The latest Supreme Court challenge to the death penalty reads like a joke.
Lawyers on behalf of two inmates in Kentucky asked the Supreme Court to halt their executions by lethal injection, because it hurts too much. Yes, dying sometimes has a way of being painful.
Ralph Baze, the first inmate in the suit, knows fairly well about the pain of dying. While a wanted felon for an earlier assault, he shot two police officers and later claimed in court he should be shown mercy, because a feud with his wife’s family caused “extreme emotional disturbance.”
It’s doubtful many Americans are going to turn a sympathetic ear to Baze’s plight. And it would have been re-assuring for the majority of Americans who recognize the death penalty as a legitimate criminal punishment, if the nine justices had made it clear that, painful or not, capital punishment will continue.
Unfortunately, the justices, even the conservatives, clouded the issue by issuing a barrage of differing opinions that allow lethal injections to continue but opened other issues with capital punishment.
Justice John Paul Stevens noted the diversity of views in this case will prompt future litigation against the death penalty.
Death row executions were already at a low, because of uncertainty created by the Kentucky case and may now be delayed even further.
Lawyers on behalf of a Georgia inmate have since asked to halt his execution by lethal injection, because of the same excruciating pain condition.
In further irony, the justices essentially ruled that being put to death can hurt a little, just not to the point of torture. [Which opens a whole new question concerning some of our foreign military policies.]
The inmates argued that the current lethal injection procedure isn’t properly administered, and some inmates have taken as long as 30 minutes to die after being given a first shot to make them unconscious, a second shot to paralyze them and a third to stop the heart.
Government policy prohibiting the release of any practical information regarding executions, including autopsies, leaves the door open for these types of legal charges and provides prison officials scant information to use in defense of this means of execution.
Currently, 36 of the 37 states that have the death penalty apply lethal injections in this manner. Georgia has used this execution method since 2000 and copied exactly procedures already in use in other states.
While some fine-tuning on the drugs or procedure may be warranted should any information ever be collected and studied, the general concept of lethal injections remains sound. Any method of execution involving a sedative can’t be termed torturous.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s main opinion that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting cruel or unusual punishment doesn’t require a pain-free execution, just one without “an objectively intolerable risk of serious harm.”
The latest case may have been cleared up, but more are sure to follow, swelling state death rows further, adding to court costs for taxpayers and offering no closure for the victims.
One collateral consequence of this action already is the delay of a second death row case before the Supreme Court that would have allowed the execution of child rapists.
While the Constitution does protect our criminals from cruel and unusual punishment, our justice system needs to protect the rest of us from the criminals.
Unfortunately one of the main arguments against the death penalty (along with expanding it to cover other crimes) is the cost to taxpayers of capital punishment trials. The costs, however, come from all the superfluous cases in the system, like the “it’s painful to be put to death” arguments that drag on for years.
Rather than looking at how to kill someone without pain, what needs to be studied is how to move capital cases through the courts more efficiently. |
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