One thing that's always confused me about the death penalty is the lengths its practitioners will go to so they (and John Q. Public) can pretend that it's anything other than the act of violence that it is. What exactly is lethal injection an improvement over?
Angel Nieves Diaz, a career criminal executed for killing a Miami topless bar manager 27 years ago, was given a rare second dose of deadly chemicals as he took more than twice the usual time to succumb. Needles that were supposed to inject drugs into the 55-year-old man's veins were instead pushed all the way through the blood vessels into surrounding soft tissue. A medical examiner said he had chemical burns on both arms.
``It really sounds like he was tortured to death,'' said Jonathan Groner, associate professor of surgery at the Ohio State Medical School, a surgeon who opposes the death penalty and writes frequently about lethal injection. ``My impression is that it would cause an extreme amount of pain.''
Oh, right. This:
Other death-penalty foes pointed to Diaz's execution as more proof that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, as they did after three executions went awry when Florida used the electric chair. During two executions in the 1990s, the heads of two condemned men caught fire, and in 2000, an inmate suffered a severe nosebleed while being put to death.
They used to call Florida's chair "Old Sparky," a bit of jailhouse humor that I'm sure everyone appreciated.
But the advantage to lethal injection, of course, is that it appears to be less brutal than it really is. When mishaps take place as they did in the Diaz execution, it peels back the veneer to reveal capital punishment's basic inhumanity. It's often put down as an accident or "unprofessionalism" as in the case before a US District Court in California. But it's not. Execution is homicide, and necessarily horrible. What else are we to say about it? Masking it with sedatives and pseudo-medical procedures does little to conceal what's really happening: someone is losing their life, often in a great deal of pain and fear.
And this is what confuses me: why do we tap-dance around that? The death penalty is supposed to be the ultimate sanction, something to put dread into the heart of every hardened criminal. Why shouldn't it be brutal? Why not barbaric? Let's pull some people apart with wild horses, or disembowel them and stick their heads on pikes. I mean, come on. Let's stop pussy-footing around this. If you're going to kill somebody, why should you need to be nice about it? It's not like he's going to complain tomorrow.
Trust a Bush family member to show me the error of my ways. Says Jeb:
But Bush said he saw no reason to stop using lethal injection. "All the people that are against the death penalty whenever there's a chance will call for suspending the death penalty," he said. "Each and every time that another appeal takes place, a family member of the person who was brutally murdered suffers again. So I think there needs to be sympathy for them as well."
Far be it from me to slag the survivors of a murder victim. They deserve all the compassion they can get. But this is typically Bushian monstrosity: can't we just knock off all this due process crap and ice some people? There's no thought here that the accused might be innocent, or that they themselves might deserve a better death than a dog at the local animal shelter.
And really, why should there be? The death penalty isn't about real people or real - irrevokable - consequences. At the end of the day, it's about making yourself feel good. The governor gets to feel like he's tough on crime, the families can remember their loved one and know that they took a real bite out of that crook's ass on their behalf. I don't see any room for justice or the imago dei there. Next time, let's just give Gov. Bush and the grieving families some lead pipes and let them go caveman. Don't worry, we'll give them spatter-proof smocks. Wouldn't want to be unprofessional, now would we?