A Fearsomely Gruesome Death
"[Execution by lethal injections] poses a serious risk of cruel, protracted death ... Even a slight error in dosage or administration can leave a prisoner conscious but paralyzed while dying, a sentient witness of his or her own asphyxiation."
U.S. Court of Appeals, 1983
"It means we can't get it right; we can't executive people in a humane way. So we have a big mess that has been approved by no one, and this is what happened. Basically the states have someone secretly just mixing up something in the backroom and then like handing it to you, saying, 'Okay, we think it'll work.'"
"We don't know what is happening in a number of states because of the secrecy laws. I would hope that this would be a wake-up call to the country as a whole to question whether or not we want to keep doing this to our citizens and whether it is having the effect we want it to have. We have more violent crime and higher murder rates in states with the death penalty than in states without the death penalty. We have had 144 people released from death row due to innocence."
Tanya Greene, American Civil Liberties Union
This file photo combo of images provided by the Oklahoma Department
of Corrections shows Clayton Lockett, left, and Charles Warner. (AP
Photo/Oklahoma Department of Corrections, File)The United States, that bastion of democratic liberty and freedom is in really nice company as the only western nation imposing the death penalty as the ultimate punishment for capital offence crimes. Amnesty International places the United States in seventh place worldwide for its execution statistics, trailing China, Syria, Malaysia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. What odd company for the "land of the free and the brave".
Compounding the issue is that of the complications relating to race, poverty, mental illness and a state-by-state judicial system aggressively supporting a capital punishment agenda that imposes incarceration disproportionately on blacks and Hispanics who are likelier than white prisoners to be seen to merit the death penalty. While American and international law generally sees it as illegal to execute a mentally ill prisoner, up to 10% of inmates on death row are estimated to suffer serious mental illness.
Drug producers, many of whom are Europe based where the death penalty is opposed, have refused to continue selling the lethal cocktail of midazolem to render the prisoner unconscious, vecuronium bromide to paralyze their breathing and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Pentobarbital, the most common drug used to impose death on murderers is produced by a Danish company that has refused to sell it any longer to the United States' prison system.
A number of American states including New York, Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey and New Mexico have abolished the death penalty or have issued moratoriums. That's on the positive side. On the dreadfully negative side there is the issue of wrongful convictions. Over 143 prisoners have been granted freedom from their convictions proven erroneous.
A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that one in 25 sentenced to death is likely innocent of the crime they've been convicted of.
And then we come to the most recent chilling imbroglio when murderer-rapist Clayton Lockett, 38, experienced his execution by lethal injection in a horribly chilling manoeuvre gone dreadfully wrong. "...Some concern drugs were not having an effect ... Lockett's vein blew during the execution preventing the chemicals from effectively entering his body" tweeted an Associated Press reporter witnessing the execution.
A double execution was planned for Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. in Oklahoma, for two murder-rapists to be executed. The first, Clayton Lockett, eventually died, but it was a long, agonizing death representing acute torture, the drugs and his vein collapse creating a situation where he suffered horribly before dying of a heart attack caused by the extreme stress to his organs.
Previously, similar botched procedures have taken place in South Dakota, Florida and Louisiana. One can only hope that those who died such gruesome deaths were not among the wrongfully convicted. In Clayton Lockett's case, he was genuinely guilty of an unspeakable act of inhumanity that closely enough aligned itself with what he himself experienced. In 1999 he shot Stephanie Neiman, 19, and then watched as two accomplices buried her alive.
Charles Warner, whose execution has now been delayed for two weeks in the wake of the dismally macabre death of Clayton Lockett, while the state tries to figure out what went wrong before proceeding to put him to death, was found guilty of raping and killing his girlfriend's 11-month-old baby Adrianna Waller, in 1997.
Neither of these brutish specimens of humankind will be missed.
Labels: Atrocities, Crime, Justice, United States
posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 02, 2014
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