[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 2



USA:

Death penalty requires national soul-searching


On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution of a Mississippi
death row inmate, so that it could determine whether death by lethal
injection violates the bar against the infliction of cruel and unusual
punishments contained in the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
This exercise seems a waste of precious time and resources.

The question currently faced by the Supreme Court is an easily answered
red herring that masks a deeper and more important issue. If the intent of
the Founding Fathers under the Constitution is our guidepost, then clearly
death by lethal injection does not represent cruel and unusual punishment
within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.

That amendment was drafted at a time when the accepted and preferred
method of execution  short drop hanging  often resulted in a slow and
painful death by strangulation.

Thus, the Founding Fathers plainly did not judge the cruelty of a
punishment merely by the amount of pain inflicted. Nor should we. No form
of execution always will be fully painless. If our society believes in the
imposition of the death penalty in appropriate cases, then we should stop
behaving hypocritically, worrying that any existing alternative mode of
execution including lethal injection, is inhumane.

Instead of pondering whether particular methods of execution cause too
much pain, we first should answer the question of whether this country, as
a whole, still believes in the death penalty. In an era when DNA evidence
is exonerating some death row inmates, do we want to continue risking the
execution of an innocent person who was wrongly convicted?

Moreover, morally and ethically, do we remain convinced that a supposedly
civilized society should condone the taking a life for the commission of
even the worst crimes? And what about the treatment of criminals who are
not put to death? In varying degrees dependent on the type of crime
committed, ex-cons who have served their debt to society spend the rest of
their lives as pariahs whom, we make clear, no longer are welcome to live
with us, work with us or associate with us.

Some might argue that such lifelong "punishment" amounts to a form of
impermissible double-jeopardy that should be deemed cruel and unusual. We
first need to decide how our society feels about these issues. Only then
can we pursue appropriate penal remedies that accord with our current
sensibilities. Perhaps we should stay all executions until these questions
can be answered, but we should not be staying them on the grounds that the
mode of execution might be considered cruel and unusual.

(source: Opinion, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)