Yesterday, Utah became the first state to bring back execution by firing squad. Once a common method of state execution, firing squads gave way to electrocution during the early 20th century, which in turn gave way to lethal injections later in the century.
However, some of the chemicals crucial to lethal injection are manufactured by European companies, and the European Union bans capital punishment. These companies have stopped selling relevant drugs to state governments in the United States. Half-baked efforts to find substitutes have led to a series of gruesome, botched executions. Thus, Utah embraces the firing squad as an alternative.
My own feelings on the death penalty are complicated. In an abstract sense, I don’t actually have a problem with killing someone who intentionally commits a brutal, unjustifiable murder. But at the same time, but I do oppose state executions.
The vagaries of a U.S. justice system, which is plagued by institutional racism, classism, and occasional incompetence, is enough for me to say there should not be a state-administered death penalty. Furthermore, I don’t actually think the state should be in the business of killing its own citizens, even its most reprehensible members.
But if there is going to be a death penalty, then we as a society should confront the violence of it instead of pretending that we’re “civilized.” We shouldn’t celebrate state violence like gladiatorial spectators, but nor should we lie to ourselves about it, like Victorian prudes fabricating an apologia for our supposed righteousness.
The unvarnished truth is that lethal injection is not more “humane” than a firing squad of marksmen. In fact, lethal injection is a slow, drawn out death, and possibly more agonizing than death by firing squad. The combination of drugs slowly paralyze the body’s ability to breath and pump blood, thereby inducing both asphyxiation and cardiac arrest. It takes 10 minutes for the victim to die.
That certainly wouldn’t be my preferred way to go.
A trained firing squad is arguably more humane than lethal injection, as the shots to the heart lead a victim bleeding out in just 2 minutes.
If the dreaded chemical cocktail is more humane, it is only so to the observers of the execution, not the victim of it. An unconscious body strapped to a gurney is a more polite show than a conscious man slumping over after the loud crack of gunfire, blood spurting from bullet holes. And thus, our society’s preference for lethal injection constitutes a sickening hypocrisy, for both opponents and supporters of the death penalty.
Those who support the death penalty should not be allowed to hide behind the politeness of bloodless executions. They should not get to pretend that their quest for ultimate vengeance is anything other than a blood lust.
Execution is the ultimate state violence. A firing squad is a more honest form of that violence than lethal injection. It rightly strips from execution the hypocritical veil of “civilization.”
Meanwhile, some opponents of the death penalty are now spouting rhetoric that reeks of the same hypocrisy. In an effort to use recent developments as a wedge against further executions, some opponents are playing to the big cultural lie that firing squads are somehow more barbaric than lethal injections.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah claims that the state’s new law makes Utah “look backward and backwoods.”
Backwards because what? Guns are so yesterday and high tech chemicals are futuristic? What a disgusting lie. And “backwoods?” That’s nothing more than an effort to shame Utahns by smearing them as less cosmopolitan than New Yorkers and Angelenos. Oh dear, the well-heeled sophisticates of the coasts might look down their noses at us while sipping kombucha and reading The Atlantic.
I get why death penalty opponents would use this kind of language and attempt to tap into these cultural veins. But it’s intellectually dishonest and it insults our intelligence.
Lethal injection is every bit as barbaric as firing squad, if not more so. But 21st century American morés allow us to believe it more civilized because it is relatively bloodless. After all, the evening news tells us that criminals and thugs kill each other with guns, but the righteous and civilized state actors use chemical engineering to induce, what seems to us, a less “violent” death.
It’s a lie, and a repugnant one at that. If Americans are to have executions then they should own them. If vengeance is what you want, then embrace your blood lust, instead of shaming us all with lies about what is humane and civilized.
Updated, March 24:
- According to the Associated Press, organs of firing squad victims can be donated. Organs of lethal injections victims, poisoned by the chemicals, cannot be donated.
- The next man in line for execution in Utah is Ron Lafferty. In 1984 he killed his sister-in-law and her baby daughter. He claimed God directed him to do so because she opposed his pro-polygamy stance.
I don’t add these post-scripts as a way of supporting the death penalty. Again, I oppose it. I offer them merely to flesh out the conversation.