Cruel and Unusual: A Death Penalty Thrad

[The Man]

The latest atrocity:

An Oklahoma inmate whose execution was halted Tuesday because the delivery of a new drug combination was botched died of a heart attack, the head of the state Department of Corrections said.

Director Robert Patton said inmate Clayton Lockett died Tuesday after all three drugs were administered.

Patton halted Lockett’s execution about 20 minutes after the first drug was administered. He said there had been vein failure.

The execution began at 6:23 p.m. when officials began administering the first drug, and a doctor declared Lockett to be unconscious at 6:33 p.m.

About three minutes later, though, Lockett began breathing heavily, writhing on the gurney, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow. After about three minutes, a doctor lifted the sheet that was covering Lockett to examine the injection site.

I will undoubtedly have more on this later.

ETA: on the plus side, Digby does have some slightly encouraging news. The Economist piece she links is worth reading too.

More, from the comments at LGM: Study estimates that one in twenty-five victims of the death penalty are innocent.

Balloon Juice has a much longer overview of what went on with Oklahoma's botched execution. It's even more outrageous than I expected.

[lisarea]

Holy crap. Everything about that is horrifying.

I've been looking for somewhere to put this story that's been haunting me. I hope it's OK here:

This Man Is About to Die Because an Alcoholic Lawyer Botched His Case | Mother Jones

[Jerome]

How about the State not be killing people, we have the resources to jail people for life.

[Crumb]

That would be ideal.

[The Man]

Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine | Video | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

[SharonDee]

Lethal injection not so humane, after all? Well, let's bring back the electric chair!

That's right, Tennessee has decided to eliminate prisoners' choice and do every execution with that old reliable, Old Sparky.

And if that turns out to work well, maybe we'll bring back firing squads, hanging, or the guillotine.

Progress, am I right?

[Dingfod]

How about bunker buster bombs dropped by B52s? Death would be pretty much instantaneous, no suffering.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Dingfod

How about bunker buster bombs dropped by B52s? Death would be pretty much instantaneous, no suffering.

If you really want a 'no suffering' execution, tell the prisoner that there has been some mistake and they are going to be released in the morning. And then take them while they sleep, they'd never see it coming, and don't you think the anticipation could be worse than the actual execution?

[Ari]

I'm oddly happy they are bringing back the electric chair. I mean if we are going to have executions at all.
Lethal injection is evil, it takes away the appearance of killing allowing people to distance themselves from the reality of what they support/are-doing. It's been theorized for some time now that lethal injection is actually pretty torturous but those viewing it just aren't seeing the torture. One of the drugs in the 'cocktail' is given specifically to prevent the condemned from thrashing around, but there's no evidence it reduces the pain felt in the dosage size given. Making the execution appear humane.

If they go through with it, it will be interesting to see how the death penalty fairs when the public finally ends up face to face with what they are supporting. Both drop-hanging and the guillotine are actually more humane than both modern methods, but are always much more graphic, and graphic executions cause people to quickly remove support for the death penalty, so it was cleaned up to allow the US to still kill mentally disabled black people.

[MonCapitan2002]

To be frank, the recent rash of botched executions has sapped a good deal of my support for the death penalty. While I still support it philosophically, the fact that it is inherently racist as well as the multiple instances where innocent people have been killed has me opposing it in practice.

On the plus side, we still have life in prison without the possibility of parole, so I can console myself with that.

[Sock Puppet]

That was my first reason to oppose the death penalty -- the racist/classist application of it, plus the opposition of the courts to reopening even obviously fucked-up cases before executions take place. But then, when I walked it back further, I realized that not only could I not trust the current system to carry it out fairly, I also couldn't conceive of a system that I could trust.

I agree in principle that some folks just need killin'. I don't have a categorical imperative that demands mercy for every human being. But there's no state, group or individual, anywhere on Earth, that can be trusted to wield that power. None. And I don't think there ever can be.

[BrotherMan]

It was many years ago now when me, my mom and dad talked briefly about the death penalty. There must have been some case that was in the news but I don't remember what it was. Mom asked both of us if we believed in capital punishment. Without hesitation my dad and I confirmed that we did. Mom, being the good Catholic, wasn't in favor of a death penalty at all. I don't know what the official reasons the Church list as reasons, but Mom reasoned that we are human, infallible, and can't know with absolute certainty that the guilty is absolutely guilty. Oh, and also, there's some moral squickiness with killing people. This was all long after I was even conservabort. I think. But I'm glad I had that conversation. It got me to actually, for reals, thinking about it - instead of "trusting" the Man (not our The Man).

[Kael]

Sometimes the capital punishment question reminds me of the mess with our military and intelligence operatives and torture; one of the arguments brought up in favor of capital punishment is, as Sock Puppet put it, "some folks just need killin'." Similarly, the hypothetical "smoking gun w/millions of lives saved" is brought up in defense of torturing suspected terrorists.

I've always thought, with regard to the torture question, that even if we ignore the extreme unlikelihood of the proposed excuse (a common feature of what-if moral dilemma questions anyway) that it wouldn't change the necessary societal response, even if many or most of us felt it did save lives and was the right thing to do. We'd throw the offending agent(s) a parade, give them a medal, then toss their ass(es) into prison for torturing prisoners. You can't afford to start making exceptions to a rule like that.

Over the last few years, my opinion on capital punishment has taken a similar turn. I'm inclined to agree that we simply do not have, and probably never will have, a fair enough system for me to feel comfortable giving it the power to kill people for their crimes. And while I do agree that "some folks just need killin'," I would have to say that whoever did the killing would still have to be held responsible, even if we threw them a parade and gave them a medal first.

[lisarea]

I have a lot of complicated feelings and opinions about a lot of the associated issues, but when it comes down to it, I cannot get past the notion of a government intentionally killing its own constituents. It's just fucked up well beyond the pale for me.

And I am not a sanctity of life kind of guy. Death does not wig me out super-hard or anything. Personally, I would rather be executed than imprisoned for a long time. And I'm not even super-against vigilante murders in really extreme cases where we know for absolute sure that someone is both guilty and dangerous.

I just can't get past thinking it's super fucked up to have a government officially, legally kill one of its own citizens.

[Janet]

I used to be fine with capital punishment philosophically but didn't trust any government to do it right. But, oddly, watching all the true crime shows I do has turned me off of it even philosophically. Seeing all those families calling for death in their interviews, the glint of vengeance in their eyes, turns my stomach. What bothers me most is that while I hope I would not be so ruled by anger if I lost a loved one, I'm pretty sure I would. I'm very protective of those I love and I know I would want to hurt someone who hurt one of them.

[Dingfod]

I'm not real keen on a government killing citizens of other countries, on purpose or by accident.

[Watser?]

I'm really glad we have no death penalty here, and I oppose it in principle but I can't really be bothered to argue against it anymore, either online or IRL.

[Ari]

Personally I'm against the modern death penalty even if I could be somehow 100% assured it was only applied to those who were absolutely guilty. As Janet mentioned it's all about vengeance. To do to them what they did to someone else.* The problem is the vengeance doesn't work. Oh sure the news loves shoving cameras in people's faces to get them to say a sound bite about closure, but it's just not true. You listen to people after someone that hurt their family is put to death and it doesn't seem to have made a difference, there's still a hole in their heart and killing the person who put it there doesn't actually mend it. I've read interviews were people talk about thinking it would (because the media tells us it will) and then regretted their support of killing after because it changed nothing but brought them one step closer to the person they hated so much.

What about a horrible psychopathic murderer with no redemption aren't we preventing him from hurting anyone else? Sure in the past, but in the modern day of ultra-max prisons (and no Riddick) and GPS tracking the concept of escape, especially for one of these types of prisoners, is pretty much nil.

*I've often argued if it's about an eye for an eye vengeance and we really want the death penalty to be a deterrent, murders should be killed in the way they killed, or released into a fenced in area and hunted for TV ratings (have all the show's money go to charities even). Yet this gets little support and raises moral issues. People seem to realize that it would make them the same monster they are trying to kill. The sanitization of the death penalty makes it easier to pretend they aren't advocating the same actions as the horrible monster that needs to die.

[Janet]

One thing I've noticed about the grieving families on those shows. The ones who live in states that don't have the death penalty are never shown asking for it or being upset that it was taken off the table for a plea. I think there's an expectation issue there and also a cognitive dissonance one. If you know the death penalty isn't an option, like in Michigan where it's been unavailable for decades, you never ask for it or get disappointed if you can't have it. I think, in time, if it were outlawed everywhere people would get used to not having it as an option and be okay with that.

Also, to expound on what Ari said, we not only have better prisons, we also know now how to diagnose psychopaths. If the psychopathy checklist is administered properly and used in parole hearings it significantly reduces the chances of a psychopath being freed to kill again. The book I read on it was twenty years old and it was not being used as universally as it could, but now I'm sure it's part of the standard procedure.

[Angakuk]

Johnny Cash - Joe Bean - YouTube

[The Man]

The venerable Charles P. Pierce details a truly barbarous fuckup of an execution in, where else, Arizona. I'm not going to quote all the grisly details; feel free to look, or not, based on the strength of your stomach. This probably merits a trigger warning for... something.

[viscousmemories]

I am against capital punishment because someone (or someones, here or at a previous forum) convinced me that the state shouldn't have the power to end someone's life because no state can guarantee that nobody will ever be wrongly executed, and none of the alleged benefits of execution are worth the risk of executing a single innocent person.

That's not why I'm bumping this ancient thread though, I'm bumping it to post this.

The Autobiography of Robert Pruett � Current Affairs