Execution as a Game of Would You Rather?

Execution as a Game of Would You Rather? An Argumentative Essay By Tristen Judson 1ST PLACE TIED ARGUMENT At times like this I remembered a story Maman used to tell me about my father. I never knew him. Maybe the only thing I did know about that man was the story Maman would tell me back then: he d gone to watch a murderer be executed. Just the thought of going had made him sick to his stomach. But he went anyway, and when he came back he spent half the morning throwing up. I remember feeling a little disgusted by him at the time. But now I understood, it was perfectly normal. How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in? Albert Camus, The Stranger 448 Waiting for his walk to the guillotine in a cement jail cell, Camus s condemned protagonist, Mersault, recalls a story of his father authenticating an execution, and the corporeal protestations that followed his witness of France s national razor in action. The guillotine is outdated and saturated with terror from the French Revolution, guaranteed to disturb the modern man. However, Camus s allegorical depiction of capital punishment still moved me to wonder: does the United States partake in executions that would make one (perhaps metaphorically) vomit all morning? While capital punishment is fading internationally, the United States continues to execute prisoners via lethal injection. Lethal injection is the most widely used execution method as the surgical nature of the procedure denotes a sense of security from a medical perspective, therefore establishing lethal injection as a humane advancement in the business of state killing. But exactly how ethical can capital punishment be? While executions were once torturous public displays, capital punishment appears to have evolved as technological advancements have dated previous methods. Torture is now unthinkable for most people, hanging and electrocution deemed barbaric. In researching the evolution of killing technologies, the motives of the state reveal themselves as pro-execution: to continue capital punishment as a practice, the state needed to seek methods that appeased society s evolving standards of decency, as worded by the Supreme Court in defending capital punishment against the 8th Amendment s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Although lethal injection, in theory, was an attempt to relieve the suffering of those condemned, prisons are ill-equipped to administer lethal injection. The clean and humane portrayal of lethal injection relies on faulty medicinal procedures that bring that inevitable queasy feeling in your stomach that make you throw up all morning. In revealing the medical nature of lethal injection to

Execution as a Game of Would You Rather? Tristen Judson be a façade that obscures its ugly reality, lethal injection digresses from a highly medicalized procedure to one plagued with error. The medicalization of pain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries initiated a steady search for execution methods that would satisfy the rising humanitarian concerns of the era. The medical discovery of anesthesia in 1846 revealed pain to be an aversive effect occasioned by changes in various etiological mechanisms, as suggested by Whitman College Professor of Politics and Leadership, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (137). This new understanding of pain as a neurological response to a physical malady enabled modern medicine to treat pain by determining its source, typically disease or injury, and removing the cause. Before anesthesia medicalized the conception of pain, it was thought to be a manifestation of some disorder or malady stitched into the very seams of the cosmos, thereby personifying pain as an individual experience (Kaufman-Osborn 137). Medicine reversed this perception as universal treatments alleviated pain equally, displaying pain to be a human trait common to all. Professor of Law and Sidney Reitman Scholar, Alan Hyde, identified the impact of this new understanding as a common pattern in which the humanistic, sentimentalized body in pain emerges as a site of empathy and identification (9). The hangman s noose, responsible for dangling feces-covered bodies with swollen faces, misplaced eyes, and protruding tongues, would no longer do ( Descriptions of Execution Methods ). Electrocution replaced hanging in 1890 as the most widely-used execution method, but soon found its place as an artifact of the State. Consider United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan s depiction of the electric chair as nothing less than the contemporary technological equivalent of burning people at the stake (Brennan qtd. Martinez et al. 317). Like hanging and electrocution, execution by lethal gas and firing squad were temporary experiments, ultimately fading from use due to the physical nature of death from gassing and bullet wounds ( Descriptions of Execution Methods ). Although each innovation in execution methods outdated the last, hanging, electrocution, firing squad, and lethal gas were all too obvious in killing. The physicality of pain present in these methods was simply incompatible with an empathizing society, continuing the search for a gentler means of killing. Lethal injection emerged as a seemingly humane execution method by confining death to the interior of the body through the use of medicine. David Waisel, specialist in Anesthesiology Preoperative and Pain Medicine at Boston Children s Hospital, explains the three-drug protocol of lethal injection as being based on what was considered an early, normal induction of anesthesia (3). The first drug is an anesthetic, known as thiopental, sodium thiopental, or pentothal. The objective of this chemical is to subdue the condemned into a state of unconsciousness to eliminate any suffering caused by the following two drugs: pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Pancuronium bromide is used to paralyze the muscles, most notably the diaphragm, and potassium chloride stops the heart. (Waisel et al. 3). As testimony to the changing ethics of society, the procedure of lethal injection reflects an attempt to eliminate pain with a surgical procedure. As proposed, lethal injection would fulfill the ultimate grave objective of capital punishment while leaving only a needle mark from the site of intravenous 1 449

access. This lack of physical mutilation from a perfectly executed procedure would distinguish lethal injection from the violence of execution methods preceding it, making its development appear especially humane against the gallows, electric chair, firing squad, and gas chamber. However, the reality of lethal injection is vastly different from an innocent medical procedure. Lethal injection is often carried out by inexperienced prison staff, opposed to trained physicians, diminishing the medical certainty of the three-drug protocol. Robert Truog, Professor of Medical Ethics and Anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, reflects on medical schooling at a roundtable discussion of lethal injection to address executional error: I think the issue, here, is that people go to school for a long time and do years of training in order to be able to do this well (6). Although lethal injection was designed to mimic a surgical procedure, physicians have mostly left the field of capital punishment as major medical societies such as the American Medical Association and American Society of Anesthesiology have expressed physician participation in executions to be a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath (Curfman et al. 404). As a result, untrained prison personnel are required to administer lethal injection, frequently infiltrating intravenous lines with misplaced or repeated IV insertion attempts, providing inadequate anesthesia, and mishandling drugs (Truog 7 8). Because the use of an anesthetic agent is the defining feature of lethal injection s painlessness, an inability of prison staff to correctly administer this first drug would result in consciousness while pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride induce death by asphyxiation and heart failure. Although appearing minor in contrast to the aforementioned suffering by suffocation and cardiac arrest, failure to properly achieve intravenous access and/or repeated attempts to achieve intravenous access results in unnecessary pain. As lethal injection was developed to eliminate pain by using medical technology, botched executions resulting from incompetent executioners compromise this attempt. The false portrayal of lethal injection as a medical procedure is compounded by the appearance of serenity during the dying process through the use of pancuronium bromide. As previously stated, pancuronium bromide is used on the condemned to paralyze all voluntary muscles, including the muscles of the diaphragm, resulting in asphyxiation. Jürgen Martschukat, Professor of North American History at the University of Erfurt, opposes the use of paralyzing agents in lethal injection executions, claiming that today s lethal injection is even worse than premodern executions at the gallows because the potential suffocating agony of a convict is perfidiously masked and remains invisible due to the use of a paralytic medication (254). Should pancuronium bromide revert execution ethics back to those of the hangman s noose, why is it used in the three-drug protocol of lethal injection? Fordham University Professor of Law, Deborah Denno, identifies the State s reasoning for the use of pancuronium as a purely cosmetic measure to eliminate the possibility of jerking or involuntary movements of the condemned (3). Serving no medical purpose, the use of a cosmetic paralytic agent benefits only witnesses and executioners, while exposing inmates to the risk of inexpressible pain. The interest of those viewing lethal injection executions are placed before the interest of the person facing execution, which, when referring back to 450

Execution as a Game of Would You Rather? Tristen Judson lethal injection s conception, is unsurprising. The physical appearance of execution methods proved to be a significant factor in the legality of methods, requiring lethal injection to fulfill only the promise of a visibly pain free death. Pancuronium bromide is therefore reminiscent of the physical hood placed over the heads of the condemned during past executions, but also absorbs the notion of something much more insidious. Since the hood of pancuronium bromide is not visible in itself, it disguises the fact that there is a disguise over the process (Kaufman- Osborn 238), maintaining the serene appearance of lethal injection. Although lethal injection is medical in appearance only, this false medicalization maintains lethal injection s appearance as a humane process, preventing widespread opposition to the current lethal injection protocol. As stated by Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, the state s ability to occlude the suffering caused by this most dramatic manifestation of its monopolization of the means of violence is enhanced by the medicalized representation of pain as an effect caused by physiological injury and localized within the body s invisible confines (143). While public executions were once commonplace, the ethical burden of hosting crowds to witness the systematic killing of a person became too heavy as moral standards for domestic and international law developed and matured. Executions were then relocated to the confines of prisons, granting institutions greater secrecy. Executioners became impersonal bureaucratic officials, while lethal injection allowed for the bodies of those condemned to remain relatively unblemished as opposed to the gruesome remains left by hanging, electrocution, gas chambers, and firing squads. As a result of these actions taken to convey humanitarian ideals, altruistic concern about those facing execution waned (Kaufman-Osborn 144). By portraying lethal injection executions as highly medicalized, the suffering that may be entailed in these cases of capital punishment are viewed as a substantial advancement from previous execution methods, thereby allowing the public to blindly accept lethal injection without acknowledging the excruciating pain possible during an execution. While lethal injection is a significant advancement in execution methods from the decapitation witnessed by Mersault s father, lethal injection ultimately does not fulfill the promises of its medicalized conception. After pain assumed a purely medical description, physical damage to a body being executed was no longer reflective of the humanitarian ideals present in society, so, lethal injection was conceived solely as a means to disguise the violence required to kill by injecting chemicals and relocating death within the secrecy of the body. Lethal injection achieved this goal through a cruelly ironic use of medicine. However, when handling a risky process such as lethal injection, it is only as medicalized as the people administering it. Consequently, the absence of medical personnel in the death chamber sends the ethics of lethal injection back to former times of hanging, firing squad, lethal gas, and electrocution. In researching the faults of lethal injection and the risk of excruciating yet inexpressible pain that inmates are subject to, I am sure that I would rather face the guillotine. 1 451

Works Cited Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Translated by Matthew Ward.Vintage, 1989, pp. 11. Print. Curfman, Gregory D., et al. Physicians and Execution. New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 358, no. 4, 2008, pp. 403 404. Massachusetts Medical Society, nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejme0800032. Denno, Deborah W. Lethal Injection. Britannica Academic, 2012, Encyclopædia Britannica, search.library.vcu.edu/vcu:all_scope:tn_britnica396467. Hyde, Alan. Introduction. Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 3 18. ProQuest ebrary, search.library.vcu.edu/vcu:all_scope:vcu_ ALMA51481579980001101. Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy Vance. Perfect Execution: Abolitionism and the Paradox of Lethal Injection. The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice: The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (1), Ogletree, Jr., Charles J., Sarat, Austin, NYU Press, 2009, pp. 215 251. ProQuest ebrary, search.library.vcu.edu/vcu:all_scope:vcu_ ALMA51415767490001101. Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy Vance. Silencing the Voice of Pain. Law, Meaning, and Violence: From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State, University of Michigan Press, 2009, pp. 135 164, ProQuest ebrary, search.library.vcu.edu/vcu:all_scope:vcu_alma51425044360001101. Martinez, James M., et al. The Future of the Death Penalty. The Levithan s Choice: Capital Punishment in the Twenty-first Century, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 315 320. Google Books, books.google.com/books?id=rojjln_- EU8C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false. Martschukat, Jürgen. No Improvement over Electrocution or Even a Bullet : Lethal Injection and the Meaning of Speed and Reliability in the Modern Execution Process. The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice: The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (1), Ogletree, Jr., Charles J., Sarat, Austin, NYU Press, 2009, pp. 252 280. ProQuest ebrary, search.library.vcu.edu/vcu:all_scope:vcu_ ALMA51415767490001101. 452