Following this introduction is an EA post from ten years ago about a “botched” execution. The issue has come around again: The always woke online tabloid The Guardian is caterwauling over another messy execution, this time in Alabama. “The only lesson from this grim sequence of events is that when states use human beings as guinea pigs for lethal experiments, they are bound to suffer, whether at the point of a needle or behind a mask,” Matt Wells, deputy director of the human rights group Reprieve US, is quoted as saying. OK, they suffer. I have no sympathy for them. Killing human beings is hard, and murderers like Clayton Lockett and Carey Dale Grayson are at fault for making society kill them. There are ways of killing the condemned that involve no suffering at all, and I don’t know what we don’t make use of them except that they are a bit spectacular. In India, they used to execute people by training an elephant to step on their heads and smash them like a grape. I don’t understand why states have to be fooling around with methods as baroque as nitrogen poisoning.

The Guardian also includes the obligatory anti-capital punishment statement from the daughter of the victim. “Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop,” Jodi Haley, who was 12 when her mother was killed, told reporters. “No one should have the right to take a person’s possibilities, days, and life.” Well, Jodi, you have been indoctrinated to your disadvantage and society’s best interests. Nobody has the right to make me pay to keep them alive when they have violated the conditions of the social compact, and when allowing them to live devalues the lives of others while requiring lesser punishments for other terrible crimes.

I was going to reprint the post below substituting Grayson for Lockett, but that isn’t necessary. Everything below applies to the Alabama execution as well.

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Capital punishment foes have no shame, and (I know I am a broken record on this, and it cheers me no more than it pleases you), the knee-jerk journalists who have been squarely in their camp for decades refuse to illuminate their constant hypocrisy. In Connecticut, for example, holding that putting to death the monstrous perpetrators of the Petit home invasion was “immoral,” anti-death penalty advocates argued that the extended time it took to handle appeals made the death penalty more expensive than life imprisonment—an added expense for which the advocates themselves are accountable.

A similar dynamic is at work in the aftermath of the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.Witnesses to his execution by lethal injection said Lockett convulsed and writhed on the gurney, sat up and started to speak before officials blocked the witnesses’ view by pulling a curtain. Apparently his vein “blew,” and instead of killing him efficiently,  the new, three-drug “cocktail” arrived at as the means of execution in Oklahoma after extensive study and litigation failed to work as advertised.  Why was there an excessively complex system involving multiple drugs used in this execution? It was the result of cumulative efforts by anti-death penalty zealots to make sure the process was above all, “humane.” Of course, the more complicated a process is, the more moving parts it has, the more likely it is to fail.

Do I think the result in Lockett’s execution was the source of glee at Amnesty International? Do I suspect that this is part of the continuing long-term strategy to make executions impossible, no matter what the crime? I do.

“We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely — and I think everyone would recognize that this case fell short of that standard,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday, in a rare moment when he wasn’t spinning, lying, or otherwise trying to deceive. What is meant by “humanely,” however, has been the foundation of pure obstruction by death penalty opponants. Humanely should mean “quick.” There is no reason why it should be painless, just not intentionally painful.

All of the disingenuous tap-dancing focuses on the Constitution’s 8th Amendment, prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment.” The opponents of the death penalty believe it is inherently cruel, which is obviously a position that can’t be squared with the Bill of Rights. The men who wrote that Amendment were perfectly satisfied with hanging or death by firing squad, knowing well that occasionally the hangman, or the hangman’s knot, slipped up, or the marksmen missed their targets. “Not cruel” was not intended to mean “humane.” As for “unusual”: the Founders were thinking of the horrible execution methods used in the past, like drawing and quartering. Ironically, the “humane” Oklahoma method was certainly unusual, even baroque. The method had never been used before: you can’t get more unusual than that.

Richard W. Garnett, a former Supreme Court law clerk who  teaches criminal and constitutional law at the University of Notre Dame, told the press that Lockett’s messy death “will not only cause officials in that state to review carefully their execution procedures and methods,” but  “will also almost prompt many Americans across the country to rethink the wisdom, and the morality, of capital punishment.” It will do the latter only if they aren’t thinking clearly, don’t comprehend the reasons for the death penalty, or are thoroughly confused by the double -talk of anti-capital punishment pundits.

This “botched” execution—in my view, it would only be truly botched if Lockett survived it—occurred because, and only because, the foes of capital punishment have made what should be a simple and quick process ridiculously difficult. Adam Leathers, co-chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, accused the state of having ‘tortured a human being in an unconstitutional experimental act of evil,’ reported CNN. That’s right, Adam, the state trying to rid society of this killer while you and your allies throw obstacles in their way was the evil party here.

Let’s consider the real evil party. Lockett, as you may know, was a four-time convicted felon, and convicted of shooting 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman with a sawed-off shotgun.  He was engaged in robbing a man in his home with two accomplices when Neiman and a friend arrived unexpectedly. The  girls were dragged into the house and hit in their faces with a shotgun. All three men raped Neiman’s friend—she was the pretty one—and Lockett announced that he was going to kill both women. He shot Neiman twice because she refused to surrender her pickup truck’s keys and alarm code. Stephanie was then buried, still breathing, by one of Lockett’s accomplices, Shawn Mathis, as Lockett watched.

No, I am not troubled that he suffered a bit longer than is ideal during his execution.

There was no question of Lockett’s guilt, and his crime was inhuman. Such wanton cruelty and disregard for innocent life warrants society’s most emphatic rebuke, and the most emphatic rebuke is death. It is essential that any healthy society make it clear to all that some crimes forfeit the continued right to not just liberty, but also life. Anyone who weeps because this sadistic murderer experienced a few extra minutes of agony in the process of being sent to his just rewards has seriously misaligned values.

No method of execution will work every time, and to make perfection the standard is a dishonest way to rig the debate. If the death penalty is justified, and it is, then we should expect and accept the rare “botch.” Meanwhile, if the concern really is efficiency, reliability, speed of death and minimal pain, there are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of methods of swift execution that would accomplish this. They just won’t pass the standards of death penalty opponents, because no method will.

The execution of  Clayton Lockett doesn’t bolster the anti-death penalty position, it exposed it. Meanwhile, he’s dead.

Good.

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Facts: New Republic,  CNN, Daily Mail, Mirror