From the archive: the first American to be put to death by lethal injection

In January 1983 the Observer Magazine examined a deeply troubling death-row drama

In December 1982 Charlie Brooks Jnr, a 40-year-old black man convicted of the killing of a garage mechanic in 1976, ‘was the first American to be put to death by lethal injection’.

‘In the vernacular of death row,’ writes Robert Chesshyre, Brooks ‘had taken the “ultimate high”’.

Only the sixth American to be executed since 1967, Brooks had yet to exhaust a ‘labyrinthine appeals procedure’; his plea for a stay of execution while his appeal was considered was rejected seven times on the day a ‘lethal potion of drugs’ washed through his veins.

Fresh papers relating to his appeal appeared the next morning. ‘We had a live appeal and a dead plaintiff,’ commented one capital punishment abolitionist. Others feared his death heralded ‘an orgy of judicial killings’ for the 1,160 people held on America’s death row in 37 states.

Neither Brooks nor his accomplice (who, thanks to a technical error, got a retrial and plea-bargained for a 40-year sentence and possible parole after six years) admitted firing the shot that killed the mechanic. There was ‘enough doubt to suppose that the “murderer”’ might relatively soon be back in society while the “accomplice” has been executed’.

There were 400-plus murders a week at the time, exposing the ‘arbitrary and capricious’ manner in which the death penalty is imposed.

Back in 1967 all executions were halted and in 1972 all death laws abolished, but the principle of capital punishment was not ruled out. Hence the ‘illogical chaos’ that sees men – invariably ‘our poor, our blacks’, according to veteran abolitionist the Rev Joe Ingle – condemned.

The ‘pioneering, high tech’ method of Brooks’s death is likened to ‘putting someone to sleep’, as one would a pet. But how far should doctors collaborate in killing, in apparent contravention of their Hippocratic Oath?

Source: The Guardian, Genevieve Fox, January 13, 2019

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