment in America. And perhaps we are right in doing so, for the mere fact that the whole world has forbidden the death penalty does not make it wrong. No, my objection to capital punishment in America is not that it is unethical, per se; I object, rather, to the means of execution. In the great majority of cases — 886 out of 1055 executions since 1976 *ATTRIBUTE*– condemned criminals have died from cardiac arrest caused by potassium chloride: that is, by lethal injection.
Lethal injection is a terrible way to execute someone.
In the first place, it does not provide as great a deterrent as a more conventional mode of execution would. Lethal injection is painless, except for the prick of the needle. The prisoner receives a solution of Pentathol before he is executed, so criminals die in their sleep. For most people, this is not so frightening as death by beheading, hanging or firing squad. Perhaps if we shot our convicted murderers, or cut their throats, would-be killers would think twice before committing their crimes. But when the penalty they face is lethal injection, they have nothing to fear but death (which is the common run of mankind) and a shot, of which we have all received many.
In the second place, lethal injection is an “unusual” punishment, and therefore is, in my opinion, unconstitutional. There is nothing unusual about beheading; you tell your prisoner to bend over, chop that sword downward, and it’s over. It’s been done for thousands of years. With lethal injection, on the other hand, you lead the condemned into the chamber, tie him to the table, swab his arm, and stick a needle in him. The word “unusual” is relative, of course, but this strikes me as a decidedly unusual punishment. It’s weird and creepy, and “weird and creepy” seems, to me, to be the spirit of the phrase “unusual” in the Bill of Rights. It is not a wholesome way to execute someone, and I doubt the Founding Fathers would have approved of it.
Finally, and most importantly, lethal injection trivializes and conceals the fact an execution is taking place. With a lethal injection, the criminal is strapped down to the table, a needle is inserted into his arm, and shortly thereafter he dies. He dies in his sleep; to an indifferent observer, he might almost seem to have expired of natural causes.
This “tameness” is, of course, is the very reason why lethal injection is used in the first place. If the criminal does not bleed, and does not thrash around, we can almost believe we have not executed him at all.
His death, moreover, will not trouble the conscience of the executioner, nor the governor who might have pardoned the criminal, nor the American public who approves of the execution. It will not tax their consciences, I say, as much as if we chopped the man’s head off. But all executions lead to the same place — death — and the man is just as surely dead as if we had beheaded him.
I believe that if we are going to have capital punishment in this country, we should be willing to look it in the face. We should look at the criminal and say, “Tomorrow, my government is going to kill that man.” Lethal injection, in the average mind, does not quite add up to “kill”; we don’t kill dogs — we “put them to sleep.” We should kill a criminal in such a way that we know we’re killing him.
Death by beheading, for example, is probably no more painful than death by lethal injection, and they both yield the same result; but I bet if beheading were the required mode of execution in the United States, we would soon follow Europe and the rest of the civilized world, and abolish capital punishment altogether.
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