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'Humane' Death - For Us or Them?
Mike Ahlf
CNN's got the doctor who came up with the "Lethal Injection" method of execution saying
maybe it's time to rework the drug formula. He also says he thinks the Guillotine is the simplest and most effective.
Of course, over time, there have been all sorts of methods for working with the death penalty. Some were designed deliberately for pain, some were simply working with the tools available at the time, some were attempts at making the process "humane."
On the truly barbaric side, you have options like drawing & quartering, burning at the stake, waterboard drowning, and tying someone out in the wilderness to die of exposure/starvation/dehydration. Nasty ways to go, very visible for the most part, and if you're looking for something that will make others who might commit crimes think "I really don't want to risk it", most capable of driving home the point.
In the middle, you have things that were just trying to use the best stuff available at the time. Hanging was supposed to be a quick death, and it doesn't take more than a rope and something to hang the rope from (whether a constructed gallows or otherwise). Keelhauling - another form of drowning death - is somewhat necessitated by the tight quarters on a ship and rather neatly sidesteps the worry of carrying the body for later disposal, especially since those who died of disease or other natural causes would likely be "buried at sea" anyways. Killing someone with a sword or spear using a "killing" strike - be it through the heart or neck - was intended to be more humane than just chopping at someone until they died, but it has a tendency to be messy.
And then we get to the "modern" versions. During the French Revolution, one Dr. Joseph Ignace-Guillotin went into medical records and came up with a device that had been used in earlier centuries to execute Italian royalty; this was later improved on by Antoine Louis to come up with the "modern" device that the French Revolutionaries are infamous for using. At the time, the Giullotine was indeed considered "humane"; it required only one stroke (instead of the several that a sword or axe usually require to get through a human spine and sever the neck) and the death was thought to be as close to instantaneous as possible.
With the introduction of guns, another option came in the firing squad; you take men who are reasonably good shots, arrange them at point-blank range for maximum accuracy, and administer a killing shot with a gun. Problem: a killing shot is either to the heart or head, and it doesn't look very nice.
The next option was the electric chair; rather than something which caused major bodily damage, an electric shock would (ideally) destroy brain function and stop the heart. Unfortunately, it sometimes goes wrong, requiring multiple shocks or causing small fires.
So, the idea came to have lethal injection. Administer a "painkiller" to be humane, and then drugs to kill the patient. Adopted overall, but now death penalty opponents are going after it by claiming it's not "humane enough."
Part of me wonders if "humane enough" really matters for someone who's done something egregious enough that society needs to get rid of them so completely. Many victims' rights groups argue that even if it's not completely painless, it's much less painful than the deaths most death penalty recipients gave their victims. And in truth, if the death penalty were not so hidden away from the public - done at night, done in a private room with no visual record to the outside world, done in a way that didn't appear quite so "peaceful" - that it might have a larger deterrent effect. A perhaps not strange irony of the situation is that as methods have become more 'humane', opponents have been more successful in arguing that the new methods didn't have much of an effect for deterring other crimes; I'd posit that someone who knew they could be drawn and quartered for killing another human being might, just perhaps, be less likely to go through with it than someone who knew they could sit in prison for 30 years before going in and getting strapped down for "endless sleep."
On a larger issue, however, is the possibility that the search for 'humane' death for these people isn't so much for them, but for the people who may or may not watch this. There's a portion of the population that supports the death penalty in theory but still finds that the visual consequences are not appealing to the eye. It is somewhat striking that the more 'humane' a method supposedly is, the less visual impact it's supposed to have upon the corpse - and perhaps it's that portion of the population that the newer methods are intended to appease.
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Observations
/I'd posit that someone who knew they could be drawn and quartered for killing another human being might, just perhaps, be less likely to go through with it than someone who knew they could sit in prison for 30 years before going in and getting strapped down for "endless sleep."/
We would also find a huge downtick in the number of thefts if we cut off the hands of thieves, but that wouldn't make it remotely the right thing to do.
It's quite possible that the death penalty could be a real deterrant, but for it to be so it would require a number of things that we as a culture are unwilling to do. We'd have to cut down on appeals, use it a lot more often and uniformly, and possibly, as you suggest, use more questionable methodology. I'm frankly not even sure that would work because future-time orientation isn't generally a criminal's strong suit.
The theory about "humane" death is an interesting one that I hadn't really considered. That's quite possibly true when it comes to disfigurement. I'd be interested to know if the condemned themselves would prefer be nigh-assured of an instant, painless death involving decapitation or something like lethal injection, wherein you are left in tact but may not go quite as painlessly. I'm not sure which I would prefer. Probably the former, but that's because I intend to be cremated anyway.
But to the extent that that is true, it doesn't explain the more recent objections to the precise formula used to lethally inject. Since the visual is the same, it would seem to be either about (a) making the death more humane and/or (b) using this as a club with which to strike the death penalty. I think it's a bit of both. I'm against the death penalty, but if we are going to do it I would like it done in the most humane manner possible. Really, it's the pro-death penalty people that should be most sensitive to this since it does provide their opponents a club to use in the ongoing debate.
On the other hand, there is the sense that some critics of the death penalty will find each and every method to be particularly inhumane simply because they fine the result to be so. Simply looking for a way to discount each possible method in order to cause everyone to raise their hands in frustration and say "Okay, fine, we'll just stick'em in a cell".
You raise an interesting point, although I don't think you realized it, but that is the social aspect of the death penalty. In Old Testament times, stoning was the preferred method of capital punishment. It was cheap, because all you needed was a pile of rocks. One of the more overlooked aspects of stoning, though, was that it was a community activity. Everyone had to participate, so the blood of the victim was on everyone's hands. As we've become more "civilized," our methods of execution have involved fewer people. Now we've reached the point that we no longer execute people in the town square, we do it late at night in a secret room. Seeing someone's corpse swinging on a rope is a powerful reminder that crime just doesn't pay. But we've lost that, because we're too squeamish to deal with it.
If capital punishment is something we as a society want to do, we ought to be willing to look at the results. If we're not willing to do that, maybe we shouldn't be killing people?
Another point Alex raises about capital punishment are the seemingly limitless appeals. I understand the desire for swift justice, but given the number of innocent people exonerated by DNA evidence, I want to be absolutely certain that someone is in fact guilty before we kill them. A disproportionate number of people on death row are poor and black and get the bottom of the barrel when it comes to lawyers.
/If capital punishment is something we as a society want to do, we ought to be willing to look at the results. If we're not willing to do that, maybe we shouldn't be killing people?/
Part of me agrees with this, but it could also be considered exploitive. If the televising of executions were to lead more people to oppose the death penalty, that'd be great. But I'm not sure it would and I fear it could be reduced to a form of entertainment.
On a related note, to anyone that hasn't heard Steve Earle's "Ellis Unit One", I heartily recommend it. It's by far the best anti-DP song I've heard to date, told from the point of view of a prison guard.
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