The uneasy relationship with capital punishment

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/09/2017 (2946 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Depending on one’s inclination, one might congratulate the state of Florida for (maybe) finding the elusive painless, bloodless method of capital punishment.

On Aug. 24, at 6:10 p.m., double-murderer Mark Asay was given a lethal injection of three drugs, beginning with etomidate, an anesthetic. This was used because the previous drug of choice, midazolam, wasn’t readily available. Pharmaceutical companies were refusing to sell their products to American prison authorities for executions. Regardless, Asay died in about two minutes.

Contrast this with the 2014 less-than-painless execution of rapist-murderer Dennis McGuire. Ohio prison authorities were prohibited from using their previous method of choice to hasten McGuire’s appointment with his maker.

So American prison authorities tried another method — combining midazolam and hydromorphone. Reportedly, Mr. McGuire convulsed in obvious pain, gasping for breath and making choking sounds. Online news reports differ as to exactly how long it took Mr. McGuire to die (anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes), but all agree it was neither quick nor painless.

The problem in this case and others is that no one has found (until, maybe, late last month) a foolproof method of painlessly killing someone. Essentially, McGuire, Asay and others were guinea pigs.

It’s not for lack of effort. Since the late 1800s, American know-how has been employed in a search for the perfect execution technique. Before then, hanging was the method of choice. Ideally, the neck would snap and the condemned would die quickly and painlessly. Except sometimes it didn’t work, and he’d slowly strangulate or, conversely, be decapitated.

In 1881, the New York state government struck a committee to find a more humane way of killing. It fell to Harold Brown and Arthur Kennelly, who worked for Thomas Edison, to invent the first electric chair.

In August 1890, murderer William Kemmler became its first victim. A 17-second jolt of 2,000 watts didn’t kill him, much to the horror of those present. A second jolt was needed; the whole process took about eight minutes. According to the New York Times, a deputy coroner (presumably someone accustomed to gruesome sights) said, “I would rather see 10 hangings than one such execution as this.”

Unperturbed, American prison authorities made the electric chair their favourite method of death. According to the website of anti-capital-punishment group the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), Kemmler’s experience was hardly unique. In 1985, when Indiana authorities executed William Vandiver, it took 17 minutes and five jolts of electricity. Other electrocutions have caused the condemned to burst into flames.

Presumably, prison authorities thought they’d be improving the situation with the gas chamber. But that wasn’t perfect, either. In 1992, Arizona executed Douglas Eugene Harding; he died 10.5 minutes after cyanide tablets were dropped. Harding was seen to thrash violently against the restraints.

Of course, there are obviously painless methods — the guillotine and the firing squad — but the Americans don’t like blood. Painless and bloodless — that’s the American ideal.

Lethal injections were supposed to provide that, but as the McGuire case and other cases listed on the DPIC website show, they aren’t always painless, either. Indeed, according to jurisprudence professor Austin Sarat’s book Gruesome Spectacles, in which he studied 8,776 American executions between 1900 and 2010, 7.12 per cent of the lethal injections were botched, compared with 3.12 per cent of the hangings, and none of the firing-squad executions.

No decent human being wants to make anyone suffer unnecessarily. But this emphasis on maximum painlessness shows that most capital punishment proponents are uneasy about the practice. That’s why they want to make it so painless. If you’re going to execute sadistic killers, you must do it more kindly than the way they killed their victims.

So when you suggest to a death-penalty proponent that it’s cruel punishment, they’ll probably respond that it’s more genteel than the acts committed by the condemned. After a lethal injection took two hours to kill Joseph Wood in 2015, former Arizona governor Jan Brewer insisted he didn’t suffer and that “this is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.”

But it isn’t just the emphasis on painless execution. Think of the rituals that go with American executions. Clergy is brought in for comfort. Then there’s the famous last meal. Why? Essentially, the prison authorities are saying, “Yes, you’re a deplorable person and we want to kill you, but here’s a nice steak. It’s on us, so no hard feelings, OK?”

Contrast this with a person being sent away for life. Does anyone feel Paul Bernardo deserved one last night on the town before going to jail for (one hopes) the rest of his life? (“Hey, Paul! It’s your last night of freedom. Should we go for pizza or Chinese food?”) Should he have been allowed to pick the decor of his cell? Obviously not. Indeed, many resent so-called Club Fed facilities.

Why the difference? Because everyone recognizes that society has the right — indeed the duty — to remove its most dangerous offenders from its midst. And if he or she must go to jail — directly to jail — and if the accommodations there aren’t five-star (or even one), virtually no one will feel badly about it.

The fact that authorities don’t feel the need to disguise, rationalize or minimize the harshness of incarceration shows there’s nothing inherently barbaric about such punishment — unlike the death penalty.

Arthur Chapman is a Winnipeg freelance writer.