Demonstrators in Washington rally against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court building Oct. 13, 2021. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)
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.
Ethics Alarms 