The appellants are fighting not for their lives but for a more efficient cocktail of deadly drugs. In the current protocol, the first drug is intended to produce unconsciousness, the second to paralyze the muscles and the third to stop the heart. In some cases, the appellants say, the first drug fails, leaving prisoners awake but unable to move or speak as they die of cardiac arrest.
It is the inverse of the guillotine. Rather than painless for the convict but gruesome for witnesses, the three-drug cocktail may be easy on witnesses but brutal for the victim ”” an inert body suffering unspeakable pain.
The Supreme Court may end up banning the cocktail, but such a ruling would only inspire state officials to mix up a new set of drugs. The new protocol may at first appear to work smoothly, but decades of executions have taught us this: Technical systems are prone to failure, and human bodies are irreducibly complex and idiosyncratic. Whatever the technique, executions will go horrifyingly wrong.
Pain is often a necessary part of death. That fact seems unfortunate yet unremarkable in cases of natural death, but when the killing is done deliberately, on our behalf, we keep seeking ways to spare ourselves the dreadful truth.
Abolish the death penalty. It is an unspeakable stain on the reputation of America.
Don’t abolish the death penalty. It is a valid and just mechanism for dealing with gruesome crimes. There. We’ve got both sides of the argument represented.
The solution (no pun intended) is obvious. First administer morphine until the felon is unconcious, then administer the potentially painful cocktail. Oh wait, pain’s not the real objection? This is just another backdoor attempt to do away with a form of punishment deemed acceptable by a great majority of Americans (and those supposedly “enlightened” Europeans too, if they were allowed to actually vote on it – according to opinion polls)…
A great majority? Has there been a referendum?
You are happy to be classed along with China and Saudi Arabia as a nation which executes criminals? Turning prison staff into killers?
Count me out of NATO.
Boy, that was great non-sequitur on NATO. What’s next, US Out of El Salvador?
Public opinion polls show that Americans are increasingly divided on the DP. While a majority continue to support it, the margin of support has been steadily diminishing for many years. I am a former supporter of capital punishment who has reversed his position after extensive research on the subject. Recently I posted an Apologia Contra Letum on my blog listing the principal reasons for my opposition. I will repost it below for general discussion.
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This year the Supreme Court will address the constitutionality of certain aspects of the death penalty (DP). At one time I was a strong supporter of the DP. However as Winston Churchill once observed when asked why he was reversing his position on a policy, “I absolutely reserve the right to be smarter today, than I was yesterday.” Today I am opposed to capital punishment. My opposition is not based on the issue of cruelty or justice. The truth is that some of those on death row deserve a level of punishment that we as a civilized nation can not impose. My reasons for opposing the DP are…
1. It has no proven deterrent value. Indeed the overwhelming body of evidence indicates the DP has no statistically significant deterrent effect.
2. There are no uniform standards for effective legal council. In some states if the defense attorney has a pulse and is not CURRENTLY disbarred he will do. Examples of some who have passed muster in the courts as adequate legal council in capital trials include lawyers who had no experience trying criminal cases (one was a tax lawyer who had never even tried a traffic ticket), drunks, a lawyer who slept through most of the trial, lawyers who called no witnesses for the defense and did not cross examine any prosecution witnesses, attorneys who have been previously suspended or disbarred and so on. It is not surprising that those states with the higher rates of executions tend to be the ones with the lowest (or no) standards for effective council.
3. Both in capital and non-capital cases their have been a disturbingly high number of wrongful convictions which have been brought to light in recent years. There are also at least two post Furman cases (one in Texas and one in Missouri) where available evidence indicates an overwhelming likelihood that innocent persons were put to death.
4. The appeals process is excruciatingly long and so expensive that it is generally cheaper to incarcerate someone for their natural life than pursue a death sentence.
5. Some states have severely limited the right of appeal in order to reduce expenses and speed up the rate of executions. In some of those states this even extends to prohibiting the introduction of exculpatory evidence discovered after the conviction! This greatly increases what I believe to be an already unacceptable risk of miscarriage of justice.
