America's Unhappy Truce with the Death Penalty

Controversy in the United States is again emerging over the use of lethal injection drugs, after the botched execution in Oklahoma that left the condemned man writhing on the gurney and dying of a heart attack ten minutes later. But, Tennessee has found a way around the issue: it is bringing back the electric chair -- this is not a bad political film, it is reality. Eight states authorize execution by electrocution, but only at the inmate's discretion. However, Tennessee is the first state to make the use of the electric chair mandatory when lethal injection drugs are unavailable. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed the measure into law Thursday after it passed the Tennessee House, 68 to 13, and the Senate, 23 to 3. "This is unusual and might be both cruel and unusual punishment," according to Richard Dieter, president of the Death Penalty Information Center. Thirty-two states have the death penalty and all of them rely at least in part on lethal injection. Fewer than a dozen states regularly carry out executions, among them Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia and Texas, which accounts for 40% of those executed in the US. The federal government also uses lethal injection but rarely carries out executions. The Supreme Court has never declared a method of execution unconstitutional on the grounds that it is cruel and unusual. It upheld the firing squad in 1879, the electric chair in 1890 and lethal injection in 2008. The Court has made it clear over the years that the Eighth Amendment prohibits inflicting pain merely to torture or punish an inmate, drawing a distinction between a method like electrocution and mediaeval and renaissance European practices such as drawing and quartering. The Constitution prohibits “unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain,” the Court said in 1976. Since then, US states and the federal government have updated execution methods in their efforts to find more humane ways to put condemned criminals to death. First used by New York State in 1890, the electric chair was employed throughout the 20th century to execute hundreds and is still an option in eight states. Since 1976, 158 condemned people have been executed by electrocution. It was considered humane when it was first introduced but has resulted in many horrific executions. In 2000, Florida changed from the electric chair to injection after bungled electrocutions raised concerns that the state’s death penalty would be declared unconstitutional. ~~~~~ America is not in the majority of the world's countries when it comes to the death penalty. China executed more people than any other country last year. Although Chinese authorities treat official execution statistics as a state secret, Amnesty International estimates thousands are killed under the death penalty every year, more than the rest of the world combined. Excluding China, executions rose to at least 778 last year, up from 682 in 2012. Iran was second after China, with at least 369 put to death by the state, followed by Iraq (169), Saudi Arabia (79), and the United States (39). The United States was the only country in the Americas that carried out executions, although use of the death penalty declined last year, to 39 executions from 43 in 2012. In total, 22 countries practiced capital punishment last year, one more than in 2012. Four of those countries - Indonesia, Kuwait, Nigeria and Vietnam - resumed executions after pauses in the practice. There are now officially 23,000 people on death row somewhere in the world. ~~~~~ According to the prestigious Pew polling organization, since 1996, the margin between Americans who favor the death penalty and those who oppose it has narrowed from a 60-point gap (78% favor vs 18% oppose) to an 18-point difference in 2013 (55% favor vs 37% oppose). Among most large American religious groups, majorities support capital punishment. Roughly six-in-ten white evangelical Protestants (67%), white mainline Protestants (64%) and white Catholics (59%) support the death penalty. By contrast, black Protestants are more likely to oppose the death penalty than support it (58% vs 33%), as are Hispanic Catholics (54% vs 37%). The differences among religious groups reflect the overall racial and ethnic picture of support for capital punishment. Twice as many white Americans favor the death penalty as oppose it (63% vs 30%). Among black adults, the balance of opinion is reversed: 55% oppose capital punishment, while 36% support it. The margin is narrower among Hispanics, but more oppose the death penalty (50%) than support it (40%). ~~~~~ Dear readers, you know that I'm opposed to capital punishment. Some ask me why I support war while opposing the death penalty. My answer is that wars are fought by countries or groups with different views of how people should form and regulate their societies. The losing side will be forced into a position not unlike servitude, with their lives and social conventions uprooted. One thinks of western Europe under Nazi occupation. So killing is permitted in wars as one of the means to preserve societies. But, the death penalty is administered to someone who is already captive. They are incarcerated and without power to inflict pain or death to anyone. All that would be required is to install life sentences without possibility of parole to continue their captivity until death. Yes, it's expensive, but it saves the collective American conscience from being torn apart morally. I believe that the United States will finally abolish capital punishment and join the large and growing portion of the world that already has. The death penalty is on the wrong side of ethics, morality and religion, including American protestant Christianity. It puts America on the side of dictators and gulag-enforced totalitarianism. I do not mean that America is either a dictatorship or a totalitarian state -- it is most assuredly not. But its moral authority in the world is needlessly tarnished by state-sanctioned executions. The Italian film director who made Cinema Paradiso has recrntly made a film called Baaria - the story of three generations of Sicilians. In the film, the lead character Peppino says : "A reformist is someone who realizes that, when you bang your head on a wall, it's the head that breaks rather than the wall." That's how I usually feel about opposing capital punishment in America. But the time will come when that wall will break and my head will see the daylight on the other side of the wall.