When the United States at last abandons the abhorrent practice of capital punishment, the early years of the 21st century will stand out as a peculiar period during which otherwise reasonable people hotly debated how to kill other people while inflicting the least amount of constitutionally acceptable pain.
The Supreme Court stepped back into this maelstrom on Friday, when it
agreed to hear Warner v. Gross, a lawsuit brought by four Oklahoma death-row inmates alleging that the state’s lethal-injection drug protocol puts them at risk of significant pain and suffering.
In accepting the case, the justices had to change its name. The lead plaintiff, Charles Warner,
was executed on Jan. 15 after the court, by a vote of 5-to-4,
denied him a last-minute stay. That may sound strange until you consider that while it takes only four justices to accept a case for argument,
it takes five to stay an execution. The case is now named for another inmate, Richard Glossip.
The plaintiffs in the current case challenge the continued use of one of the drugs that may have contributed to Mr. Lockett’s prolonged death, the sedative midazolam.
There is disingenuousness on both sides. Many who oppose the death penalty, this page included, are obviously not interested in identifying more “humane” methods of execution; the idea itself is a contradiction in terms. Nor are many capital punishment supporters concerned with how much suffering a condemned person might endure in his final moments. In the middle sit the armchair executioners who engage in macabre debates about the relative efficiency of, say, nitrogen gas.
It is time to dispense with the pretense of a pain-free death. The act of killing itself is irredeemably brutal and violent. If the men on death row had painlessly killed their victims, that would not make their crimes any more tolerable. When the killing is carried out by a state against its own citizens, it is beneath a people that aspire to call themselves civilized.
