(RNS) Every so often, the glint of morality — or common sense — flashes across the television screen.
Witness a recent episode of the television drama “House.” One doctor tells another: “It is impossible to take another person’s life and remain unchanged.” That’s all I’ll say; I don’t want to ruin the program for you if you haven’t seen it.
But if you’ve been following the death penalty debate recently, it has to make you wonder. Who, exactly, is willing to do this? Who is willing to be an executioner?
For millennia, societies have deemed themselves able (and willing) to end the lives of individual humans. More immediate and presumably more convenient than life imprisonment, the death penalty’s roots extend to the beginnings of recorded history.
Not that we’ve learned much since then.
Today in the United States the predominant form of state-inflicted death is lethal injection (actually a series of injections) to an open intravenous line intended to simply put someone “to sleep.” Permanently. It’s considered more scientifically advanced, and perhaps humane, than older, gorier methods, such as boiling, crucifixion, impalement, stoning, dismemberment, burning and yes, even the electric chair.
Some societies still use some of these methods. About a year ago, after withdrawing an accusation of rape when her rapists’ families promised money, a young Somali girl was executed for “adultery.” A thousand men in the soccer stadium cheered as the hooded girl was forced into a hole and stoned to death. This century has seen numerous lethal crucifixions in Sudan. Iraq, we must remember, hanged Saddam Hussein. More recently, a man was beheaded in Saudi Arabia in retribution for a double murder. They crucified his headless body.
Back in the democratic United States, lethal injection is the preferred means over electrocution and gas. As many as 3,316 individuals await the needle. Recently, a few in Ohio got a reprieve after one of their number survived several failed attempts — 18, to be precise — to find a useable vein during a two-hour failed execution. In fact, Ohio is not particularly adept at applying its statute. It has botched three executions in the past four years.
Which brings us back to our first question: who can do this? Who is willing to be an executioner?
The process of lethal injection requires an intravenous line to be set, and requires several injections that send a deadly cocktail of numbing, heart-slowing drugs coursing around the condemned prisoner’s body until breathing stops, heartbeats fade and cease, and brain function ends. It is not a medical procedure performed by medical specialists. A doctor is on hand to pronounce the prisoner dead, but the drugs are not administered by licensed health care professionals.
Of course I am focusing on the punishment, and not upon the crime. Even the Catholic Church says a nation has the right to a death penalty as a deterrent, although it can only use it in self-defense. The U.S. is right up there with large swaths of the globe — China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan — in annual executions. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe do not have capital punishment. Are the home countries of the executioners any safer than these others? Does the death penalty work as a deterrent?
Of course that cannot be answered here. Sociologists, criminologists and psychologists tend to disagree on the point.
We can answer one thing, however. Post-execution, there is a qualitative difference in the person who, and therefore in the society that, loads the deadly needle and injects the healthy vein of a human being. It is not a graced person, nor a graced society, that performs this action.
We must stop this terribly, terribly wrong approach to jurisprudence.
Until we do, we are all complicit.
(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)
