I am an advocate of capital punishment, but only when the crime is especially heinous, and only when the guilt of the defendant is beyond dispute. Jack Ruby, for example, was guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald: he did it on national TV. The crime Carruthers was tried for was certainly worthy of the death penalty: he was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of three people. If his lawyer is to be believed however—and she has an obvious bias—the case against her client was weak.

However, DeLiberato’s brief is supposed to be about the intrinsic cruelty of an imperfect execution method, not unjust convictions. Life imprisonment of an innocent man is also an ethical abomination. After warping the discussion by focusing on her client’s alleged innocence, the lawyer spends paragraph after paragraph describing her client’s agony and the difficulties doctors had finding a vein.

My view of that issue: it is anti-death penalty zealots like DeLiberato who are responsible for all the complications involved in lethal injections. A bullet to the head is virtually infallible, quicker and cheaper than the baroque process of death by injection, which has been litigated into absurdity. In India at one time, a condemned man had his head crushed like a grape by a trained elephant. Instant and painless! Again, the lawyer’s case is deliberately misleading. She is attacking the death penalty by indicting a needlessly complicated and fallible system. Would she approve of a more certain and efficient execution system any more than the one Tennessee mishandled? No, she opposes all executions, and the fact that botched executions happen occasionally has nothing to do with her position. Ironically, the failed execution of her client worked to his benefit: he’s still alive, and Maria has a year to try to save him. What’s she complaining about?

I have written before about executions that cause more pain than they are supposed to. My reaction: Gee, that’s too bad, but I don’t care enough to lose any sleep over it. The criminals who deserve the death penalty should be executed efficiently, but if they aren’t, they are the ones who took lives and who have forfeited the right to live in a civilized society. They also have earned whatever pain their just elimination causes them.

“For 90 Minutes, I Watched an Execution Go Horribly Awry” begins by raising the uncontroversial issue of wrongful prosecutions. It moves on to attacking the death penalty because it might be icky in isolated examples of executions gone wrong, but it is the fact of incompetent executioners and flawed methods in such cases, not the death penalty itself, that is the real issue. This is dishonest analysis. When capital punishment is proven for an appropriate crime and the execution is carried out properly, capital punishment serves societal needs and is both moral and ethical.