Cruel and Unusual

My dad sometimes likes to parody the politician who says, “I have friends on one side of this issue and I have friends on the other side… and I always stand by my friends.” Sometimes it is just hard to know what to think; sometimes it’s just easier not to think.

The death penalty is back on the front burner of public debate. In 1983, Michael Morales was convicted of the 1981 and murder of 17-year-old Terri Winchell. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection last Tuesday, but the execution was put on hold by district court judge Jeremy Fogel. Fogel was not be satisfied that Morales would feel no pain in dying by lethal injection, and inflicting pain would be cruel and unusual punishment. So Fogel ordered that an anesthesiologist or other medical professional must administer the anesthesia (the first drug in the lethal injection tail). Since this tends to violate the Hippocratic Oath (ya think?), no such medical professional was found. So the execution was put on hold and after almost a quarter century, due process is still processing.

At the same time I’m following this story, I’m reading Richard North Patterson’s novel Conviction. The story centers around a retarded and black man on death row and his lawyers' valiant efforts to save him. The problem is that no one except his lawyers believes that he is retarded nor (everyone presumably concedes that he is black). The drama in the novel is played out in the same court as the drama in real life. The details are different, but the debate is much the same.

Patterson's story gave me reason to pause; sometimes the issues we want to be cut-and-dry just aren’t. While I am sure that capital punishment is just and right, I am also very not sure that it is carried out justly and with impartiality. If the poor and the non-white are so much more likely to be on death row, does that not cast dount on the fairness of the whole process? One of Patterson's characters (a lawyer) suggests that the one trait all those on death row have in common is that they had incompentent lawyers.

This story in the news bothers me. The presumption that the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution precludes any pain is preposterous. The guys that wrote that clause knew all about hanging and firing squads; they would not have known of any way to execute without pain! Even more disturbing to me is the fact that of the two dozen or so web sites I scanned on this story, about half had pictures of Morales. A fourth had pictures of death penalty protesters. They all had ads. None had pictures of Terri Winchell. No one talks too much about her cruel and unusual death.

What are my views on the death penalty? “I have friends on one side of this issue…” I do believe that without faith in a just and loving God, true and final justice is only illusionary.