Barbarism in Alabama
I am opposed to the death penalty in any shape or form for any reason, but this looks like the most utterly disgusting and inhumane way of killing someone. The process took 22 minutes and according to one eyewitness report “Smith writhed and convulsed on the gurney. He took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head.”
Regardless of the crime he committed, nobody deserves this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/25/alabama-executes-kenneth-smith-nitrogen-gas?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3V1LI52Pi69cugjq7RYZyS8XX2M1h9gsV2rjnT6VQHVlrxH3wszIUIRLI_aem_Aax9uVV1mK1Es70OICTuoGAtm6UF4DXtVGTQEwh38Uw5VQiTXxYQNdqy_FnM0Srb-cRNX6xxzR44zhSo-545G4td#Echobox=1706252613
Regardless of the crime he committed, nobody deserves this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/25/alabama-executes-kenneth-smith-nitrogen-gas?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3V1LI52Pi69cugjq7RYZyS8XX2M1h9gsV2rjnT6VQHVlrxH3wszIUIRLI_aem_Aax9uVV1mK1Es70OICTuoGAtm6UF4DXtVGTQEwh38Uw5VQiTXxYQNdqy_FnM0Srb-cRNX6xxzR44zhSo-545G4td#Echobox=1706252613
Comments
Four independent UN monitors asked the US govt to call this off. Nitrogen hypoxia is an experimental execution technique in violation of the international ban on torture. The technique has never been used before in an execution.
What @Arethosemyfeet said. I don't understand why there is not more opposition to the death penalty in the US. A number of those executed by the State before 1994 in South Africa were later shown through DNA tests to have been innocent.
Irrespective of that, everything else about this case also disgusts me.
UK Shipmates might recall a news report which quoted an anonymous voter (in 30p Lee Anderson's constituency) who thought execution was too quick, and that prisoners should be tortured on a weekly basis instead.
Someone in the same constituency - maybe it was the same voter - thinks that migrant boats in the Channel should be stopped by the use of minefields...
Barbarians are always with us, and sometimes, alas! in a position where they can legislate their cruelty and barbarity.
DNA evidence shows that at least 196 innocent people have been executed in the US since 1973.
Source: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence
But American supporters of the death penalty think it is morally justified, despite the concerns some of them hold about executing innocent people.
Source: Pew Research poll, 2021 -
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/02/most-americans-favor-the-death-penalty-despite-concerns-about-its-administration/
If you would like to understand the thinking behind support of the death penalty, I suggest looking at the write-up of that poll at the link and alongside it considering the morality of conservative Christianity.
As to your list, @Enoch, and @Arethosemyfeet's point, I don't disagree (except I don't think the state is pandering to some imaginary constituency for torture) - but consider the idea that if there were no opposition to the death penalty in the US, the appeals process wouldn't drag out so long, states would just be able to shoot or hang people, and if states wanted to employ less painful and messy methods, pharmaceutical companies would be willing to sell them the drugs used in lethal injections The reason for all this mess is that the US is, state by state, lurching in the direction of abolishing the death penalty.
Any support for this?
Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah authorize the use of a firing squad when lethal injection isn't possible, either because the drugs aren't available or it has been prohibited by federal law.
But, if they have to kill people then why on earth couldn't they give them an anaesthetic first?
It’s sadly a common human trait.
Oh well, back to my latest 'Book of Hours' ....
I think in this case it might be appropriate. Public executions by methods designed to cause maximum suffering and torture were decidedly part of mediaeval practice. Caricatures of the mediaeval period are unhelpful but so is revisionist sanitisation.
"Barbaric" isn't exactly fair to Barbarians (non-Greeks).
I was wondering about support for the idea that Alabama officials employed nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method because they wish to cater to their constituents' appetite for cruelty.
I thought Trump's methods often involve a kind of theatre of cruelty. I remember him mocking a disabled journalist, I guess his fans like it.
IMHO support for the death penalty by people identifying as Christian is particularly bizarre: Am I my brother's keeper? is not just some random quote but an instruction that we should regard it as a duty to act as such - and that rules out murder, with or without a threadbare cloak of judicial approval.
As I understand it, the theory was that suffocating in a nitrogen atmosphere should be relatively quick and painless. There is reasonable theory, and a certain amount of circumstantial evidence to do with farm workers suffocating in fruit storage silos, to suggest that this should have been true.
I would not have assumed that suffocating with a mask feeding you nitrogen strapped to your face would be the same. Were I to be designing a "painless" way to die from asphyxia in nitrogen, I'd probably start by thinking about a sealed box something like one of those Japanese capsule style hotels, put the person in there with a good book, and let the nitrogen flow.
It is certainly an article of faith amongst those who work with large quantities of nitrogen (and so in a position where nitrogen asphyxia is a safety risk that needs to be considered) that you don't notice that you're breathing pure nitrogen, which is what makes it so dangerous.
If the execution of prisoners was instantaneous, painless or done while the person was heavily sedated or unconscious, it would be much better for the person being executed. It would be less traumatic for the prisoner's family watching, easier for the executioners and other witnesses. But would that make the death penalty a better or more acceptable thing?
Originally, the public spectacle of criminals being tortured and and then killed in public was intended to serve as a deterrent, to frighten the crowds watching so that they would not be tempted to commit crimes. It instilled fear about the power of the State to control anti-social behaviour. There was no need for prisons except as holding places until the turure and execution could be performed. Torture and death as public entertainment and a moral lesson, like reality TV.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault looks back at the penal system in Europe as emerging from the secret interrogation and confessions extracted under torture by the Inquisition, or by the military during war to force spies to tell secrets and name names. The Inquisition was concerned with heresy and devil worship. If Catholics were in league with the devil or possessed by the devil, torture and confession would be followed by exorcism and a return to Christian conscience for the penitent. If heretics or spies confessed under the agony of prolonged torture, they would be granted the merciful kindness of death. Their suffering would not be continued once they admitted to their torturers the nature of their wrongs. They could receive absolution from a priest and then be put to death. Submission was the important step that ended the torture.
Submission not humanitarian compassion was what lay behind the creation of long-term imprisonment. Prisons ensured the criminal or dissident did not become a martyr which would shift the locus of blame to the State or the executioners. It was expensive and an inconvenience to keep criminals alive in mass prisons and there was the risk of escapes or riots. Submission by the prisoners was ensured by surveillance and isolation, that those not behaving were constantly watched or placed in solitary. Solitary confinement was understood to be form of torture. This constant surveillance and isolation was also done in the treatment of 'madness', the locked wards and padded cells and restraints of the lunatic asylum. To be replaced by sedation in more modern psychiatric wards, just as psychotropic medication is now used to subdue long-term prisoners incarcerated by the State.
Much of what happens in the penal system is secret (not unlike military torture of 'terrorists' in black sites operated by the CIA) and never made public. It is not secret in that fear of what might happen to dissidents under interrogation is used to ensure submission and obedience in those perceived as a threat to the State. When the nature of certain tortures or interrogation techniques are 'leaked' and made public, the locus of public blame shifts to the military or the prison as an excess of force or as inhumane. The need for ongoing processes of torture or death to ensure the safety and stability of the society is not questioned in itself. The debate instead looks at who might be 'innocent' and who might be 'guilty' or whether punishments and confessions under duress reveal cruelty in the public at large. If the techniques of punishment are not voyeuristic or likely to incite cruelty in captors or the general public, the controversy is forgotten. Punishment, surveillance, torture and secrecy are as necessary in the modern democratic State as in the dictatorship.
In the country area where I live there are two kinds of institution hidden from public sight, away down forbidden and gated roads, invisible to anyone who has no business there. The one is a network of maximum security prisons run by carceral companies from the UK and the other are a number of abattoirs for the humane processing or mass deaths of livestock in a farming area.
Touche! Nice one.
If the state can't execute someone within, say, six months, then
- however heinous the crime,
- whatever the reason for the delay, and
- irrespective of the fact that this would inevitably lead to lawyers spinning out the appeal process,
the state should forfeit that right to do so. The sentence should automatically convert itself to imprisonment.I'm going to support @Ruth's 'take' on this issue. As I understand it, the reason prisoners spend so long on Death Row as it were is precisely for the reason she identifies. Various US states are gradually moving away from the death penalty with a consequential rise in appeals and legal wrangling.
That's a by-product of the direction of travel.
An unfortunate one as it leads to people living in limbo until the time comes when they are finally executed.
Although if appeals are successful...
I don't in any way approve of the death penalty nor the way it was administered in this instance.
But neither do I think it was adopted purely to satisfy some kind of bloodlust or cruel streak among the people of Alabama, who I have no reason to suppose are any more cruel than anyone else in the US or elsewhere.
Are we not in danger of stereotyping people in the Southern States? 'They're all a bunch of red-necks and hill-billies. What do you expect?'
Sure, Trump is cruel and whips up a kind of mob-mentality but is he really that directly involved with decisions taken by the State of Alabama and the US Supreme Court? He's no longer President (at least not for the time being - yikes!) so why aren't we blaming the current incumbent of the Oval Office? Why didn't Biden intervene? Or doesn't his authority stretch to intervening with the judicial process?
I have no idea why the State of Alabama chose this particularly unpleasant mode of execution but I suspect it wasn't to satisfy the bloodlust of an angry lynch-mob at the gates of the city-hall.
Ruth's on the ground, insofar as she's in the same country but not the same state. Most of us appear to be somewhere else, over the Atlantic or in the Southern Hemisphere.
That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't comment, but it does mean that Ruth is more likely to have insights into how the process works.
The problem with the six-month limit is that it generally takes more than six months before the first appeal can even be submitted, let alone adjudicated. I am told it takes about three years for the appeals process to play out.
Nevertheless, once it is all said and done, it is much cheaper to incarcerate a convicted murder for life than it is to execute him/her.
Locally, we have a case that has yet gone to trial. In November 2022, four college students were stabbed to death. Law enforcement quickly caught the accused, but since then there has been court delay after court delay. This past week the defense attorney asked for yet another delay because she has yet to wade through the many terabytes of information that was turned over by the prosecution. There is a potential of over 400 witnesses. and it takes time to interview them. On top of that she will have to line up expert witnesses for her defense. The prosecuting attorney wants the trial to start this summer. The defense attorney is asking that the trial be set for the summer of 2025.
Did I say, the accused is using a public defender, meaning the state is paying for both the prosecution and defense? This may end up the most expensive trial in that state's history.
Needless to say, once it goes to trial, which can last up to three months by all estimates, there will be an innumerable number of appeals once the case is decided. The defense is already challenging the instructions that the grand jury was given.
So much for a speedy trial. Think of the pain the victims' families are continuing to go through. At the last hearing the families attended, they all left in tears.
I am not in favor of capital punishment. If convicted, putting the accused to death will not bring the victims back. The families just want the process of the trial completed at this point.
Sure, but it also engendered a lot of anti-social behavior, which was the main reason cited for ending the practice of public executions in the US. Crowds got very out of hand. That's the thing about violence - it's hard to contain. We can hide the violence of carceral systems, but then violence just spreads in society in different ways. People may be less aware of it, but it's still there. (A lot more to think about in your post; perhaps in Purgatory after people's outrage has died down or moved on to another target.)
Thanks for your comments. Alabama officials didn't expect it to be horrible. (Nitrogen is sometimes used in physician-assisted suicide; the suicide pod in Switzerland is a container that is flooded with nitrogen. The fuck-up in Alabama seems to be using a mask to administer nitrogen.) The minister who was present for the now deceased prisoner said they were visibly surprised at what happened. What's troubling now is that they are now saying it all went fine.
Apparently, on the strength of the experience of some industrial accidents, it was believed that nitrogen asphyxiation would be painless.
Now the process is mechanised, and those who administer it can go home and sleep at nights (I assume) on the assumption that it was not they, but some impersonal process, killed the subject.
I can see and understand why people have different views on whether the death penalty should be used or abolished. I can see and understand that people have strong views either way, and can imagine myself into their shoes.
What I cannot see, and cannot see the legitimacy of any alternative view on, ethically or emotionally, is how anyone can regard it as anything other than beyond the pale to let a legal system get itself into a position where a convict can be kept in uncertainty on death row, 'will they - won't they?' for 34 years and then executed. That is not a just, moral or civilised way for any state to conduct itself. In that, whatever you might say, I don't think I'm being either ignorant or arrogant.
It really puzzles me that I get the impression that that doesn't seem to be something that opponents of the death penalty and those pursuing appeals add to their arguments.
If I had to be executed, I'd want it to be quick. No nitrogen, no lethal injections, no electrocution, just shoot me in the head or something.
That's interesting on crowd psychology (the last US public execution being Rainey Bethea in 1936) and the fear of mob violence. I'm wondering if there's an analogy between the US history associated with lynching (vigilante violence and public hanging) and the refusal of post-colonial governments in Africa to allow the death penalty given that the majority of those put to death had been Black, and many of them convicted on political grounds (treason).
The controversy around the case of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be executed for murder in 1955, played a role in the abolition of the death penalty there. Her hangman Albert Pierrepoint (mentioned above by @Firenze) revealed in 1974 that he had never believed that hanging was a deterrent. He came from a family of executioners and had time through a very long career to develop his fast and efficient methods of humane killing by noose, had been dismayed by the suffering at Nuremberg when war criminals were ineptly hung.
When executioners come forward to speak about the PTSD, or suicidal ideation experienced by those administering death (as in South Carolina, 2021), that breaks the anonymity and secrecy around how traumatic these deaths are in reality and how often things go wrong.
You are indeed both ignorant and arrogant. Read up on the history of the death penalty in the US and learn how we got to this position before you opine about it. No one is arguing for the current system. Proponents of the death penalty think the process should not be drawn out for years. You'd know that if you'd made any effort to educate yourself about them and their views.
You could at least Google this. Opponents of the death penalty in the US do bring it up. The problem with making it a more prominent part of the arguments against executing people is that the counter-argument is to simply execute people faster, not do away with the death penalty.
Why do you presume to make assumptions? Many of them are severely traumatized. Click the link @MaryLouise gave.
And that's it for me on this thread. Have fun exercising your emotions about how morally superior you are.
Well, let's look at the typical timescales involved in such a case. It probably takes 3-4 years for a case to come to trial, assuming that the suspect is caught quickly. A week or so for the trial, then wait 3 months for a sentencing hearing. And then start the appeals process.
You might be interested in this from 2007: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/217555.pdf which looked at the time between arrest and execution in death penalty cases, and the causes of the delay. Through the 1990s and first half of the 2000s, those sentenced to death spent an average of more than a decade on death row. The paper goes in to some detail analyzing the length of time spent in each part of the process.
Each generation has to some extent interpret Christian morality for that generation. For some the pace will be too slow for some too quick. Each side is probably able to argue from a biblical stand point in its own favour. The New Testament is not really prescriptive on this. We need to judge for ourselves.
The death penalty looks incompatible with the Christian emphasis on forgiveness and love of enemies. I suppose how one might go about explaining why this wasn't recognised and is now depends on whether one is doing sociology or intellectual history.
And yet they did for the vast majority of Christianity's history. It's there in the 39 Articles. Historically, Christian opposition to the death penalty is an aberration, or at least an innovation.
Of course, this is also true of the various Dead Horses.
It doesn't help that the OT Law, allegedly handed directly to Moses from God, contains loads of capital crimes.
It's certainly true that capital punishment seems contrary to the themes of Christianity such as forgiveness, redemption and love for enemies, and that would be my position, but we have to deal with the fact this hasn't been the case for most of the previous 2000 years.
families.
I think historically most Christian societies have regarded many gospel precepts as we regard the injunction to sell all your goods and give the money to the poor: indicative of a certain ideal but only intended as a practical course of action for a small minority who are seeking perfection.
If you take that line, how do you imagine any Christian can take any part in the justice system at all?
It would be good if there were some attempt at rehabilitation!
There are, but you seem to be taking a peculiarly literal approach to scripture if you're reading "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" as a prohibition on being an executioner.
I do not believe that judicial killing is necessarily murder any more than lethal fighting in wartime is. But we may simply have to disagree on this matter.