On July 23rd, 2014, Joseph R. Wood III was put to death by the state of Arizona for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father Eugene Dietz. He was executed just this past week, but he committed these crimes well over a decade ago. This isn't uncommon; in 2012, the average time between sentencing and the actual execution of death row inmates was 190 months, or a little over 15 years:
But what happened to Mr. Wood on that day was not usual - or at least, never used to be. He was given a lethal injection of midazolam and hydromorphone at 1:57 p.m., but wasn't pronounced dead until 3:49 p.m., nearly 2 hours later. Usually, death by lethal injection takes somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.
What the hell happened? In short, something that has been happening much more frequently, as of late. 4 such "botched" executions have taken place thus far in 2014, in which things went awry after the inmates were injected with lethal toxins. In this instance, a reporter for the Arizona Republic observed Mr. Wood gulping "like a fish on land," and noted that he had opened his mouth and gasped more than 640 times. This was likely due to the relatively new and apparently ineffective cocktail of drugs executioners have been using. On January 16th of this year, in one of the other 4 "botched" executions, convicted murderer Dennis McGuire was injected with the same drug combination in the state of Ohio. He too took longer to die than usual, and was observed gasping throughout the ordeal.
There were prior warnings that this might happen. Before the execution in Ohio took place, David Waisel, an associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, submitted his concerns to the U.S. district court, but to no avail. He wrote that it was likely Mr. McGuire would "remain awake and actively conscious for up to five minutes, during which he will increasingly experience air hunger as the drugs suppress his ability to breathe," and that "in light of the insufficient dose of midazolam...it is substantially likely that McGuire will be aware of this agony and horror."
In addition to the questionable doses of said drugs, there's also the high probability of the executioners themselves not knowing what the fuck they're doing. Those that would be most capable of carrying out a "humane execution," as it were, such as physicians and anesthesiologists, are explicitly banned (by threat of revoking certification) from participating in executions by the American Medical Association and the American Board of Anesthesiology, respectively.
These institutions have taken the position that medical professionals have an ethical obligation to refrain from assisting in taking the life of another human being.
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This post is about capital punishment. Or, more specifically, my opposition to capital punishment.
I write about people like Joseph Wood and Dennis McGuire, and the people they have been convicted of killing, like Debra and Eugene Dietz, because their stories have been in the news recently, and I feel that it's important to note the very real people and lives this issue affects. And yet, this issue is larger than just the inmates on death row, and the people they killed. It's a discussion about the way we enact justice in our nation. More precisely, it's a discussion about what constitutes justice, and what differentiates it from revenge.
The reaction of those who are in favor of capital punishment to the potential suffering and length of Mr. Wood's ordeal has been clear and predictable: "Who gives a fuck? He was a murderer. His victims suffered as well. He got what he deserved for the crimes he committed." Indeed, these sentiments were expressed by members of the Dietz family in a press conference after Mr. Wood finally passed.
And yet, such sentiments regarding the execution of Mr. Wood reveal the folly of the pro-capital punishment stance more than any other case: it's about revenge, period. What else could it be? There is no conceivable way that an active desire to see another human being suffer, even if that individual happens to be a convicted murderer, could be accurately described as justice. After all, if the objective is to see the inmate suffer, then why not just torture him? Why not waterboard him, burn him, electrocute him, and pierce his flesh until our wanton desires to see him punished for his heinous crimes has been fulfilled? Why not rape convicted rapists? They deserve no less, right? May as well carry out that desire to its logical conclusion.
We shouldn't do these things because we (well, most of us) understand that such actions are unbecoming of an advanced society. In essence, such actions would make us no better than the convicted felons. I submit that our inability to kill a man without making him gasp for air for 2 hours also makes us no better than the convicted felons.
It's worth noting that the U.S. finds itself in an increasingly lonely group of nations where the death penalty is permitted, as much of the rest of the 1st world has moved to abolish it throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2013, the U.S. found itself in the fine company of nations such as China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia for its continued use of capital punishment (Admittedly, Japan, another 1st world nation, was also on that list, though they have a ways to go to catch up to the U.S.). Indeed, one of the reasons we've resorted to using untested drug combinations is because pharmaceutical companies, primarily located throughout Europe, are now restricted from exporting tried and true drugs, such as pentobarbital, to the U.S. for ethical reasons. After all, they know that we intend to kill human beings with them, and the E.U. constitution explicitly forbids torture and capital punishment.
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But even if we could guarantee executions in which there was no prolonged suffering inflicted upon the executed, I would still be opposed to capital punishment. To be clear, my opposition is not borne out of sympathy for convicted murderers such as Wood and McGuire, or out of a lack of sympathy for their victims. My opposition is borne out of my belief that such executions are not committed in the name of justice, as I have written, and for the following calculated reasons:
1) Executing the innocent
At the core of the pro-capital punishment stance is the firm belief that we're executing a monster. But what if that "monster" was falsely convicted? What they fail to consider is the very real fact that we don't always get it right. Professors Samuel Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, and Edward Kennedy recently explored this phenomenon in a research paper. Here's part of the abstract:
"The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution, but most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply. We use survival analysis to model this effect, and estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States."
