Hank Green mused about the botched execution in Tennessee: Why Are We So Bad at Executing People? He has a statistical analysis that might well explain it. Christa Pike’s attorneys had made it known that she had essential thrombocytosis, which complicates IV access. A doctor explains: “What happened in Tennessee’s execution chamber is one of the most common failures in medicine.”
Kelly mentioned his conversion to opposing the death penalty. I’ve opposed it for longer, but I like his point: “Time and time again I have seen that, as a response to the actions of the worst of us, executions do not bring out the best of us.”
Over 200 people have been exonerated after being on death row, some of them incarcerated for decades.
From the ACLU:
- Almost all people on death row could not afford to hire an attorney. The quality of legal representation better predicts whether someone will be sentenced to death than the facts of the crime.
- Race often plays a role in determining a capital sentence, in multiple ways. Over 80% of capital cases involve white victims, even though nationally, only 50% of murder victims are white….
Death is a carnival
But what frankly enraged me recently was Pete Hegseth announcing that the Pentagon plans a public livestream execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, its first in decades. The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, has rightly condemned the plan as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” that would “only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation.”
Public execution as entertainment? AP: “For about nine decades, executions in the U.S. have been private affairs.” After years of public executions, “states started to change the policy as an increasing number of people witnessed botched hangings and as broader concerns grew over the events… Instead of promoting the sanctity of life and how solemn the circumstance was, with people applauding and having a carnival-like atmosphere, that really turned people off.”
I will admit that the “festivities” image created a visceral reaction in me. It reminded me of lynchings, “the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.
“A typical lynching involved a criminal accusation, an arrest, and the assembly of a mob, followed by seizure, physical torment, and murder of the victim. Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy. Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards.”
Don’t be like Iran
I’m not arguing that Hasan was not fairly convicted, as far as I know, or that the government doesn’t have the AUTHORITY to execute him. But the OHCHR’s Shabia Mantoo, responding to a question from journalists at a press briefing in Geneva, noted that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, in response to public executions in Afghanistan and Iran, had previously stressed that such executions “constitute a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
We are presumably better than Yemen and North Korea, other countries that have performed public executions in recent years. Or maybe not. Watch Jonathan Pie on American Morality.