Thursday, July 24, 2014

ANOTHER BOTCHED EXECUTION

When the state of Utah executed Gary Gilmore by firing squad in 1977, I remember thinking that Utah’s method of putting a capital murderer to death was barbaric and constituted cruel and unusual punishment. A large segment of our society was agreed with this opinion, too. The publicity surrounding Gilmore’s execution fueled an already widespread discussion about alternative methods of imposing the death penalty, and later that year the state of Oklahoma enacted legislation authorizing death by lethal injection. Subsequently, the state of Texas followed suit, and in 1982 became the first state to execute a prisoner using that method. The notion of putting a convict to sleep and then stopping the convict’s heart seemed like a humane way to bring about the prisoner’s death.

A lot has changed since 1982. World-wide, only a handful of countries employ the death penalty, and the multi-national pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs typically used in the lethal injection process are no longer willing to sell those drugs to American states that still have the death penalty on their books. As a result, those states have had to secure the drugs used in their executions from unregulated compounding pharmacies, and the track record of those pharmacies has been woefully deficient in providing drugs that will bring about a death row inmate’s demise without the cruel and unusual suffering that the Eight Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits.

Yesterday’s botched execution of Joseph Robert Wood III by the state of Arizona was just the latest in a string of gruesome executions conducted by states over the past two years using ineffective drugs secured from compounding pharmacies. Instead of a short, painless procedure that was supposed to take around ten minutes to bring about Wood’s death, Arizona’s procedure took almost two hours, during which time Wood repeatedly gasped for air. When will this kind of torture end?

I believe that state-sanctioned execution of prisoners is wrong and should be eliminated, but barring the elimination of the death penalty, I also believe that a prisoner’s execution should be carried out without torture and in the most painless way possible. In retrospect, Gary Gilmore’s execution by firing squad seems a lot less cruel and barbaric compared to what states have been doing today.

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