6. Statistics show that cases where the defendants were able to afford good legal council prosecutors rarely seek the death penalty even when the vital circumstances of the crime are demonstrably the same as other cases where the defendants could not afford top notch lawyers and the death penalty was sought. Translation: Those that have the capital, don’t get the punishment.
7. States that do (or did in New York’s case) have high standards for competent legal defense in death penalty cases see few capital sentences and very few or no executions.
New York had the highest standards for capital defense lawyers in the country during the roughly ten years the death penalty was on the books. Of the seventy-two capital cases prosecuted in New York between 1995 and 2005, sixty-three resulted in First Degree Murder convictions, fifty-one of those resulted in Natural Life sentences, eleven in death sentences and one died before being sentenced. Of the nine not convicted of First Degree Murder, seven were convicted of lesser charges and two were acquitted.
Of the eleven sentenced to death over that ten year period, in 2005 five were still on death row, six had had their sentences overturned on appeal and none had been executed. Shortly thereafter New York’s Court of Appeals overturned part of the death penalty law. Subsequently the state legislature declined to amend the law to restore capital punishment to the state. The cost to the taxpayers over that ten year period exceeded $100 million (!) dollars. (Exact figures were not available from my primary sources since several counties had not reported their total expenses. The aforementioned figure is therefore conservative.)
8. There have been numerous documented instances of prosecutorial and police misconduct in capital cases. Those who question if this really ever happens should take a look at the recent case in Durham NC where a prosecutor attempted to railroad three young students from Duke University for a crime he knew never happened. It is likely the only reason they were not packed off to prison is that they came from families with the means to hire outstanding criminal defense teams.
9. Although the United States is a sovereign country, and we are within our rights to order our justice system as we see fit, I think that when virtually the entire of the developed world has abolished capital punishment and we have not, that should be cause for reassessing our position. When we stand alone in the developed world in defense of an institution that has been uniformly rejected, to not ask ourselves some very tough questions is perhaps tending towards the sin of pride and hubris. Why are we so isolated on this matter?
5, so what is the proper penalty for murder?
“In some cases, the appellants say, the first drug fails, leaving prisoners awake but unable to move or speak as they die of cardiac arrest”. Wrong! The prisoner dies of hypoxia. Reports and columnists are lazy and seldom check facts and try to make things more sensational than they are. Knowing the pharmacodynamics of the drugs used I think awareness is probably rare if it occures at all.
How come we’re so worried about how the non-innocent killer feels–emotionally and physiologically–when being put to death with the “cocktail” but we’re so blase when it comes to administering a toxic solution (highly concentrated like salt sea water) to the uterus which is carrying an innocent baby?
Re: 6
[blockquote] so what is the proper penalty for murder?[/blockquote]
Death by incarceration.
Re: 8
The issues raised in this article are not very compelling reasons for abolition of the DP. That said I remain opposed for the reasons I outlined above.
Like Ad Orientem, I have been re-examining this issue. However, I cannot agree with a total abolition. Rather, I would limit it to cases in which the death penalty is essentially self-defense (or defense of another). E.g. A murderer who murders again in prison, a terrorist responsible for death and whose imprisonment is likely to cause additional death due to reprisal or ransom attempts.
Except in those cases in which there is a demonstrable self-defense claim, I’m inclined to oppose the death penalty for the reasons cited.
#4. It makes me shudder when I think that the UK is allied to a state which continues to value human life so cheaply. Sequitur.
You will get over it once the executions are stopped. As others have said, there is no provable deterrent value. And retributive excuses carry no moral weight.
The last hanging in the UK was c.1964. It would now be impossible to find judges willing to pass a death sentence, or a jury willing to convict if the death sentence were to follow a guilty verdict.
9, so you lock them up and throw away the key? Sounds awfully cruel to me.
Re: 13
Br. Michael,
I do not agree. Punishment should be harsh. but I do not perceive lifetime incarceration as a cruel punishment when weighed against the crime of murder. That said, as I noted in my #5 above cruelty is not the overriding issue with me. My objections to the DP are based on pragmatism and a concern for the near certainty of a miscarriage of justice. There is no reasonable argument (with the possible exception of #11 above) that trumps the issues I raised in my points.
