Scandalous
Clayton Lockett died last week. He was killed by the state of Oklahoma. Ordinarily, this would not be news. Before Lockett, Oklahoma had executed 111 people since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976. In the country as a whole, 1,378 had been put to death during the same period.
What made Lockett’s killing notable was not the scandalous reality that a nation that styles itself as the world’s tutor on human rights still practices a form of punishment that most of its democratic peers and many other countries in the world consider barbaric. What made Lockett’s execution newsworthy was that it did not go down as just another carefully choreographed, efficient, and seemingly humane bureaucratic procedure carried out on a resigned dead man walking.
Instead, Lockett’s execution revealed the raw horror and chaos that lies just beneath the surface of every well-managed state homicide. Unlike other inmates, Lockett refused to go quietly, resisted the guards that took him to the death chamber, and was tasered as a result. Once there, the technician charged with inserting the intravenous line through which the lethal drugs would flow could not find a suitable vein in the usual places and finally placed it in the inmate’s groin. That delayed the start of the execution by 23 minutes. Then, once the execution was underway and about three minutes after the official supervising the action declared Lockett unconscious (unusual, since officials normally speak only after the inmate has been declared dead), something went wrong. An eyewitness described Lockett as having a “violent reaction,” and was quoted as giving the following account:
“First, she saw his foot kick. Then his body bucked, he clenched his jaw and he began rolling his head from side to side, trying to lift his head up, grimacing and clenching his teeth. “He mumbled some things we didn’t understand. The only thing I could make out was when he said ‘man.’
“It looked like he was trying to get up.
“He looked like he was in pain to me. How much pain, nobody knows but him.”
The botched execution and one that was to follow were called off. But it was too late for Lockett who died of a heart attack within the hour.
Investigations into what went wrong are already underway. After all, lethal injection was adopted by almost all states because it was supposed to be more humane than electrocution or the gas chamber. Yet looking for a humane way to kill is a futile and foolhardy exercise. Indeed, the dreaded guillotine was invented and adopted in France as a humane execution method. The only humane alternative is to abolish the death penalty as all the countries of the European Union and many others have done.
In contrast to the EU, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, among other countries, continue to impose the death penalty frequently and unapologetically, as does the United States. To be a member of this club should make Americans recoil and reconsider their support for the death penalty. Yet the United States is not close to ready to do away with capital punishment, which enjoys support from the majority of the population.
The reasons for that are complex. The culture of punishment and retribution has strong roots here — no country incarcerates more people, including demographic giants like India and China. The frontier ethos, slavery and racism, and the deepening class divide all play a role in the popular proclivity for very severe punishment.
Still, while abolition in one fell swoop is not in the cards, several trends provide room for hope. Public support for capital punishment has been eroding fast. In 1996, Americans supported the death penalty by an overwhelming 78 to 18 percent. In 2013, the margin was much less lopsided, 55 to 37 percent. Also, since 2007, the number of states that have abolished the death penalty has grown from 12 to 18. The number of executions has dropped from an average of 71 per year from 1997-2005, to 44 a year from 2006-2013. And more and more companies are refusing to provide drugs for use in lethal injections, forcing states to improvise, which may have been a factor in the Oklahoma debacle.
Looking at the issue from a broader perspective, while the United States takes pride in its exceptionalism, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” is a principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. As long as the United States practices the death penalty, its respect for world public opinion will be very much in doubt.
It is probably futile to expect American politicians, the vast majority of whom are terrified to be seen as “soft” on the death penalty, to lead the way toward abolition until and unless public support drops further. But there are other sectors in American society that might do more to change the climate of opinion.
In Europe, countries such as France and England still practiced the death penalty as late as the 1950s. In 1957, two major intellectuals began a campaign against capital punishment in Europe. Albert Camus (“Reflections on the Guillotine”) and Arthur Koestler (“Reflections on the Hanging Tree”) published a joint volume laying out devastating critiques of capital punishment as it was actually practiced, including its cruelty and its ineffectiveness as a deterrent.
While Americans don’t regard intellectuals as highly as do Europeans, a coalition of writers, artists, actors, and celebrities including rock stars might help speed the trend away from capital punishment. To many, it might seem like a tough cause to embrace given the horrible crimes committed by people like Clayton Lockett. Yet ultimately it’s not about Clayton Lockett but about who we are as a people. When we kill someone with more cruelty than we slaughter a pig, we are not honoring the victims but debasing ourselves.
