How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection.
-Antonin Scalia
I'd like to take a moment and direct your attention to Elizabeth Weil's superb article on the issues surrounding lethal injection which appears in this week's NY Times magazine. As an aspiring health professional, this issue has often grabbed my attention. Yet until now it's been difficult for me to find a good summary of the relevant history and viewpoints. It's a mere 5 pages on the web, but I'll try to give a sum up of the sum up.
The article drives home the conflict embroiling in the legal and medical professions and how it is connected to the contradictory public opinion: Bad guys should die, but we shouldn't appear barbaric in doing it.
This leads us to lethal injection, a practice that puts as much focus on ensuring that witnesses do not have to view unsightly twitching and, well, DYING as it does the actual practice of executing a criminal. Sanitized death.
As many of you know, the main problem with lethal injection is that it hardly ever works out that way. Why? Because medical professionals recognize that this "execution-as-medical-procedure" is still killing a person, and that just might violate the ethical standards encapsulated in the phrase "Do no harm." Consequently they rarely participate and leave the executing to incompetant staff that regularly botch the steps. For example, a warden who mixed the three drugs involved in one syringe instead of injecting them in their required order. (not) Suprisingly, things like this happen frequently when STATES DON'T EVEN WRITE DOWN WHAT TO DO.
The article comes around to a conclusion that I share: If American's can't stomach watching a murderer die, we should stop executing them.
another quote from a death penalty supporter:
"'The sadistic rapist murderer — why should he feel no pain as he dies?'"
Last I checked, we do not chop off your hand for stealing. An individual act of murder does not justify the State to take the same action. This is the last vestage of a system of punishment based on revenge rather than justice, and it needs to be abolished.