The American way of death

originally published: 17th September 2009
all credits: Times Online

America is the only big democracy — apart, occasionally, from Japan — that still carries out capital punishment. The botched attempted execution in Ohio this week of a murderer should prompt America to join the rest of the developed world in consigning judicial killing to history.

There is inadequate evidence that it acts as a deterrent, it ignores the risk of miscarriages of justice and allows no room for repentance or correction. But above all it is a barbarity that stains civilised society.

There is no question but that the crime committed by Romell Broom was vile. He was sentenced to die for the rape and murder in 1984 of a 14-year-old girl. But his execution on Tuesday was halted when technicians failed, after a two-hour-long search, to find a vein sturdy enough to deliver the three-drug lethal injection.

A one-week reprieve granted by the Governor of Ohio may well be extended indefinitely, partly because it is half a century since any inmate was subjected to more than one execution, and partly because some justices of the US Supreme Court have now begun to wonder if botched lethal injections might not violate the eighth amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment”.

Last year the court upheld the use of lethal injections. But Justice John Paul Stevens, while concurring, said that imposing the death penalty represented “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes”. Other justices are believed to share this view.

When Texas became the first US state to introduce lethal injections in 1982, they were thought more humane than the electric chair, gas or hanging. It is time that they went the same way.

Posted by Larry Fedja on 17/09/2009. Filed under Breaking News & Digests,Capital Punishment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry