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Anyone anxious about America’s languishing innovative spirit can take comfort in its execution chambers. For in these spaces, the country has no shortage of ideas to extend its practice of killing inmates.
Last month in Alabama, Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first person in the nation ever executed with nitrogen gas.
Witnesses say that Smith, convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Sennett in 1988, “shook and writhed on a gurney” for two minutes, after which he gasped for breath for several minutes as he suffocated to death. Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm assured people at a news conference afterward that the execution had gone exactly as planned, and that nothing about Smith’s death was “out of the ordinary.”
Nothing — if you find the state killing of citizens ordinary.
So successful was Smith’s convulsing death that several Republicans in Ohio quickly introduced a bill to begin the practice in their own state. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall was happy to offer his assistance: “Alabama has done it, and now so can you.”
The nitrogen gas method was necessary because it has become increasingly difficult for jurisdictions to acquire the deadly cocktails of sedatives and heart-stopping toxins needed for lethal injections. For some reason, the drug manufacturers needed to produce the chemicals have been more interested in marketing themselves as promoters of health than as merchants of death.
With the shortage of these chemicals becoming ever more acute, criminal justice officials have been devising creative methods to dispose of human beings on death row. The Justice Department under President Donald Trump contemplated using fentanyl, the powerful opioid fueling the country’s overdose epidemic. Tennessee reinstated the electric chair as its default method if lethal injection is unavailable. Some Republicans have even sought to bring back firing squads. (In Utah, inmates have the luxury of being able to elect this as their means of expiration.)
The number of public executions in the United States — after falling precipitously in the past few decades — has started ticking upward in the past two years. The death penalty, it seems, is just too embedded in America’s DNA to go away.
Support for the practice has been on the downtrend, but most Americans still approve of it. This is largely thanks to Republicans, who, despite momentarily wavering on government-sanctioned death during the Obama years, have regained their confidence in it. In Gallup’s most recent survey, 81 percent of Republicans said they favor the death penalty.
Even the Biden administration is reacting to the issue with a shrug. President Biden campaigned on eliminating the death penalty, saying he would “incentivize” states to follow his lead. But his Justice Department believes that his promise has room for exceptions. Last month, it announced it is seeking the death penalty for the white supremacist who in 2022 killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo.
Moral consistency, it seems, is overrated.
Keep in mind that the United States resides in a lonely space among Western democracies. Almost all its peers abandoned use of capital punishment decades ago, owing to its barbaric nature.
The case against the death penalty centers on a simple fact: It is cruel and therefore should be barred by the Constitution. It is inconsistently applied and often carried out poorly, such that people endure torturous deaths. The Death Penalty Information Center reports that lethal injections are botched 7 percent of the time. This is made worse by the abhorrent rate of wrongful convictions in the United States (one 2014 study put it at about 4 percent for death-sentenced defendants).
Supporters have long trotted out dubious rationales for the practice, such as its importance in discouraging crime. (The United States’ sky-high homicide rate compared with countries without capital punishment contradicts this notion.) Some have expressed anxieties about the costs of incarcerating individuals for a lifetime — better to kill people than spend too much on them! (Turns out, executing people is more expensive.) Embedded in all this is the contention that it is possible to kill people humanely (an oxymoron).
More recently, however, the bulk of rhetoric in favor has relied on vapid emotional appeals. When then-Attorney General William P. Barr lifted the federal moratorium on executions in 2019, he argued, “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” Alabama’s Marshall celebrated the suffocation of Smith as a way for his victim’s family and friends to “find long-awaited peace and closure.”
As if the only way to bring peace to victims and their loved ones is through more violence and death.
This is an oversimplified view of justice — one most of the developed world has soundly rejected. That the United States seems to be doubling down on it, in the year 2024, is a sign of a deeper sickness that makes a mockery of the principle that all life is sacred.
The death penalty just won’t die
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05.02.2024
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Anyone anxious about America’s languishing innovative spirit can take comfort in its execution chambers. For in these spaces, the country has no shortage of ideas to extend its practice of killing inmates.
Last month in Alabama, Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first person in the nation ever executed with nitrogen gas.
Witnesses say that Smith, convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Sennett in 1988, “shook and writhed on a gurney” for two minutes, after which he gasped for breath for several minutes as he suffocated to death. Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm assured people at a news conference afterward that the execution had gone exactly as planned, and that nothing about Smith’s death was “out of the ordinary.”
Nothing — if you find the state killing of citizens ordinary.
So successful was Smith’s convulsing death that several Republicans in Ohio quickly introduced a bill to begin the practice in their own state. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall was happy to offer his assistance: “Alabama has done it, and now so can you.”
The nitrogen gas method was necessary because it has become increasingly difficult for jurisdictions to acquire the deadly cocktails of sedatives........
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