In 1791, when the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, capital punishment was widely accepted and practiced, sometimes even for offences we would find petty.
Even though tearing someone’s limbs apart by horses seems repulsively surreal today, modern methods of execution aren’t always much less barbaric.
In America, we still use the electric chair, gas chamber and even a firing squad on occasion.
But in general, procedural standards for the death penalty have certainly come a long way. It almost seems a bit absurd at times, the extent to which some states go in order to make execution more comfortable for the condemned man or woman.
According to The Arizona Republic, like many states that utilize lethal injection to carry out capital punishment, Arizona uses three drugs — sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
Arizona’s three-drug protocol has been the subject of recent criticism, after speculation that the thiopental and pancuronium bromide, imported from England, were intended for use on animals, not humans.
Charles Ryan, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, says that the drugs are fine and blames the confusion on mislabeled FDA and U.S. Customs documents, The Republic reported.
It does seem odd, though, that instead of focusing on the fact that the government is killing someone, we are focusing on how it will do it.
How much can it really matter when the end result is still the same — death?
A series of Supreme Court cases from the ‘60s and ‘70s challenged the constitutional legitimacy of capital punishment. Most argue that it violates the Eight Amendment.
The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
It is just another matter of interpretation. What constitutes “cruel and unusual”?
Based on American history and tradition, there isn’t a good case for the “unusual” part.
So is it cruel?
In the 1958 case Trop v. Dulles, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for the government to strip someone of his or her citizenship as a punishment.
Though this does not deal directly with the death penalty, it offered an interpretation of the Eighth Amendment that many death penalty opponents used to justify their stance.
One aspect of the ruling gave an interesting interpretation of the clause. “The words of the [Eighth] Amendment are not precise, and … their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Ever since, death penalty abolitionists and constitutional lawyers use this idea to argue the penalty’s “cruel” nature –– at least when viewed through a lens of modernity. We’re not the simple-minded brutes we once were, are we?
When we scrutinize the quality of a three-drug lethal injection, for the sake of people who have been convicted of committing heinous and disturbing acts of violence, I think it’s fair to say that, yes, we have progressed since our drawing and quartering days.
But as for abolishing capital punishment as “cruel and unusual,” there are about 3,000 inmates currently on death row in the U.S. who can testify to the commonality of it, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The media may quibble over drug labels and FDA regulations, but in the end, the public wants the worst of its members removed from society –– permanently.
Appeal Danny’s case at djoconn1@asu.edu
