This week, the federal government may have tortured three men to death in the name of justice.
It wasn’t at some black site overseas, but here at home and unhidden. The work was done quickly and initiated in the dead of night.
It began Tuesday morning when, for the 1st time in 17 years, the federal government executed a man on death row.
Resuming these executions has been a priority for U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. The problem was how to do it.
Lethal injections once involved 3 drugs which have been hard to get for years because the European Union banned exports of lethal injection drugs and even the manufacturers stopped selling them to the United States.
Yet we very much want to kill, you see, and so states began experimenting with different drug protocols, injecting what they could get, with horrifying results on occasions when prisoners died in agony.
Barr wanted to use a single sedative, pentobarbital, to kill convicted murderer Daniel Lee. Medical experts said it presented a serious risk for inmates to suffer flash pulmonary edema — a buildup of fluid in the lungs that gives one the sensation of drowning or strangling, gasping for life in panic and torment through their final moments.
Lower courts barred this procedure as a violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. A few remain who aspire to the notion of a civilized state that doesn’t torture human beings convicted of crimes, even repugnant crimes.
Yet there is another side to us. There is, in our culture, a sadistic streak, a fascination with violence and subjecting designated bad people to suffering and fear. The excellent chance that injecting death row inmates with pentobarbital would cause excruciating pain did not disturb the attorney general, and it did not disturb a majority of justices on the highest court in our land.
And so, in a 2 a.m. ruling on an unusual request for an emergency order, the U.S. Supreme Court granted that Lee must die in this fashion, as the man waited strapped to a gurney. A few hours later, it was done — a hasty operation undertaken in darkness.
Who was it for? The family of Lee’s victims opposed his execution, yet had sought a delay long enough for them to be present if it was to be done. The Justice Department said no. So it wasn’t for them. Nor was it for Lee’s prosecutor and trial judge, who also opposed putting Lee to death.
Yet it was done, inhumanely and with no demonstrable public benefit, no deterrent value, no redeeming virtue unless one regards sadism a virtue.
Since then, 2 more have been killed: Wesley Purkey (whose lawyers said he suffered from dementia and could not understand what was happening to him) and Dustin Honken.
Perhaps we should note that family members of one of Honken’s victims said his execution brought them closure. Of the three, it took Honken the longest to die, at half an hour.
Daniel Lee committed his crimes in the name of white supremacy; even so, to risk torturing convicted persons to death in vengeful haste is a conviction not of them, but of American justice.
It summons to memory, ironically, a verse by a Black poet, Langston Hughes, who wrote:
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides 2 festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
Source: Lac Cruces Sun News, Opinion: Algernon D'Ammassa, July 20, 2020
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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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde