The American way of death


A botched execution in Ohio should quicken the end of capital punishment
America is the only big democracy — apart, occasionally, from Japan — 
that still carries out capital punishment. The botched attempted 
execution in Ohio this week of a murderer should prompt America to 
join the rest of the developed world in consigning judicial killing 
to history. There is inadequate evidence that it acts as a deterrent, 
it ignores the risk of miscarriages of justice and allows no room for 
repentance or correction. But above all it is a barbarity that stains 
civilised society.

There is no question but that the crime committed by Romell Broom was 
vile. He was sentenced to die for the rape and murder in 1984 of a 14-
year-old girl. But his execution on Tuesday was halted when 
technicians failed, after a two-hour-long search, to find a vein 
sturdy enough to deliver the three-drug lethal injection.

A one-week reprieve granted by the Governor of Ohio may well be 
extended indefinitely, partly because it is half a century since any 
inmate was subjected to more than one execution, and partly because 
some justices of the US Supreme Court have now begun to wonder if 
botched lethal injections might not violate the eighth amendment ban 
on “cruel and unusual punishment”. Last year the court upheld the use 
of lethal injections. But Justice John Paul Stevens, while 
concurring, said that imposing the death penalty represented “the 
pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal 
contributions to any discernible social or public purposes”. Other 
justices are believed to share this view.

When Texas became the first US state to introduce lethal injections 
in 1982, they were thought more humane than the electric chair, gas 
or hanging. It is time that they went the same way.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/
article6837546.ece