SIXTEEN PEOPLE HAVE been executed in the United States this year. Five more
are scheduled to be killed during the month of September and another eight more through the end of the year.
With each of these killings, more people joined the ranks of a new class of victim — the men and women who carry out the taking of a human life.
Carey Dean Moore was executed by correctional staff on August 14. His death received
national attention only because it was carried out in the state of Nebraska, which hadn’t carried out an execution in more than two decades, and because of its novelty: It was the first time that the
opioid fentanyl was used to carry out a state-sanctioned homicide.
Americans have a habit of rationalizing or forgetting the occasional high profile or wrongful execution. We don’t read much at all about the routine use of the death penalty. And we don’t think much about it either.
We should.
I planned and trained staff to carry out two executions as superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary. These are the state’s only two executions in the last half-century. Their names were Douglas Franklin Wright and Harry Charles Moore.
In addition to overseeing the staff, I was the person who trained the executioner how to depress the plunger of the syringe to inject the lethal chemicals into the veins of the condemned.
Prior to the administration of the lethal chemicals, the tie down team straps inmate to the gurney. The medical technicians take about three minutes to hook the inmate up to the intervenous lines. The warden then stands at the head of the gurney and asks the condemned man if he has any last words.
This is when procedures go according to plan — or all hell breaks loose. Sometimes the condemned close their eyes, take a deep breath, begin to snore a bit, and are pronounced dead. Sometimes the condemned writhe, grimace, and gasp from the pain. No one knows how witnessing such an event will affect them over time.
Regardless of the crimes they committed, being involved in the taking of two lives forced me to reckon, on a moral level, with the reality of capital punishment, which I once supported.
Capital punishment should be abolished outright. But if we are going to continue executing people, there should be a lottery system for those tasked with carrying it out. It should be the civic obligation of every elected lawmaker in states with the death penalty to be a part of this lottery, a sort of jury service for executions.
If politicians refuse to outlaw state-sponsored killing, then a minimum condition of their public service should be their inclusion in a lottery where they are randomly selected and trained to provide hands-on assistance in an execution. Once served, their names should be thrown back into the hat.
Governors assume the responsibility of giving the final go-ahead for an execution. Judges halt or permit them. Correctional staffs administer those orders. Why should the people who are responsible for making capital punishment into law in the first place be exempt from assuming some of the responsibilities and psychological burdens of killing?
Capital murder, in most death penalty states, requires premeditation. In other words, the intent to kill must have been formed prior to the act itself.
Correctional staffs are put through a more extensive routine of premeditation, reflection, and preparation for killing another human being than any murderer on any death row. They spend many hours in training, conducting practice executions. During the final days, corrections staff watch the prisoner 24-hours a day to make sure they don’t take their own lives.
All this planning is supposed to make the taking of a human life more clinical and shield the staff from the consequences of their actions. But it still damaging and destructive. The results of participating in a execution are exactly what you’d expect: post-traumatic stress disorder, with all its related maladies — substance abuse, suicide, depression.
Being cloaked under the rule of law does not insulate a person from having to deal psychologically with killing another person. Correctional staff who participate in executions face a lifetime of questioning themselves over what they have done. Lawmakers could stop this immediately by banning the death penalty and replacing it with reasonable alternatives like life without parole. Their refusal to do so makes them complicit in inflicting this needless trauma on corrections staff.
It is needless trauma because
study after
study after
study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime and does not lower murder rates.
Capital punishment in the United States is cloaked in a cloud of indifference and moral passivity. Requiring Americans who are responsible for its continuation to bear more of its costs is the only way to ensure that it is soon abolished altogether.
Source: bostonglobe.com, Opinion, Semon Frank Thompson, September 2, 2018. The writer was the superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary from 1994 to 1998.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
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