Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy has a post on lethal injection challenges and renews his notion that the attention given to capital litigation distracts from the issues affecting tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the criminal justice system. In this post he specifically references the recent NPR series on conditions at supermax prisons and the emotional costs of such confinement. LINK
These discussions, along with the just noted NPR series on solitary confinement, gets me revved up again about the harmful and distracting obsession everyone has with the death penalty. There is now nationwide constitutional litigation disrupting the imposition of lawful capital punishments because there is a chance that a few murders might suffer pain right before being executed. Meanwhile, more than 25,000 prisoners are subject to the extreme mental and physical suffering that is known to accompany confinement in Supermax or control-unit prisons. And yet, there is little or no litigation or even attention paid to this issue.
Why don't persons who claim to be so concerned about human dignity focus more on the tens of thousands of humans suffering every day from extreme prison confinement rather than on the few humans who might suffer pain on the way to being executed?
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