That's the title of the Friday editorial in the New York Times.
Welcome to the macabre absurdity of the modern American death penalty. Of course, death by lethal injection became the standard method only because earlier methods — from hanging to the firing squad to the electric chair — were deemed too “barbaric,” not because the state was taking a human life, but because the method of execution offended the sensitivities of the public in whose name the killing is carried out.
By now, it is clear that lethal injection is no less problematic than all the other methods, and that there is no reason to continue using it. But capital punishment does not operate in the land of reason or logic; it operates in a perpetual state of secrecy and shame.
In most cases, it is conducted late at night, behind closed doors, and as antiseptically as possible. Were it to be done otherwise, Americans would recoil in horror, as they did after the debacle in Oklahoma. Mr. Bucklew’s unusual case shows that death-penalty supporters can’t have it both ways. If they want the United States to remain a global outlier by killing its citizens, they must accept that there are no clean executions.
"Execution drugs unavailable, states eye electric chairs, firing squads," is Scott Martelle's column in the Los Angeles Times.
So what do you do when you’re a death penalty state and the rest of the civilized world refuses to sell you the drugs for your lethal injections? Turn back the clock, apparently.
In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Haslam on Thursday signed a law that would allow prison officials to strap the condemned into an electric chair should drugs become unavailable for lethal injections. In Wyoming, there’s talk of bringing back the firing squad (the state already allows for poison gas as a backup, but apparently it doesn’t have a gas chamber). What’s next, mass public hangings? Drawing-and-quartering, with heads left on pikes at the city gates?
That states are looking to previously rejected execution methods indicates just what a problem this has become. Most of the industrialized world — the United States’ peer nations — did away with this barbaric practice long ago. European-based pharmaceutical companies refuse to export drugs to prisons for use in executions. The American Medical Assn., the American Board of Anesthesiologists and the American Nurses Assn. proscribe members from conducting executions, and activist groups are pressuring the American Pharmacists Assn. to adopt a similar ethics policy. Those policies’ influence, though, is limited: State-level laws shield most doctors from sanctions.
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