slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
No matter what your stance is on the death penalty, it’s hard to work up much sympathy for the man executed by the state of Missouri this morning. Joseph Paul Franklin was, without exaggeration, a white supremacist serial killer. His preferred targets were Jews, blacks, and anyone connected to interracial couples. During a three-year spree beginning in 1977, he murdered at least seven people, may have killed 15 more, and wounded civil rights leaders Vernon Jordan and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt for good measure. His victims include a father of three leaving a bar mitzvah, and two teenage African American boys.
But the most striking thing about Franklin’s case isn’t why he was killed, but how. He was among the first prisoners in America’s history to be executed by lethal injection using only a single drug—the sedative pentobarbital. Ever since lethal injection was introduced in the 1970s, virtually every state has used a combination of three drugs: one to put the inmate to sleep, the next to paralyze his muscles, and the last to stop his heart. That protocol has come under withering fire in recent years, however, from activists and medical professionals citing a growing body of evidence that indicates the process isn’t always as painless as it looks; in many cases, in fact, the prisoner may remain conscious but paralyzed, unable to scream or thrash, as her heart is slowly squeezed to a stop. One result is that chemical companies have stopped selling those drugs to prisons. Hence Missouri’s switch. (Other states are trying different drugs for their own executions.)
But there’s something absurd about this whole debate. Here’s the thing: We—the American body politic—have decided we are going to commit the ultimate act of violence against condemned inmates. That is, we are going to kill them. And yet, having made that decision, it’s as though we are so conflicted about it that we have to tie ourselves in knots trying to carry out this most heinous of acts nicely. We have phased out hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber in an attempt to find a way to kill a man or woman in an inoffensive way. And now we’re trying to find just the right chemical to shoot into a man’s bloodstream to end his life as palatably as possible.
cont at
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/pol...t-condemned-inmates-head-death-penalty-70385/
But the most striking thing about Franklin’s case isn’t why he was killed, but how. He was among the first prisoners in America’s history to be executed by lethal injection using only a single drug—the sedative pentobarbital. Ever since lethal injection was introduced in the 1970s, virtually every state has used a combination of three drugs: one to put the inmate to sleep, the next to paralyze his muscles, and the last to stop his heart. That protocol has come under withering fire in recent years, however, from activists and medical professionals citing a growing body of evidence that indicates the process isn’t always as painless as it looks; in many cases, in fact, the prisoner may remain conscious but paralyzed, unable to scream or thrash, as her heart is slowly squeezed to a stop. One result is that chemical companies have stopped selling those drugs to prisons. Hence Missouri’s switch. (Other states are trying different drugs for their own executions.)
But there’s something absurd about this whole debate. Here’s the thing: We—the American body politic—have decided we are going to commit the ultimate act of violence against condemned inmates. That is, we are going to kill them. And yet, having made that decision, it’s as though we are so conflicted about it that we have to tie ourselves in knots trying to carry out this most heinous of acts nicely. We have phased out hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber in an attempt to find a way to kill a man or woman in an inoffensive way. And now we’re trying to find just the right chemical to shoot into a man’s bloodstream to end his life as palatably as possible.
cont at
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/pol...t-condemned-inmates-head-death-penalty-70385/
