There is no nice way to kill someone

On January 25, 2024, Alabama crossed the threshold into the “cruel and unusual” with the execution by nitrogen hypoxia of convicted murderer Kenneth Smith. After the Supreme Court declined to intervene (over the objections of the three liberal justices), Mr. Smith became the first prisoner in the United States executed by this method. Despite claims by Alabama state lawyers that this method of execution would ensure “unconsciousness in seconds,” the five Alabama journalists who witnessed the execution reported that Mr. Smith “shook and writhed” for at least two minutes before beginning to breathe heavily for several minutes. According to one of the journalists, Lee Hedgepeth, Mr. Smith’s head moved back and forth violently in the minutes after the execution began. “This was the fifth execution that I’ve witnessed in Alabama, and I have never seen such a violent reaction to an execution,” Mr. Hedgepeth stated. This was the second time Alabama had attempted to kill Mr. Smith. In a failed lethal injection in November 2022, he was strapped to a gurney but the executioners were unable to find a suitable vein.

Death penalty proponents will argue that whatever pain and distress the murderer suffered in his last few minutes on earth paled in comparison to the agony of his victim and the monstrousness of his crime. For full disclosure, I am an opponent of capital punishment and have been for most of my life. There was a time when I questioned the usefulness and morality of executions and hedged in my opposition after a particularly grisly and senseless murder that occurred in New York City many decades ago. During a robbery, several employees of a fast food restaurant were forced to lie on the floor and were then shot in the back of the head. One can also point to such monsters as Adolf Hitler as examples of criminals whose acts argue strenuously for the ultimate penalty.

My opposition to capital punishment was reaffirmed about 20 years ago after reading Scott Turow’s non-fiction book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. Too many individuals have been exonerated from death row in the United States since capital punishment was reinstituted by the Gregg v. Georgia decision in 1976. (That reversed Furman v. Georgia, in which SCOTUS found the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972.) There is also indisputable evidence of a racial and economic bias in the application of capital punishment in the US. Members of minority groups, as well as poor people, are much more likely to be sentenced to death compared to affluent or white people who are convicted of similar crimes. I am convinced that there is no fair way to apply the death penalty, and furthermore, it is much more costly to the state than life imprisonment. It may seem counterintuitive, but it is actually cheaper to house and feed a murderer for the rest of his life than to execute him, due to the complexity of the appeal process in this country. Then simplify the appeal process, I hear you say. That would only increase the likelihood of an innocent person being put to death, as I believe has already occurred in the decades since Gregg v. Georgia.

The United States is nearly alone among Western democracies in retaining the death penalty. Of the 193 member states of the United Nations, only 28% maintain capital punishment in both law and practice, while 55% have abolished it completely, including the most recent abolitionist countries of Papua New Guinea, the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone and Kazakhstan. According to Amnesty International, the United States is the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that carried out any executions (18 of them) in 2022. The Russian Federation, by comparison, has not carried out an execution since 1996 and there is currently an indefinite moratorium in place, making it de facto abolitionist. Countries with the highest number of executions per year include China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Application of the death penalty is at best problematic and at worst inhumane. After a period of dithering some years ago, I have returned to my Ethical Culture roots in opposing capital punishment on both religious and humanitarian grounds. As a young child I attended Ethical Culture Sunday School, and still recall reading Algernon Black’s The First Book of Ethics, a children’s book which deals with a number of moral issues including the death penalty. Besides the moral quandary of taking a human life, something I feel we have no right to do, capital punishment as it is carried out in America is far from error or pain free, and cannot be equitably applied. From hanging to electrocution to lethal injection, most methods used in the US have fallen short of being reliably swift and painless. Some experts posit that death by firing squad would be the most humane method, but we have eschewed it for decades, likely because although we as a species sometimes thirst for blood, we don’t actually want to see it. The sensibilities of those charged with carrying out executions, as well as those who must witness them, have apparently been figured into the choice of method. There really is no nice way of killing someone, and I suggest that it is not worth the cost or trouble, when life without parole is a pragmatic and just alternative.

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Note: I wrote this post before I read the excellent piece in the New York Times about one death row inmate's spiritual journey. If you like my blog, I think you will find this of interest too:

NYTimes.com: An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours