Let Him Dangle

Florida and California have suspended execution by lethal injection after it took over half an hour to kill Angel Diaz.

There's no painless way to kill people and we should stop pretending that there is. Death to a healthy body requires traumatic injury. Traumatic injury brings with it a pretty darned big risk of pain.

I applaud the humanity of Jeb Bush's decision (not a sentence I ever thought I'd write in sincerity--just one of life's surprises, I guess). I don't think, though, that we are going to find an unproblematic way to kill people. We should stop trying.

This search for a painless way to execute prisoners isn't new, of course. We all know that the guillotine and the electric chair and the gas chamber were all devised as humane ways of exectuing prisoners. But I don't think it's the prisoner's pain that we are trying to palliate so much as our own sense that there is something overreaching in a death sentence. We are so invested in finding a a method that isn't cruel, because we know on some level that the whole enterprise is contrary to some fundamental value.

We're looking for clinical solutions to a moral problem. We won't find them. To look for a painless way of ending life is to mystify the fact that it necessarily involves inflicting injury.

What's disturbing to me is the way the death penalty has become a litmus test for politicians' "toughness on crime." The turning point was assuredly Mike Dukakis's response to Bernard Shaw's question: "If your wife were raped and murdered, wouldn't you support the death penalty?"

You notice that Kitty Dukakis didn't just get murdered, she had to get imaginatively raped first. Nice, Mr. Shaw.

Old Mike stuck to his principles and the American people thought he was a jerk and ever since the Democrats have tried to prove their equal bloodthirstiness. The most chilling example has to be Bill Clinton's return to Arkansas during the 1992 election season to preside over the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a man who was essentially lobotomized in a suicide attempt. He was not capable of participating in his own defense. He had no memory of his crimes and did not understand either the legal procedings or what was at stake in the death penalty.

He didn't eat the pie from his last meal--he was saving it for later.

And Bill Clinton thought that justice would best be served by having this man executed. That's a peculiar notion of justice.

Of course, one of the big problems with the death penalty is in its administration--over a hundred death row inmates have been exonerated of their crimes. Not had their cases revisted on the basis of legal problems with the trial, but exonerated. Not to mention all the folks who are on death row and being denied an appeal (or a DNA test), even though, say, their lawyers were sleeping during the trial. And the poorer and blacker the inmate, the more likely he is to get the needle.

But it falsifies the matter to talk about the death penalty in terms of its inherent moral value and the way it is administered. The way that it's administered isn't neatly separable from its ethical status. To claim that it is, is to exist in the world of the thought experiment: "What if there was this really really unredeemable bad guy, and we know he did it and he had a really good lawyer and we have this humane way to kill him and he raped Kitty Dukakis--well then would you support capital punishment?"

Sorry, it just doesn't work like that.