One of President Trump’s recent executive orders calls for ending the moratorium on the death penalty in federal criminal cases, speeding up their prosecution, and allowing the use of historical methods like the firing squad, electrocution, and the gas chamber.
Let me start by saying that I am viscerally opposed to the death penalty, but I’m not going to begin here with a debate about its propriety, but instead, about how it’s...um…executed. Over time in this country, we mostly sidelined the older methods as cruel and unusual. I guess my position is, if we must have the death penalty, let’s use methods that get the job done as quickly as possible.
Lethal injection was designed to be humane, but it hasn’t always worked well. My macabre joke is that if the cocktail of drugs employed in some states had a commercial on TV it would have to carry a warning that one of the side effects was LIFE. Injection with pentobarbital is allowed federally now, but death can take up to 10 minutes.
Electrocution is about the same as injection, it appears, while the gas chamber might not induce death for almost 20 minutes, according to reports. Even a firing squad would not always produce the immediate death of the target. Strictly from a layman’s point of view, I would imagine the guillotine or the executioner’s axe seem most efficient, though unpleasantly messy. OK, I’ll stop with this part now.
At one time, executions were very public events, the idea being that they served as deterrent, as in, “Look what will happen to you if you do what this person did!” I’m not sure the death penalty now accomplishes that purpose. It’s also argued that a disproportionate number of minority people are on death rows because of unfair convictions.
But I’d be willing to bet that most victims’ families are not all that interested in revenge in the form of seeing the perpetrator suffer. They just want the security of knowing that they no longer have to share space on this planet with that individual, and they get it with an execution. No chances of the perp being sprung on appeal or through a pardon.
However, there are also stories about lifers being rehabilitated in prison, truly repenting their crimes. Beyond that, there are even accounts of perpetrators meeting victims’ family members and being forgiven.
As for the death penalty, though, we might consider that one of the Ten Commandments is Thou Shalt Not Kill. There is a period after the last word. We have added a whole bunch of “unlesses” since Moses brought down those stone tablets from the mountain.
