Oklahoma

There can’t possibly be anything new to write about capital punishment.  The Americans however continue to widen our imaginations on its implementation.  Having switched in some states to chemical obliteration of persons they have deemed trash, they found that some countries manufacturing the necessary lethal drugs were now declining on moral grounds to sell them to the USA.  It became necessary to source these drugs or substitutes from places without adequate quality control. 

The latest result of this is a hideously botched execution in Oklahoma.  The victim writhed and refused to die.  His veins collapsed and it was impossible to insert needles properly.  They tried a needle in his groin.  That was futile.   They said the man was unconscious – he was not.  Eventually and mercifully the man died all by himself, after the execution had been called off, of a heart attack.  There is now some report that he had been tasered and knocked around before even entering the execution chamber.

Plenty of Americans (and some New Zealanders) consider all this perfectly OK.  One insightful commentator said it was nothing compared to what the man did to his victims.  Oh, sorry, that’s alright then.  An eye for an eye and all that.  This is Christianity in practice in the Bible Belt.  Formerly they used to electrocute the condemned with often prolonged and hideous results.  There are atrocious stories of events in the gas chamber, and with old fashioned hanging.

It is scarcely credible but true that these execution chambers are fitted with an adjacent gallery where prison personnel, lawyers and state officials can witness the procedure – the Oklahoma facility has a separate watching gallery for families of the condemned’s victims, to see “justice done”. 

The Land of the Free is generally in love with guns and with death.  Of course they are in interesting company – China executes hundreds every year, but rather more humanely, with a gunshot to the back of the head.  And other countries can be listed.  In some you get beheaded, in one or two you might be buried up to the neck and stoned to death. 

In every case it involves a prior decree that someone of human flesh and blood is no longer of value of any kind and should be eliminated, removed from human company.  The fact that that a person, by his or her acts, is deemed to have relinquished the right to life and is officially considered beyond reform and worthless, does not in my view deliver the right to state-sponsored murder.  We are perfectly capable of locking up a seemingly hopeless or dangerous criminal for life, if necessary, and providing him or her with some kind of helpful environment, without hope of release.  Of course that would be expensive – so what?  We are not at liberty to deprive him or her of life, let alone by this kind of barbarism.