They conclude that 4.1% (a conservative figure) would be exonerated if "defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely." This is a significant figure when talking about an irreversible act.
As for the actual number of innocents who may have been executed, the authors write:
"The most charged question in this area is different: How many innocent defendants have been put to death? We cannot estimate that number directly but we believe it is comparatively low. If the rate were the same as our estimate for false death sentences, the number of innocents executed in the United States in the past 35 y would be more than 50. We do not believe that has happened. Our data and the experience of practitioners in the field both indicate that the criminal justice system goes to far greater lengths to avoid executing innocent defendants than to prevent them from remaining in prison indefinitely. One way to do so is to disproportionately reverse death sentences in capital cases in which the accuracy of the defendants' convictions is in doubt and to resentence them to life imprisonment, a practice that makes our estimate of the rate of error conservative. However, no process of removing potentially innocent defendants from the execution queue can be foolproof. With an error rate at trial over 4%, it is all but certain that several of the 1,320 defendants executed since 1977 were innocent."
The fact that the empirical data indicates that we've most likely executed innocent people is reason enough to abolish the death penalty. Perhaps the most notorious example is the execution of Carlos DeLuna by the state of Texas in 1989. It is difficult to fully articulate just how badly the American justice system fucked this case up, but there is a large body work by writers who have given it a shot. From the The Atlantic:
"Texas convicted and executed DeLuna despite the fact that the police and prosecutors knew or should have known that Lopez's real murderer was a man named Carlos Hernandez, a violent criminal who looked almost exactly like DeLuna. Why? Because Hernandez was known to use the sort of knife used as the murder weapon. Because he matched initial descriptions of the suspect. Because he was known to violent toward women. Oh, and because he evidently couldn't stop bragging about how he had murdered Lopez and gotten someone else to take the fall for him."
DeLuna was apparently mentally disabled, and when the system came down upon him, he was incapable of fully understanding the precarious situation he was in, and even less capable of securing an adequate, legal defense for himself - an unfortunate series of circumstances that the actual killer in the crime DeLuna was convicted and executed for was fully able to exploit.
The justice system failed Carlos DeLuna, and now he's dead and gone. There's no reason to repeat the same mistake.
2) The death penalty isn't a deterrent
As I wrote, the possibility of executing innocent people is reason enough to oppose the death penalty. But for those who think killing a few innocent people here and there is a reasonable cost to pay if it sends the message that we're serious about cracking down on crime, there's another important fact to consider: capital punishment doesn't deter criminals from committing violent offenses. Per Amnesty International:
As the graph illustrates, states without the death penalty have lower overall homicide rates than the rest of the nation. This would suggest that potential murderers in states with capital punishment are not deterred by the fact that they could be executed if charged and convicted. This makes sense; crime is more a symptom of poverty and inequality of opportunity than it is about consideration of the consequences of getting caught.
3) Executing people is expensive
This last point seems counterintuitive to those who would prefer we put a bullet in the heads of convicted murderers, instead of letting them rot in prison on the taxpayer's dime. And yet, the data leads us to the conclusion that it is more expensive to execute someone than it is to imprison them for life. Why? Because of the high costs of prosecuting death penalty cases and the ensuing incarceration on death row.
Death penalty proponents suggest that the answer to this problem is to do away with the appeals process and other costly legal measures that tend to occur in capital cases. But these cases aren't more expensive simply because of the appeals process; as the Forbes article indicates, "the greatest costs associated with the death penalty occur prior to and during trial, not in post-conviction proceedings. Even if all post-conviction proceedings (appeals) were abolished, the death penalty would still be more expensive than alternative sentences."
Besides, cutting back on the legal scrutiny would run afoul of point one: the possibility of executing innocent people. If we already execute innocent people with the existing high level of legal scrutiny in capital cases, then imagine what would occur if we limited it.
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That's my case against the death penalty. But those of us who wish to see it abolished in this country have a lot of work to do. As of this writing, capital punishment remains popular in this country. Still, there are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic. While the most recent Gallup poll puts approval at 60%, that number has been trending down since its peak of 80% in the early 1990's:
The number of states that prohibit the death penalty has slowly been on the rise, where it currently sits at 14 (including Michigan). New Mexico repealed it in 2009, while Connecticut followed suit in 2012. Finally, the actual number of executions carried out in the U.S. has been dropping as well, to 43 in 2012, from a high of 98 in 1999:
Being in favor of capital punishment doesn't make you "tough on crime." That's a fool's argument, given the fact that it in no way shape or form deters criminal homicides. We do not honor the memory of the victims of violent crime by executing the perpetrators, even though it is certainly important to remember them and their stories, just as it's important to acknowledge the pain and lingering anger of their surviving family members and friends.
It's also important to remember the stories of people like Carlos DeLuna, and any other potentially innocent men who are murdered not by another violent perpetrator, but by the hand's of the State. When the State tries and convicts criminals, it does so on our behalf. As such, it is our responsibility to make sure it's doing so in the name of justice, not in the name of revenge.
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