HB 328 by state Rep. Joe Lopinto
would have allowed purchase of the combination of drugs required to produce a lethal
injection formula, compounded for executions that minimizes suffering of the
guilty, from out-of-state pharmacies and for information regarding suppliers and
participants in the process to be kept confidential. Many states have
experienced difficulty in getting such chemicals because manufacturers of them
face intimidation from vocal minorities against the idea of capital punishment that,
if they sell these, negative public relations campaigns against them will be
engaged in, leading them reluctant to sell these if knowledge of that becomes
public.
In effect, this activism attempts
to veto by other means, through preventing the practice from being carried out,
the sensible public policy of the use of a death penalty. The fact is that
allowing capital punishment makes society better off by saving lives, in three
ways. First, it has a proven
deterrent effect that preserves the innocent. Second, it protects from
those not deterred by ensuring that they never again can threaten society that
provides them targets, where they may access those targets through various
means such as judicial incompetence that allows them out of prison, within
prisons where they have the chance to murder correctional employees and fellow
prisoners, and/or by escape. Third, their eternal souls may be saved by having
to face execution, for impending death provides a terrific incentive to focus on
this aspect of their existence that without they may otherwise never explore,
resisting the knowledge that the owner
of the vineyard is like God the Father, and that salvation thus can come at
any time, even the at the end of life.
But at the same time, capital
punishment is a brutal solution that, for reasons that St.
John Paul elegantly eludicated, must happen only when absolutely necessary.
And the difficulty presented by the means of lethal injection to ensuring the
relative rarity is it almost makes the process too clinical, too sanitized, too
(to use the word of Vice Pres. Joe Biden
in describing Pres. Barack Obama
while they ran for the presidency in 2008) “clean.”
By making the execution process
hardly any different than putting down a suffering family pet, it desensitizes
us to the horror intrinsic to capital punishment. By contrast, going about
doing it should provoke and remind society that by nature it represents an
assault on the concept that human lives are sacrosanct and that to give the
state power over them for even the most compelling reasons invites tyranny over
and degradation of them. Any execution should invite us to reflect upon the
power of the state, to resolve to keep it in check, to increase efforts and deliberation
to ensure that the innocent never suffer because of it, and to abhor it as an
unpleasant duty to perform in order to save others.
Thus, it would seem that alternative
execution methods, in their more graphic nature, would serve better in
prompting this kind of reflection from the public. Several venerable ones exist
that, if done correctly (as must lethal injection), provide a minimum of
suffering for the guilty, for not to try to minimize suffering embraces the
very horrific nature of capital punishment that instead should meet with
repulsion. They all have in common that, through the visible physical damage
done, they manifest the obvious and abrupt ending of a human life at the hands
of others, even if justified. They better signal to us that what they did was
repugnant yet necessary.
While this unlikely described the
thinking behind the original
version of the bill, it did propose to reinstate electrocution as a means
of execution. Resistance to that excised this portion of it before eventually it stalled, but this decision
bears reconsideration in the future. Getting rid of lethal injection because it
makes carrying out a death sentence seem too effortless and painless in favor
of other methods that generate minimal suffering of the guilty and also exposes better the revolting quality of it all to everybody else not only
achieves a more helpful conceptualization of capital punishment as a public policy
tool, but it also moots the necessity of finding ways to cancel the effects of
impassioned minorities seeking to impose their mistaken morality over the will
of the majority.
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