Executions no place for trial and error

Published July 29, 2014

by Burlington Times-News, July 28, 2014.

Whether or not the government should execute people for particularly heinous crimes has always posed murky moral, ethical and legal questions. But whether people agree or disagree on the subject, it seems that there is an overriding responsibility in our society for executions — as much as possible — to be conducted in a humane manner.

That’s why it’s increasingly troublesome that executions today are handled so poorly. It seems unfathomable that technology and medical know-how could take such a quantum leap backward in this area.

The most recent example occurred in Arizona last week when for the third time this year, executioners administering a lethal injection to a condemned man botched it. It took nearly two hours to kill convicted murderer Joseph Wood using the same two-drug protocol involved in Ohio’s slow, torturous execution of Dennis McGuire in January. The other mis-execution occurred in Oklahoma, where Clayton Lockett writhed and groaned on a gurney before the bungled procedure was finally aborted; he later died of a heart attack.

Our opposition to the death penalty has been clear: Capital punishment is inconsistently applied and is a system fraught with potential errors. Just as it is wrong to execute an innocent man or woman it is equally wrong to give one defendant the death penalty while another gets life for ostensibly the same crime. Now we add the difficulty in carrying out the penalty itself without violating the condemned’s constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. As long as states continue to execute murderers, they must do so within the limits of the Constitution.

But they’re not. With manufacturers balking at selling drugs for executions, states have been scrambling to find alternatives, coming up with new lethal cocktails made with drugs customized by compounding pharmacies. Not only are some of these cocktails proving ineffective, but states have been shielding their sources and the specific makeup of the drugs from both the public and the condemned. Oklahoma has even sent corrections officers with money from petty cash to procure the drugs in a tawdry effort to blur the trail.

Wood, who was convicted of the 1989 murder of his girlfriend and her father, was among those who sought a court order requiring the state to reveal details of the execution protocol so he could determine whether it violated his constitutional rights. It turns out, he had reason to raise the question.

North Carolina hasn’t executed a prisoner since 2006 following a moratorium on the practice enacted by the N.C. General Assembly, which has since been lifted. A year ago, facing court scrutiny over the three-drug lethal injection favored since 1998, the state changed its protocol to the one-drug format. Death penalty proponents had hoped the change would reopen the door to executions for the 153 people currently on death row.

That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.

Executions should not be run by trial and error. Death penalty protocols should not be kept secret. North Carolina is at least ahead of the game there.

It may be true that the suffering of those executed for their crimes does not compare to that of their victims or the families of victims. But that’s not the point. Society must not stoop to torture or to other constitutionally impermissible methods of punishing criminals.

http://www.thetimesnews.com/opinion/our-opinion/executions-no-place-for-trial-and-error-1.351449