We have come a long way from the capital punishment we have all seen in Westerns. Instead of tying ropes around the necks of the condemned and stringing them up from the nearest tree, we stick them with needles full of poison and electrocute them to death, while the rest of the civilized world looks on in horror.
Modern, civilized nations, like those of western Europe (France, United Kingdom, etc.), do not execute prisoners anymore. It is odd, I believe, that a country like the United States, which toots its own horn as being the most modern, democratic, humane country in the world, still practices a most barbaric ritual, state-sanctioned murder.
How many people must die, guilty or innocent, before we understand murder is simply murder? Just because twelve ill-informed peers, including a person in a black robe, sanction it, doesn't make it right.
We say that our methods of execution are not cruel or unusual. I am not sure any of those people who have been executed would not agree with this assessment. When it takes an hour for someone to die a slow, agonizing death as they lay strapped to a gurney, with onlookers standing behind a glass, it is hard to accept that death, in this fashion, is humane.
More and more states have adopted lethal injection as their preferred method of execution. We learn more about it from each instance it is used. What we have learned is it may be most cruel of all methods of execution used in this country in the past fifty years. It sounds nice (well, as nice as death can be): you are strapped down to a hospital gurney, someone with as little medical knowledge and experience as possible attempts to connect IVs to your arm, then they feed a cocktail of death directly into your veins. First, they want to put you into a deep sleep so you are oblivious to what his going on, then they want to inject a little drug into you that paralyzes your diaphragm, so you stop breathing, then they finish you off with an injection that stops your heart from beating.
Poof, you're gone; dead as a box full of door nails, or so they hope.
Many times, you're not as lucky, if you're the condemned. The person administering the cocktail is inexperienced with medical procedures. Your executioner may be a high school drop out, lucky you! Other times, the drugs they use are not enough to do the job adequately, considering the prescribed dosage fails to do the job as anticipated. Your prognosis: a slow, painful death.
Families of the condemned are left behind to pick up the pieces. They are the last hope for a truly humane way of dying. Perhaps, they are even the last hope for having capital punishment, in the United States, banned altogether.
Some people, like the mother of Joseph Clark, a man who was executed in Ohio by lethal injection, in 2006, are calling into question the practice of lethal injection, by
suing the Ohio state prisons.
Clark was forced to endure over ninety minutes of confusion, pain, and cruel torture as his executioners muddled their way through the botched procedure. You know it is pretty bad when the condemned individual is fully awake and assisting in his own execution. He even asked, "Can you just give me something by mouth to end this?"
In America, we must ask ourselves if it is really worth the effort to execute prisoners. Is it worth the price of killing men and women for crimes they may or may not have committed? How high must the the price finally be before we say it is too high?
