This execution brought to you by the letter "J"
At this point, how anyone purports to sincerely debate the ethics, medical or otherwise, of capital punishment from any position but backed into a corner is enough to boggle the mind.
Take this snippet from the New York Times on the controversy surrounding the drugs currently used in the standard lethal injection cocktail:
If witnesses and executioners–people who give this practice a direct institutional sanction by merely showing up to perform their jobs–can't stomach actual, unglamorous, unseemly death, that's a hint something is wrong.
We've already, by and large, done away with and written off as barbaric the guillotine, the electric chair and the gas chamber–anything that viscerally reminds us there is, in fact, an ethical snag here and that the prisoner in question isn't just drifting off into the eternal sands of justice, but being killed in an act that anywhere outside of his role as a convicted and condemned criminal we as a society consider roundly wrong.
When we're trying to nail down the moral particulars of which variations of ultra-sanitized, state-sanctioned death are OK and which are cruel and unusual–from the eligible inmates to the preferred chemicals to the acceptable error rate–perhaps we're not in an ethically defensible position to be playing executioner.
Not that that ever makes a difference.
And speaking of lost causes, check out this guy. What a persistent little monkey. Doesn't he just make you proud to be an American?
Take this snippet from the New York Times on the controversy surrounding the drugs currently used in the standard lethal injection cocktail:
A major obstacle to change is that alternative methods of lethal injection, though they might be easier on inmates, would almost certainly be harder on witnesses and executioners.Yes, heaven forbid we remind them they're watching a human being die and not sitting down for a nice wholesome episode of Sesame Street or something. (Though maybe bringing in the Count to track the administration of the different drugs with a cheery little musical number might bolster inmate morale and absolve the ethical angst. It might also take PBS off the chopping block.)
With a different approach, death would take longer and might involve jerking movements that the prisoner would not feel but that would be unpleasant for others to watch.
If witnesses and executioners–people who give this practice a direct institutional sanction by merely showing up to perform their jobs–can't stomach actual, unglamorous, unseemly death, that's a hint something is wrong.
We've already, by and large, done away with and written off as barbaric the guillotine, the electric chair and the gas chamber–anything that viscerally reminds us there is, in fact, an ethical snag here and that the prisoner in question isn't just drifting off into the eternal sands of justice, but being killed in an act that anywhere outside of his role as a convicted and condemned criminal we as a society consider roundly wrong.
When we're trying to nail down the moral particulars of which variations of ultra-sanitized, state-sanctioned death are OK and which are cruel and unusual–from the eligible inmates to the preferred chemicals to the acceptable error rate–perhaps we're not in an ethically defensible position to be playing executioner.
Not that that ever makes a difference.
And speaking of lost causes, check out this guy. What a persistent little monkey. Doesn't he just make you proud to be an American?
posted by Holly at 12:41 AM
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