Give me liberty or give me death
Darryl Mack is set to be executed tonight. He appealed the decision saying that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. You can read an article about it here.
Before I start, I want to say that this is not a post about whether the death penalty should be banned in the US or if it should be widely used, etc. That would open up a whole other can of worms that I’m not prepared to deal with right now. I’m not even writing about Mack, although his appeals prompted me to actually commit this to a post. More on that later.
I’m reading The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (1998, Oxford University Press), which is a collection of essays detailing prison life and politics, primarily in England and America. England did a lot of transportation to America and Australia, as well as capital punishment before prisons became the main source of punishment, and even then it was seen as a reformative process, not a punishment per se.
The first chapter deals with punishment in the secular part of the Roman Empire, and oh my, they were bastions of capital punishment. If you were a convicted arsonist, you were burned alive. If you committed perjury, precipitation was the sentence (being thrown off the Tarpeian Cliff.) “Composers of scurrilous songs about a citizen” were clubbed to death. Hanging was reserved for those who stole from another’s crops. Vestal virgins who did the nasty were buried alive. Those who killed close relatives were subject to the culleus, which was “the practice of confining the offender in a sack with an ape, a dog, and a serpent and throwing the sack into the sea.” It almost sounds like a cruel Monty Python sketch.
According to Wikipedia, a lethal injection is a mixture of three drugs. Sodium thiopental is a short acting barbiturate that makes the injectee unconscious while the other drugs do their thing. 5 grams is about 14 times the amount a normal injection would be, so it’s supposed to work quickly and last long. Pancuronium bromide is a muscle relaxant that stops all muscle movement except for the heart. Again, there is a much higher dosage (over 10 times) given to act within 15 to 30 seconds. Potassium chloride (5-10 times the usual amount) is then given to stop the heart.
Okay, here’s the reason why I’m writing. In late February, Michael Morales was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. Two court-appointed anesthesiologists withdrew from the execution, saying that they were doctors who took an oath to help cure people, not to help kill them. I agree completely. If a doctor does not want to aid in an execution, he or she shouldn’t be forced to do so. However, there is the issue of whether someone who is not a doctor can administer this injection efficiently (find a vein, etc.) That, and the theory (which, if it’s true, is bad enough) that the anesthesia doesn’t fully work, thereby causing great pain to an inmate that can’t move, are why the appeals for cruel and unusual punishment are starting to arise.
Again, this is not an argument for or against the death penalty. This particular inmate, Michael Morales, was sentenced to death after raping and brutally killing a 17-year-old in 1981. He knows he is guilty and is repentant. But he wants to be able to die a painless death. I’m sorry, but didn’t this girl deserve to die a painless death as well? Apparently, he tried to strangle her and when that didn’t work, he beat her with a hammer. We’re talking a long and excruciatingly painful way to die. If he were sentenced to life without parole, that would be one issue, but he was sentenced to death and, unfortunate though it might be, all the intricacies surrounding it.
In 2001, a pastor had written a letter to the editor of the New York Times. He was questioning why people who had committed the most heinous crimes were allowed to die peacefully, while all over the country there are terminally ill people who are in great pain and cannot get help in dying because it is illegal to assist suicide. Now, I’m not for people offing themselves because they feel bummed or have a broken leg. I’m talking about people who have lived with horrible pain that won’t go away and don’t want to live their lives as doped-up bed-ridden people. They want to die with dignity. I’m also saying that if there’s going to be a death penalty in this country, there’s a reason why heinous crimes that cause horrific pain and anguish to the wronged individual, family and friends are punished by execution.
On second thought, I will give my opinion on the death penalty. I believe it’s a sound theory. If someone commits a crime atrocious enough, or if it is known that said person has killed multiple times, then this is an appropriate punishment. The problem lies in the practice. I would rather let a guilty man go free because of lack of evidence than kill an innocent man. In a society so huge, there is no possible way to know for sure who committed what crime, if any.