As George Will once observed, the conservative opposition to capital punishment can be framed thusly. You are asking us to hand over the power of life and death to a government with the efficiency of the Post Office Department and the compassion of the Internal Revenue Service. I think not.
Somewhere recently a study was published which found that the existence of the death penalty did in fact reduce the number of murders in those jusrisdictions. I don’t have a link. It was in the last few months.
Ad Orientem’s discussion of uneven prosecution and defence do give one pause. I am grateful for the tool of DNA evidence which makes mistakes much less likely than in the past.
However, the article is about whether the drug cocktail is “humane.” Once the state has determined that an individual must be put to death as a matter of justice, it becomes a question of not infliciting unnecessary pain while he’s dying. Hanging and the firing squad were both fast and effective. Dying hurts, as far as I know. It’s a fact.
I do have to wonder at the logic, that if our criminal justice is so bad and leads to a wrong punishment so often that you are willing to lock innocent people up for long periods of time. I would think that such mental torture is cruel and unusual. And you probably do need to give them a hope of release for good behavior. And harsh punishment does not seen Christian, maybe fair punishment would be better.
Maybe we could reserve the harsh punishment for really serious murders, like hate crimes. You know, murders that we really disapprove of.
Know what it says under “cause of death” on the death certificate of an executed criminal?
“Homicide.”
Enough said.
It’s too bad the victims of all these murders don’t have a chance to testify. The death penalty may not completely stop murder but it will certainly take those who are guilty of it off the streets-forever.
Lethal injection currently involves intravenous delivery of drugs that (1) anesthetize, (2) paralyze, and (3) stop the heart, delivered in sequence.
Any one of these drugs could, by itself, cause death. The paralytic and heart-stopper would do so quickly and painfully. The anesthetic would do so without physical pain but more slowly.
The current controversy arises from concern that the anesthetic (as currently delivered) may wear off and leave the prisoner fully conscious while the other drugs stop his breathing and then his heart.
Prison officials could avoid that scenario by omitting the paralytic and using only the anesthetic and heart-stopper. They could also avoid it by administering a massive intramuscular dose of the anesthetic (in additional to any intravenous dose)—so that the prisoner, once sedated, could not possibly regain consciousness before the other drug(s) took full effect.
But those alternatives could produce bad PR for prison officials. If you use the anesthetic and heart-stopper without the paralytic, the anethetized prisoner may thrash around while his heart is being stopped. That wouldn’t look good.
And you probably can’t do an intramuscular injection from a curtained control both on the other side of the witness chamber. Thus intramuscular injection would involve the awkwardness of having a visible human being visibly inject the anesthetic. Sort of like “The Revenge of Nurse Ratched.”
That’s the practical issue here: not so much the comfort of witnesses (as this article suggests) as the PR of prison officials and the politicians to whom they report. Death penalty opponents want to play up the chilling reality of execution. Prison officials want to make execution look a smooth, impersonal, medicalized version of falling asleep.
Irenaeus Na thiopentathal has a PH of eleven, If those on death row think KCL burns when given then they would be in for a rude awaking with an IM Injection of Na Pent!
Dave B [#20]: What pH would sodium thiopental have in the sort of (dilute) solution one might use for intramuscular injection?
Irenaeus, That is the dilute form. If we injected Na Pent during anesthesia and it went outside the vein we would then inject Bicarb to buffer the effect so the patient did not suffer as much tissue damage. I think the best system would be giving intermitent boluses of the drug during the execution. In the massive doses that Na Pent is given you have circulating levels of Na pent that produce anesthesia for probably 30 minuets or more. The drug is absorbed rapidly into tissue from the blood vessels then reenters the circulation and is metabolized by the liver. In large doses or multiple intermittent doses you have a fairly steady amount that keeps entering the circulation system and produces continous anesthesia. There was an article published in Lancet about measured levels of Na Pent after an execution that showed low levels of the drug. The problem with the study is that the samples were taken several hours after death and the drug continued to be absored but no mechinism to reenter the circulation existed so the levels were artificially low. Another alternative would be to give a large dose of a Benzodiazapine (valium type drug) like ativan that would keep the executed person unaware. This drug could be given IM or IV.