During my one-year Americorps service, I worked at the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). I continue to be haunted by how sadistic our death penalty protocol remains. Simply unacceptable...........especially for a country claiming to be the moral example for the rest of the world. And yet - it was sooo hard getting people to acknowledge this because simply nobody wants to know the big, bad, ugly truth. However, things are changing, and finally the issue is making headway.......
Die Hardest
Why the states are standing by their outdated, messy lethal-injection protocols.It's unofficial: The country is in the throes of a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. In the wake of a Supreme Court decision in September to take a case testing the constitutionality of Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol, and after a series of stays granted by state courts and the Supreme Court, prosecutors in Texas and elsewhere announced they will stop seeking execution dates. This past October was the first month in three years in which nobody was executed in the United States.
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The prevalent three-drug protocol consists of an anesthetic rendering the victim unconscious, a paralytic that stops his breathing, and a drug that stops his heart. Mounting evidence suggests some prisoners may be suffering horribly. As Justice John Paul Stevens tartly pointed out at oral argument on a related question, the lethal-injection procedure we use "would be prohibited if applied to dogs and cats." (The American Veterinary Medical Association issued guidelines in 2002 saying the mix of drugs is unacceptable for putting animals to sleep.)
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If academics, doctors, and prisoners—as well as death-penalty supporters and the guy who invented the protocol—have been criticizing the three-drug protocol for years, why haven't the states switched methods? [...] The reason the states haven't acted is one part strategic and one part inertia. As the appellants' brief in Baze points out, most of the states have persistently stood by their protocols with the argument that everyone else is doing it. Kentucky adopted Chapman's cocktail without "any independent or scientific studies" because "other states were doing it … on a regular basis."
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The reason our death-penalty methods are old and rickety is that they were cobbled together on the fly and broadly adopted without care. They are being defended for political and strategic reasons, as opposed to pragmatic ones. And the whole argument is a bad proxy for a larger fight about capital punishment. If carelessness, raw politics, and inertia should be driving policy, the current lethal-injection system is a penalogical grand slam. One shouldn't have to be opposed to the death penalty, be soft on criminals, or be a liberal crybaby to insist that procedures that are hopelessly outdated and medically suspect should be fixed.
Read full article here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2176196/
