Execution touts retaliation, violence as form of justice
A regrettable event happened last Thursday in Ohio when the state executed 53-year-old inmate Dennis McGuire. Despite a lack of the drug used in lethal injections, Ohio carried out the execution using an untested combination of sedatives and painkillers. In total, it took 26 minutes from the first injection of drugs to the official pronouncement that McGuire was dead — the longest execution in Ohio in 15 years. During those 26 minutes, the inmate “gasped, made snorting sounds and reportedly opened and shut his mouth,” according to the AP report. Essentially, McGuire served as a guinea pig for a state determined to continue executing its criminals.
Thankfully, legislative Democrats are pursuing justice and looking to do away with the death penalty in Ohio. Toledo Democrat Sen. Edna Brown also called for a moratorium on the death penalty. Brown, who has fought for ending the death penalty in the past, hopes to introduce the legislation necessary to abolish capital punishment. Considering Ohio’s history of botched lethal injections, like Joseph Clark’s in 2006 when technicians struggled to find a vein for 22 minutes,the sooner this legislation is enacted the better.
McGuire sat on death row for 24 years after being convicted of raping, choking and stabbing a 22-year-old woman. His execution was the first in the United States using a prototypical lethal-injection of midazolam, a sedative and hydromorphone, a derivative of morphine.
This event serves to highlight the need for judicial reform in the U.S. At the very least, states should halt lethal injections until they can come up with a formula that works faster and does not cause unnecessary suffering. Reforming the practice should only be a stopgap measure however, with the ultimate goal of full repeal of the death penalty. The motive for revenge behind the death penalty makes it a form of cruel and unusual punishment, a violation of the Constitution’s 8th Amendment. In addition, the rationale for it is based on assumptions that don’t add up. For instance, supporters claim that retaining the death penalty scares would-be criminals from killing, however many of them are unafraid of death, meaning that the widely touted deterrent effect is useless.
Those clamoring for the execution of a criminal are reducing themselves to a lower level by calling for retaliation. The most reasonable way to handle those who commit horrific crimes is to sentence them to life in prison. With life in prison, they are kept safely away from the public, without condoning violence by treating them the same way they treated their victims.