Not a week after posting my reflections on the
latest gross cruelty to helpless chickens being slowly smothered to death so
that humans can have cheap meat, sure enough, we moved on to enact cruelty and
suffering on a fellow human. In this particular case, we rationalized our
actions in the name of justice.
Erica Goode, writer for The New York Times
reported the following about the Ohio execution of Dennis B. McGuire, which
took place Thursday morning, January 16th.
"As the lethal
drugs flowed into his veins in the Ohio death chamber, Dennis B. McGuire at
first “went unconscious” and his body was still, his daughter, Amber McGuire,
said Friday.
But a few minutes
later, she said, she was horrified to see her father struggling, his stomach
heaving, a fist clenching.
'He started making
all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s when I covered
my eyes and my ears,' said Ms. McGuire, who watched the execution on Thursday
at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near Lucasville. 'He was
suffering.'
"Mr. McGuire’s execution,
conducted with a new and untested combination of drugs, took about 25 minutes
from the time the drugs were started to the time death was declared."
Dennis McGuire committed the heinous crime of
rape and murder, and the woman he attacked was pregnant. There is no
excuse for his brutality. He should've had to pay for the rest of his
life for his unjustifiable choices and actions.
The family of Joy Stewart, the woman
McGuire probably can relate to the pain and suffering of McGuire's
family. But they don't share their sympathies for McGuire. Goode
paraphrased the Stewart family statement after the execution: "whatever Mr. McGuire’s suffering,
it paled in comparison with what Ms. Stewart went through at the hands of her
killer. 'He is being treated far more humanely than he treated her.'"
The family's
sentiments are certainly understandable. But McGuire’s brutality does not
justify or sanction our own state-sponsored brutality. The United States is the only Western nation
that practices capital punishment in just under ¾ of the 50 states and
Washington D.C. In the last handful of
years, China has executed more individuals, by the thousands, than all of the
rest of the world countries that exercise capital punishment put together, as
the chart below, from Amnesty International, shows:
But please also make
note that the United States is one of the top 10 countries in executing
criminals, and notice the company we keep besides China: Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Sudan…world
countries we in the United States often criticize for their human rights
abuses.
The cause of McGuire’s
suffering during his execution is that Ohio had to scramble to come up with a
new poisonous cocktail by which to kill him.
As Goode points out, the European manufacturers of the chemicals that
previously had made up our humane “lethal injection” combination have banned their
use in state executions.
So a new
combination, never used before, was given to McGuire. And the result? Like the chickens subjected to the latest and
greatest innovative slaughter technique in the food production industry, slowly
smothered in a chemical foam, McGuire was slowly poisoned, apparently
unconscious, while his body tried to breathe.
Goode makes the experimental nature of the execution clear: “It has not been established whether Mr.
McGuire was conscious of pain or whether the drugs that were used were responsible
for his prolonged death.”
In Ohio alone,
according to USA Today, four executions are scheduled in 2014, with one
as early as March. And the state
authorities don’t seem to see a problem with McGuire’s death. Goode reports that one of the state’s
assistant attorneys general, in response to the U.S. Constitution’s ban against
“cruel and unusual punishment,” insisted that such restrictions don’t mean that
executes are “entitled to a pain-free execution.”
I am personally opposed
to capital punishment. Frankly I see
sanctioned state murder as much more representative of who we are as a culture,
as an organized, supposedly humane, even Christian, collective than it is about the the actions of the convicted criminal. And this latest effort to ensure justice
casts “us” in a dark, blood thirsty light that, in reality, has absolutely
nothing to do with true justice in a questionably peace-loving, supposedly civilized society.
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