Reform Capital Punishment
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Dylan Lister
“He does not know that sickening thirst that sands one’s throat, before, the hangman with his gardener’s gloves slips through the padded door, and binds one with three leathern thongs that the throat may thirst no more.”
He does not know that sickening thirst that sands one's throat, before, the hangman with his gardener's gloves slips through the padded door, and binds one with three leathern thongs that the throat may thirst no more. -Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The sad tale of George Stinney Jr. His trial had been a joke. It lasted less than two hours in total, and the jury's deliberation lasted no more than ten minutes. In his final minutes, his eyes reportedly filled with tears as the executioner lifted the black sack over his head and down his neck. His hands and feet were restrained, and the Executioner was given the order to commence. George Stinney Jr. was only 14 at the time of his death and became the youngest person to ever be executed in the United States.
This was not the only case of wrongful execution in the US. In 1939, Joe Arridy, a mentally disabled man, was executed by gas chamber after giving a false confession to murdering a teenage girl. In May of 1990, Jesse Tafero was convicted of murder and executed by the electric chair in the state of Florida for the murder of a highway patrol officer and a Canadian constable. His conviction was overturned in 1992 after an analysis of the crime scene indicated an unidentified person had committed the murders. Tafero was not only wrongly convicted and executed, but his electric chair had malfunctioned three times. Horrifically, Tafero's head caught on fire. His scalp was burned, and his face was mutilated beyond recognition.
These are only just examples in the United States. In Russia in 1983, Aleksandr Kravchenko was executed for the murder of nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova. Her killer would later be identified as Andrei Chikatilo, otherwise known as the Red Ripper. Derek Bentley, Mahmood Hussein Mattan, and Timothy Evans, all of British citizenship, were executed for several different murders and posthumously exonerated after new evidence arose. Chiang Kuo-Ching was tortured into giving false rape and murder confessions and was not pardoned until 13 years after his execution in 2011.
Wrongful executions are not the only problem with the death penalty. The death penalty methods themselves are also inhumane. For example, on August 10, 1982, Frank Coppola was executed by electrocution. Although no one witnessed or reported on the execution and no details were ever released by the Virginia Department of Corrections, a lawyer present at the execution stated that it took multiple minute-long jolts of electricity to kill him. The second jolt produced the smell of burning skin and she reported several officers vomiting. Coppola’s head and leg caught on fire. Smoke filled the room from floor to ceiling.
On May 3, 1995, Emmitt Foster was executed by lethal injection. Several minutes after the lethal chemicals began to flow into his arm, the execution was halted when the chemicals stopped circulating. Foster proceeded to struggle to breathe, gasping and convulsing, the blinds were drawn so the witnesses could not view the scene. Death was not pronounced until thirty minutes after the execution began, and three minutes later the blinds were reopened so the witnesses could view the body. The problem was caused by the tightness of the leather straps that bound Foster to the execution gurney; it was so tight that the flow of chemicals into the veins was restricted. On February 3, 2016, Brandon Jones was sentenced to die by lethal injection. After spending 24 minutes trying to insert an IV into Jones’ left arm, the executioners spent another 8 minutes trying to insert it in his right arm; when they faced another failure they again attempted to insert it in his defunct left arm. They then asked a doctor to violate several codes of medical ethics for assistance, and he spent 13 minutes inserting and stitching the IV near Jones’ appendage. Just minutes later, Jones’ eyes popped open.
Even as recently as 2022, there have been numerous botched executions in Alabama, Arizona, and Texas. Nearly 33% of all executions are botched; his horror cannot continue. We must adopt more humane systems of capital punishment, or abandon it altogether. A firing squad has proven to be a more effective, painless way of executing condemned inmates, with a 0% fail rate. This is also instantaneous, painless, and cheap. Most people don't realize that one execution by lethal injection can cost up to 2.3 million dollars, whereas an execution by firing squad can cost as little as 15,000 dollars. The last man to be executed by firing squad, Ronnie Lee Gardner, specifically chose this method because he knew it would cause the least amount of suffering. In Japan, prisoners condemned to die have two doors opened, one to their cell and the other to the execution room. There are no guards to escort them, and at the last moment in their life, they have control over their death. The primitive Hammurabian ideas of an eye for an eye no longer fit the constraints of society, so why should they fit our prison system? You are the future. You will have the power to change these things. Reform capital punishment.
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