Capital Crimes and Punishment      
     Last month (September), the State of Ohio failed to execute an innate who spent 25 years on death row for the murder and rape of a 14 year old girl. The state's failure was not due to any legal action, new evidence, DNA, appeal, or court ordered stay. The execution failed when technicians at the state's Lucasville prison were unable to insert an intravenous line into the condemned man to administer the lethal injection.   

      The techs tried 18 times. Needles were inserted in both arms and a leg. In fact, a team of 12 people tried for more than 2 hours to find a vein to push the 3 drug lethal cocktail through his veins. To no avail. Finally, they gave up.

     Soon after, the State rescheduled the execution. This prompted the US District Court to intervene and issue a temporary stay. Then the Ohio Governor put all executions on hold until a review and alternative plans could be put in place.

      63 years ago, in 1946, the electric current failed to kill a teenage inmate strapped to an electric chair named “Gruesome Gertie” in Louisiana. A drunk executioner failed to wire the chair properly, and after a long minute, the convulsing teenager screamed “I'm not dying!”

      In 1946, the US Supreme Court ruled Louisiana was entitled to a second shot.

      The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that other scheduled executions could go forward, but the state's Governor suspended any further executions.

      The New York Times (which has over 155 links to the story), Newsweek, Agence France Presse, and the China Daily are among the global/national press organizations that covered or editorialized about Ohio's repeated unsuccessful attempts to execute the death sentence 25 years after the crime.

      The first recorded instance of  Occidental (Western) death sentences appears in the Hammurabi Code, established in the 18th century BC by a Babylonian King. The Code proscribed the death penalty for 25 different crimes. Death penalties for crimes were also part of the 14th century BC Hittite Code, the 7th Century BC Draconian Code (Athens), in which death was the only punishment for all crimes, and 5th Century BC Roman Law. Executions were carried out by crucifixion, drowning, beating, burning, and impalement.
      In the 10th Century AD, hanging was widely used in Britain. In the 11th Century, William the Conqueror largely stopped the death penalty.
      But in the Sixteenth Century, Henry VIII executed as many as 72,000 people. Common execution methods were boiling, burning, hanging, beheading, and drawing and quartering. Under Henry VIII's reign, capital offenses included cutting down a tree or marrying a Jew.
      North Carolina once punished by hanging the crime of taking a free Negro out of state for the purpose of being sold into slavery. Charleston has one recorded incident of a hanging for “Negro stealing.” Charleston also recorded the first death by hanging of an American woman (a serial killer). The country hung 505 women before 1900 (under counted by hangings of enslaved women). Charleston, for several decades, burned alive enslaved cooks who were thought to be guilty of arson—a travesty protested even in the local newspaper's editorials.
      On the global front, China reported 1770 executions in 2005. In the US, in 2008, 37 executions were carried out and 3220 persons waited on death row. The oldest, 92; the youngest, 19.
     Death by the state, in any era, in large numbers or small, seems grisly and macabre—and senseless and inept. Death for cutting a tree? Drunken executioners? 18 needle sticks? Despite the safeguards of review and law, governing officials have seemed eager to apply the death penalty for specified crimes. They are also often inept or indifferent in carrying it out. And executions, touted as a social good, have a hidden human cost. 

     What ideas allow the State to sentence men and women to death? The basic premise is that individuals, if found by others, to actually have carried certain designated actions, have forfeited, under the concept of justice, their “right” to live and may be condemned to die by the state. This holds that death is a valid action by the State. But can we really justify executions by the presupposed good these deaths offer the victims families and society?  
      Both sides of the debate, cite positions and counter arguments, offer statistics and historic examples. But it comes down to a simple feeling about the value of life. The contradictions of this feeling are evident in the fact that conservatives, who want government out of human enterprises, generally support the death penalty and eagerly relish the state carrying out death sentences. Liberals, who usually support government as a prime actor in society and the economy, generally want the State to end death sentences as a state function. They seek to change laws that allow the State to mandate capital punishment.
      The contradictions of ideology highlight the difference in the feeling each side has about the death penalty. Feeling determines how each side interprets, justifies, and legitimizes its views.


