Electric chairs have been controversial ever since the original one was introduced. Many people believe that both the guillotine and the gallows are preferable due to their lessening of torture or lingering death.
Lethal injection has come to be the vehicle of choice for executions in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. Over that time it has been employed in 1,039 of 1,212 executions. It is the principal mode of execution in 35 of the 36 states that employ the death penalty, and the sole one in about half of these jurisdictions. Other states permit electrocution, gassing, hanging and, in 2 states, death by a firing squad. These are at the option of the condemned prisoner, or available as backup procedures. Utah is 1 of the 2 states that retain the use of a firing squad, but only for prisoners who requested it prior to May 3, 2004.
Gary Gilmore, the subject of Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song," requested a firing squad in Utah and was duly executed by one in 1977. Now another prisoner, Ronnie Lee Gardner, who has been on the state's death row since 1985, has asked for it as well. The state does not want to give it to him.
I don't know why Gardner wants to die with his boots on, so to speak. Maybe the question is its own answer. In lethal injection, the prisoner is strapped cruciform on a gurney, alone in a room where he is exposed to the gaze of others he cannot see, and executed by functionaries who cannot see him. It is a posture of maximum helplessness and humiliation. It's the situation of a lab rat being done to death.
A firing squad is no picnic. You aren't stood up or bound to a post after the proverbial last cigarette. You are strapped to a chair, blindfold, with a target over your heart. You die from massive damage to the heart, central nervous system and other vital organs or by a combination of one or more of these effects plus hemorrhage. In other words, death is not necessarily instantaneous. In addition, the marksmen may not be particularly good shots, especially if they are recruited from police ranks.
Lethal injection sold itself as the method of choice based on 3 considerations: it was easier on the executioners, the witnesses and, notionally, on the prisoner. The executioners dispensed a 3-drug cocktail whose first 2 ingredients, sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide, supposedly produced unconsciousness and paralysis. This meant that, to the observer, the prisoner appeared simply to be going to asleep. The executioners, meanwhile, had no view of him themselves. One of them dispensed the actual cocktail, the other a harmless solution, so that neither knew whether he was the Angel of Death or not. This was adapted from the protocol of the firing squad, in which one shooter customarily fires blanks.
The problem is, however, that no one actually knows how this works - that is, what is going on in the body and nervous system of the man going to death. Unconsciousness is supposed to blunt the perception of pain, but what if there is merely paralysis while the prisoner is still conscious? He would then be in protracted agony as the lethal agent, potassium chloride, shut down his heart, without the least means of expressing it by so much as a twitching finger or a bulging eyeball.
Additionally, there is often a problem with hooking up the double IV injection in the prisoner, particularly if he has been a drug abuser. Numerous botched executions have required 40 minutes or more of probing and puncturing before the drip could be started, with, in one celebrated case, the prisoner himself trying to assist the execution team. As recently as 2007, lethal injection required two hours to execute Christopher Newton.
As a consequence, there have been several legal challenges to the lethal cocktail on the ground that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Such a challenge was successful in Ohio, which now uses only a lethal dose of sodium thiopental. Ohio is a particularly active executioner, and ranks 2nd now only to Texas in executions nationwide. This should give us a certain amount of empirical evidence to go on soon.
Clearly, however, lethal injection has failed to meet the Kemmler test. In the Supreme Court case In re Kemmler (1889), the court that sanctioned the first use of the electric chair wrote that "punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death." The court had hanging in mind, but no hanging ever took 2 hours as Christopher Newton's death did, and no method before lethal injection presented the nightmare scenario of a man condemned to agony while frozen in place.
In the case of capital punishment, it seems that every step technology takes involves a further regression into barbarism. Dr. E. C. Spitzka, a medical witness to William Kemmler's execution (which was also botched, as the current shorted out) remarked, "The guillotine is better than the gallows, [and] the gallows is better than electrical execution." Fred Leuchter, the inventor of the lethal injection cocktail, said he would personally prefer to be electrocuted than to die by his own method.
Spitzka was right. The guillotine, introduced into France during the 1790s, is better than any execution method used in the West today: simpler, speedier and more certain. The only quicker method is a bullet delivered directly to the brain. This, until recently, was the method employed in China (the family of the condemned was billed for the bullet). Now, however, the Chinese have adopted lethal injection.
If a bullet to the brain is the safest, speediest, most certain and certainly cheapest mode of execution, why abandon it; indeed, why not adopt it universally? The answer is simple enough: no one, at least in the West, wants to get up close and personal with spattering brains and blood. One of the most infamous photographs of the 20th century is that of an official shooting a captured Viet Cong prisoner in the head during the Vietnam War. Even a firing squad is designed to get the executioners at a suitably hygienic distance from the prisoner, both physically and psychologically. Lethal injection accomplishes this goal as does no other method of execution. The prisoner appears to fall asleep. He doesn't writhe, shudder or gasp for air. Flames won't shoot out of his head, as at some electrocutions. If he soils his pants, you won't see or smell it. The whole process mimics simple anesthesia, the prep for a life-saving rather than a life-ending procedure. It is a stage tableau in which everyone can pretend, if they wish, that something other than the taking of a human life is going on. Everyone, that is, except the prisoner.
Maybe that's why Gardner wants the State of Utah to actually pump rifle rounds into his chest. Maybe he wants people to hear the report, smell the smoke and see the blood. Seems a man's right - maybe under the Second Amendment, if not the Eighth. In any event, his execution - one way or another - is scheduled for June 18.
Utah is not one of your more liberal states, but The Salt Lake City Tribune's April 17 editorial seems to speak for more and more Americans today: "There is simply no denying that the system of capital punishment in the United States is unalterably broken. To continue to adhere to it is to tread beyond the bounds of what constitutes a humane, moral and just society."
Amen.
Source: The Triangle, June 6, 2010
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