Florida has enacted a moratorium on executions following the severely botched execution of Angel N. Diaz earlier this week. The issue, as I understand it, revolves around whether or not execution by lethal injection violates or runs the risk of violating the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Hours after the announcement was made, a federal judge ruled that California’s lethal injection protocol in its current form does indeed violate the Eighth Amendment. (California has been under a death penalty moratorium since February.)
There have been many accusations of botched executions resulting in unintended pain and suffering for the inmate since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Sometimes it has to do with the chemicals being prepared or administered improperly; sometimes it has to do with the qualifications or competency of the personnel involved. A lot of it seems to stem from the fact that those involved in setting up and carrying out an execution have little or no medical training. Some doctors have posited that the entire procedure is flawed and not experienced as we are led to believe, and since those that undergo it are unavailable to provide feedback on their experience, it is impossible to know what death by lethal injection its current form is really like.
Some human rights organizations have proposed requiring execution by lethal injection, as a medical procedure, to be carried out by medical doctors in order to ensure that the process really is as humane as it was intended to be. The difficulty with this is that the American Medical Association argues that licensed doctors should not participate in executions, since doing so would violate the Hippocratic Oath and contradict the AMA’s mission to preserve life. The AMA cannot prohibit doctors from participating in executions; however, an overwhelming majority of physicians refuse to do so, citing similar concerns. Physicians are typically present at executions in order to pronounce death.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft refuted claims from numerous organizations concerned with social justice that the death penalty is enforced in an arbitrary and capricious manner (which would make it unconstitutional). Executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and assistant professor at the New York University School of Law Bryan Stevenson countered: “Attorney General Ashcroft’s claim that there is no racial bias in the federal death penalty is without merit. Nearly three-quarters of the people for whom the federal government has authorized execution are black or brown, while the majority of people eligible for such authorization are white. Ashcroft totally ignores the fact that most racial bias can be found by looking at the race of the victim — for example, an African American convicted of killing a white person is much more likely to be executed than one convicted of killing another African American.” Other opponents of the death penalty point to the fact that the percentage of inmates actually executed out of those eligible for execution are extraordinarily inconsistent across geographic areas of the U.S. Ashcroft’s response was something along the lines of needing to execute more people all across the country so that other states could catch up with Florida and Texas and the like, especially more white people. Then everything would be fine.
*sigh*
