There continues to be extensive media coverage of Arizona's botched execution. This post will contain editorials. Columns and other commentary in the next post, followed by news articles with several different areas of focus.
Today's Arizona Republic publishes the editorial, "Stop the death penalty - now."
The increasingly irrational argument for attempting to humanely put a convict to death has run out the string in Arizona.
It is not humane to leave a human being, however deserving of death, to gasp for air for two hours before dying, as double-murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood did on Wednesday.
"Executions should not be run by trial and error," is the Los Angeles Times editorial.
For the third time this year, state executioners administering a lethal injection to a condemned man have botched it. This time it happened in Arizona, where it took nearly two hours Wednesday to kill convicted murderer Joseph Wood using the same two-drug protocol involved in Ohio's slow, torturous execution of Dennis McGuire in January. The other mis-execution occurred in Oklahoma, where Clayton Lockett writhed and groaned on a gurney before the bungled procedure was finally aborted; he later died of a heart attack.
The Times' opposition to the death penalty has been clear: Capital punishment is inconsistently applied, subject to manipulation and error, morally wrong and of dubious value in deterring crime. What's more, it is becoming increasingly difficult to carry out without violating the condemned's constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. As we've argued before, as long as states continue to execute murderers, they must do so within the limits of the Constitution.
"Another botched execution: Cruel and usual punishment," is by the Denver Post Editorial Board.
That states must experiment to find drugs to make capital punishment appear humane cannot hide what is really happening on the gurney. The state is killing someone with an eye-for-an-eye logic.
And pulling that eye out over an excruciating and prolonged time only shows how barbaric the death penalty truly is.
"Botched execution demonstrates debacle of death," in the today's San Francisco Chronicle.
Some of us would say that a state-sanctioned execution is barbaric by any method. But even the majority of Americans who are ambivalent to enthusiastic about capital punishment should be sickened by descriptions of Wednesday's debacle in Arizona.
And:
In an almost chillingly prescient opinion before the execution, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco suggested that lethal injection amounts to a "misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful. He suggested a return to "more primitive" and "foolproof" methods such as a firing squad.
When "more primitive" is considered progress on a question of justice, Americans ought to be asking themselves if something is fundamentally wrong with the direction we're headed.
Alabama's Anniston Star publishes the editorial, "Free market vs. death penalty."
As this space noted previously, states that persist in capital punishment find themselves in conflict with the free market, an ironic twist given how many of these state’s politicians declare their faithful allegiance to the marketplace. Drugmakers don’t want their products employed to take a life, even one of a convicted killer. Some states persist in executions in the face of setbacks, including questions about the guilt of some death row inmates and the uneven application of this ultimate punishment.
We long for the day when these states end this cruel practice.
"Another botched execution," is in the Louisville Courier-Journal.
These events should shock the public into understanding what most developed nations already know — executions are not the hallmark of a civilized society.
Next month, a joint meeting of the Kentucky General Assembly's House and Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to discuss our state's use of the death penalty, which has not been employed since 2008.
A judge currently has barred the state from carrying out executions while reviewing legal challenges from some of the 33 inmates on Kentucky's death row.
The committee should give serious consideration to ending capital punishment in Kentucky and let this state be an example to others who persist in a practice that must come to an end.
"The Guardian view on America’s botched executions," is in the Guardian.
Capital punishment remains destructively entangled in America’s culture wars. If it is to continue, the US will have to devise a swifter form of licensed execution. The current shambles, much of it the result of desperation in the face of welcome global campaigns against the suppliers of lethal drugs, has created an intolerable situation for prisoners and the nation alike. Until it is fixed, US states should suspend the death penalty. What the US really needs, though, is to find dignified ways to face up to, as a nation, the failure and damage that are associated with a punishment that is now so clearly, in and of itself, both cruel and unusual.
Earlier coverage of Arizona's botched execution begins with the preceding post.
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