An Unshakeable Feeling

      These feelings create their own controversy. At Ohio State, my alma mater, the College of Social Work employs a full professor who once sat on Georgia's death row for year, awaiting execution. His sentence (not his conviction) was overturned on appeal. He was then sentenced to life imprisonment and spent 8 years in the GA penal system before being paroled. While at OSU, the professor has sued the College of Social Work and its former Dean for discrimination and sent crude, defaming emails. With a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, the prof bitterly blames the system for his low professional evaluations and his term in prison, and seems locked in a combative, confrontational box. The comments that follow the story show how complex feelings run on the death sentence--and on those who have come under its spectre. (Story link: http://bit.ly/2tEqV2).
      The present support for the death sentence in some ways seems a part of the cynicism that shadows American public life. Kill them (add any name here: of the murderers whose crimes are more frequent and harder to fathom; of kidnappers and child murderers, serial killers, mass murders; of family killers, gang members seeking “props” and street justice, juveniles with broken value systems that seek the outlaw status of being a killer who has taken a life; of the members of a youth mob whose senseless violence recently killed a honor student in Chicago). Kill them. But tell me, what is the difference between their gross inhumane executions without judge or jury--their murder of innocent victims--and the stamp of state approval that undergrids the State's own slower, peer-reviewed death march? 
     They deserve it, many say, citing history, the Bible, the gross inhumanity of their crimes. I shudder when I think of the increasing litany of lives lost not just to violence but by mind-numbing methods. But please read carefully.
     Where many of my readers might think of my position as that of a “bleeding heart,” I honestly see a paradox. I see a deadly cycle in which the system and the criminals mirror each other, and both sides simply seem to spiral upward, more and more out of control. I believe, in our anger, rage, self-righteous, in our pain and helplessness, we forget the commands of the Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.”Let us “not fall into the pit we have dug,” or be snared “by the net we have hidden.” Plain spoken warnings from God resound and admonish us that in anger, we are not to take up any fight by our own will or mistake patience for passiveness.
     I know this paradox from substituting in middle schools. The more I cracked down on misdeeds, the more they multiplied. The more I controlled, the more I lost control. By the time I became a special ed sub, I had mastered the paradox: my class won awards for the first time in school history.
     My point is the death penalty has no easy answer—expect both research and anecdote clearly indicate, without equivocation, that the death penalty is not a deterrent to the commission of capital crimes, and may, in a perverse logical way, may be used as a justification by some who do. The State does it. Why can't I?

The Crime and the Time

     I hear my readers snorting at the argument above. I hear the mantra: kill 'em. Gas 'em. Hang 'em. Stick them a hundred times if necessary. I hear and understand. But I hope at lease someone will understand when I say: It doesn't feel right. The action of supporting the death seems to mock me; it's a feeling I cannot shake.
     Lastly the penalty mocks itself by the mistakes and wrong convictions swept into its fold. This week, an announcement cited the 137th and 138th case of wrongful conviction in capital punishment cases in the US system!138 times, we nearly sent the wrong persons, innocent persons to death. Our safeguards failed. Our adversarial process failed. Our juries failed. 138 times. And counting.
     Still: the cry: “kill 'em.” I hear the cry. I can cite the all reasons and feel the pain and rage, the suffering and emptiness caused by those who walked and laughed among us, who were killed, “wetted,” with vicious ease. I don't want us to be soft or exploited by those who kill and rape and maim our friends, honor students, or family. But even with knowing and seeing, the State's ability to kill just doesn't feel right. Killing killers and rapists doesn't seem to serve justice. The State's history of death sentences is filled with caprice. The death penalty lacks social benefits. And mounting numbers indicate the State is often wrong. 



All pictures, fair use.

Walter Rhett writes Southern Perlo. A national cultural/history blog with a traditional, Southern story telling style and key Southern examples, Southern Perlo often reviews politics and social issues.
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