With conservative justices questioning their motives and liberal justices questioning their evidence, opponents of the American manner of capital punishment made little headway Monday in their effort to persuade the Supreme Court that the Constitution requires states to change the way they carry out executions by lethal injection.
Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the lawyer for two inmates on Kentucky’s death row who are facing execution by the commonly used three-chemical protocol, conceded that theoretically his clients would have no case if the first drug, a barbiturate used for anesthesia, could be guaranteed to work perfectly by inducing deep unconsciousness.
But as a practical matter, Mr. Verrilli went on to say, systemic flaws in Kentucky’s procedures mean that there can be no such guarantee, and the state’s refusal to take reasonable steps to avoid the foreseeable risk of “torturous, excruciating pain” makes its use of the three-drug procedure unconstitutional.
It was here that Mr. Verrilli met resistance from both sides of the court, and the closely watched case appeared to founder in this gap between theory and practice.
Of the 36 states with the death penalty, all but Nebraska, which still uses only the electric chair, specify the same three-drug sequence for lethal injections.
Since the Enlightenment at least, the West has been constantly searching for a way to execute people that was guaranteed to be instantaneous and painless. Perhaps to assuage our consciences.
Dr. Guillotine regarded himself as a humanitarian, since the inexpert headsmen of the Revolution often missed and required several strokes to finish the job. It’s not obvious to me how, from the point of view of the star of the show, injection (even assuming ideal performance) is all that much more humane than, say, a firing squad aiming for the head, or for that matter the guillotine. The principal goal here really seems to be to cater to the sensibilities of the onlookers: By making it all a clean, clinical, white-coat sort of affair we can somehow protect our wall of denial about what we are actually doing — a denial made more difficult by the bloody mess that other methods leave.
If the people of the USA or its states insist on execution then have hangings in the town square. Don’t keep it all nice and clean behind locked doors and covered windows. Be willing to kill publicly.
#2: How about public surgery too? After all, that’s how it used to be done. Very educational.
I have said for several years that we aught to go back to the days of the guillotine. With a nice, sharp blade. Dull blades hurt more. Most people tend not to feel much when their head is no longer attached to the rest of their body….talk about quick and mostly painless.