A human life is difficult to destroy. Our bodies can take a lot of punishment, and people often put up amazingly tough resistance against efforts to put them away. We can survive remarkable injuries. Despite the tremendous firepower of modern armies, the vast majority of soldiers in modern wars survive. This poses a problem when a state wants to kill someone.
Throughout history, authorities have experimented with various methods of permanently getting rid of such undesirables as murderers, pirates, brigands, heretics, and apostates. Some of these methods were designed to prolong death and make it as agonizing as possible, e.g. burning at the stake. Others were devised to be quick and painless, e.g. drop hanging, although they didn’t always work that way.
Recently, in America, where “cruel and unusual” state-inflicted punishment is putatively outlawed, lethal injection has been the choice du jour among execution methods to replace hanging, gassing, electrocution, and firing squads. These other methods were generally effective, but tended to be unpleasant for the witnesses to watch, were sometimes messy, and could be prolonged and painful if botched, which happened more than a few times. The problem is, lethal injection is prone to mishaps, too, and drug companies increasingly are refusing to supply execution drugs to prisons.
So, governors and legislators of some states, mostly Republicans, have embarked on a search for new and untested ways to kill the unwilling guinea pigs sitting on their states’ death rows, and they seem to be settling on asphyxiation with nitrogen gas as the next big thing in execution science. It doesn’t strike me as an especially attractive way to be killed, but from a legal standpoint, after today’s Supreme Court ruling on use of the drug midazolam for lethal injections, apparently anything goes. If you’re a veterinarian, you still can be arrested for putting a dog down with that drug, but it’s okay for states to use it on humans.
This ruling may take some pressure off wardens to come up with a new execution method, but probably only temporarily. When lethal injection hits more roadblocks, and it will, and after some more botched lethal injections, bloodthirsty legislators will again be looking for an alternative. I suspect most wardens probably aren’t all that eager to strap inmates to gurneys, strap a rubber mask over their faces, and pump ’em full of pure nitrogen gas. This Time magazine article explains how it works. Supposedly it knocks ’em out in 15 seconds or so, and stops their heart in 2 or 3 minutes, assuming all goes according to plan. But what ever does?
Even in the best-case scenario, it doesn’t sound like an appetizing way to issue angel wings. You can simulate this manner of death by putting a plastic bag over your head, although I’m not recommending you try that, even with an assistant standing by to make sure the experiment doesn’t take you over the brink. You can vicariously observe this method’s humanity and efficacy by watching a fairly realistic-looking movie simulation of it in “The Killing Fields.”
Some criminals are so evil it’s tempting to say, “screw ’em,” and just go ahead and kill them by any means at hand, without getting hung up over their suffering in light of the fact their victims suffered more. That’s basically the conservative Republican position on capital punishment, and apparently also that of 5 Supreme Court justices.
For squeamish types and those who still have a few scruples and a scrap of humanity left in them, that approach is unsettling — even before getting into questions of whether some states’ flawed legal systems are executing innocent people and have a propensity to mete out harsher punishments to black people. These issues people to argue the only reasonable executions are the ones that never happen. Aside from questions of guilt or innocence, as long as we have executions, some will be bungled no matter what killing method is used.
I’m conflicted about the death penalty. Heinous crimes, and the people who commit them, repulse me; and my gut cries out for revenge in some of these cases. But revenge is no longer a respectable motivation in our society, even though we still practice it and try to cover that up by calling it “justice” or something else. The death penalty is arbitrary, doesn’t deter crime, is expensive and awkward to administer, and its fairness is tainted by flawed state criminal justice systems capable of convicting innocent people, the blatant racial bias that clearly exists in the system, and the fact only poor people are executed because rich people invariably can buy their way off death row. Add the problems of carrying out executions, and the unwillingness of the human body to die, and you’ve got an ungodly mess.
One thing I’m certain of is, if I were a scholar, scientist, or doctor — which I’m not — I couldn’t see myself spending my days sitting around trying to figure out how to make people die. I’m just not that type of person.