Capital Punishment: A Dilemma

This is not going to argue the case for or against capital punishment, per se, but merely to look at some of the methods of capital punishment employed in modern times and see whether they are humane.

The following methods of execution are used in the 37 states that have a death penalty: lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, firing squad, and hanging. The electric chair is probably not as common as it used to be. Indiana, for example, has dropped the electric chair in favor of lethal injection. Nebraska is the only state where it is still the primary method of execution. However, in 2008 the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the use of the electric chair as a method of execution violates the Nebraska Constitution. Electrocution may be less widely used because of a number of horror stories about, for example, the number of jolts required before the condemned expired; the condemned's body catching fire; and so forth.

This device [the electric chair]—considered progressive and compassionate when it was introduced—has fallen almost completely out of favor because it frequently results in vomiting, violent muscle spasms, and burning flesh. Even after having a century to perfect the procedure, the heads of two prisoners in Florida caught on fire during their executions in the late 1990s, prompting the governor to scrap the state’s electric chair altogether.*

But lethal injection, now the preferred method in many states, has its problems as well. The same writer says, "The first execution [by lethal injection] was conducted in 1982 and is now the preferred execution method in every state except one (Nebraska still only performs electrocutions). Lethal injections involve three consecutive drugs; the first sedates the prisoner, the next relaxes the chest muscles to stop breathing, and the third stops the heart."*

Among the problems with lethal injection are that the drugs are sometimes not administered in the proper amounts, and sometimes the agony of the prisoner, when he is unable to breathe, is obvious. Also, as the same article points out, the people who administer the IV are prison guards, not medical professionals—medical professionals typically consider participating in executions to be against the Hippocratic Oath they have taken—such that at times the injected substances have gone into muscles rather than veins, and have left visible chemical burns on the flesh.

The same article says that we are not comfortable with any method of capital punishment that results in a corpse giving any appearance other than that of a natural death. We don't want to have to confront any evidence of what we have done, that is, to murder a human being.

Addendum published Dec. 9, 2009: Here is an article about the State of Ohio switching to a single-drug lethal injection, the first such to be used in the US (and their first execution with this method just occurred, according to today's news). Nebraska will be watching carefully. The reason for the switch is the botched executions referred to above, one of which took two hours because the executioners could not find veins in the condemned.

http://news.aol.com/article/ohio-inmate-kenneth-biros-to-get-1-drug/705937?icid=main|htmlws-main-n|dl1|link6|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fohio-inmate-kenneth-biros-to-get-1-drug%2F705937

*Daniel Guarnera, "Hard to Kill: Why Can’t the U.S. Find a Suitable Execution Method?" Internationalist Review, 2007-01-04.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein