Mendalami dan merenungkan soal hukuman mati untuk para terhukum di pelbagai
era, di pelbagai negara, rupanya kita mau tak mau, se-tidak2nya aku sendiri,
pribadi tidak menyetujui hukuman mati dalam cara apapun.
Setelah membanding2kan segala cara hukuman mati sepanjang masa yang
dilakukan oleh pelbagai negara, dari hukuman gantung, kamar gas, kursi listrik
dan lethal iinjection dan mengangkat apa yang diminta oleh 3 pembom Bali si
Amrozi cs aku kira ...hukuman pancung adalah yang paling "humane".
Alasanku, walaupun sekali lagi aku tidak setuju dengan hukuman mati, tapi
pancung kepala adalah suatu hukuman yang cepat dan "bersih". Bersih artinya,
bahwa kepala yang sudah terlepas dari badan , maka tubuh tidak bisa merasakan
sesuatu yang menyakitkan apabila proses dan prosedur hukuman mati itu
me-lenceng sedikit, seperti yang digambarkan dalam berita dibawah.
Hukuman pancung sama dengan misalnya hukuman yang di jalankan di abad
pertengahan dengan potong kepala, di-guilotine.
Tapi kembali kepada hukuman mati. Apakah hukuman mati ini sebagai sesuatu
yang bersih dalam arti memberikan hukuman kepada ter-vonnis atas kejahatan yang
dilakukan atau...apakah ini bukan suatu cara ...pembalasan dendam oleh manusia
terhadap manusia?
Sebaik-nya hukuman mati itu ditiadakan. Eropa , Australia, dan Canada rupanya
adalah pelopor dalam meniadakan hukuman mati.
Ditinjau lebih jauh, sepertinya hukuman mati itu kurang tepat. Karena apa?
karena ter-vonnis bisa cepat membebaskan dirinya dari hukuman karena telah
dibebaskan deritanya dengan hukuman mati. Seyogianya para ter-vonnis ini harus
menjalani hukuman sepanjang hidupnya, agar ybs bisa menrenungi kejahatan yang
telah dilakukan. Biar ybs merasakan bahwa kemerdekaan seseorang itu adalah
paramount dan hukuman adalah sesuatu yang benar2 menyengsarakan ybs karena
kemerdekaan pribadi hilang.
Harry Adinegara
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Goodman: Cruel and unusual
By Ellen Goodman The Boston Globe
Published: October 12, 2007
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So America has a national moratorium of sorts. An unofficial stay of
execution. All quiet in the death chambers.
In the days since the Supreme Court decided to take on another death penalty
case, 11 states - including Texas, the capital of capital punishment - have
suspended executions. In two more states, inmates slated for death next week
may be granted a reprieve. Even the Europeans who led Wednesday's World Day
Against the Death Penalty must have missed having their favorite international
target.
But there isn't much hoopla among death penalty opponents or much anger among
proponents. The case that will be heard this session isn't about the morality
or constitutionality of the death penalty. It's about the way execution is
executed.
The case brought by two death row inmates in Kentucky doesn't ask whether the
death penalty constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," but only whether
lethal injection is cruel and unusual. The justices will be asked to rule on
the method, not on the madness.
Is there something just a little chilling in this? A searing moral debate
reduced to an argument about the details of injections, syringes, dosages, pain
and the competence of executioners? How many angels - or devils - dance on the
head of a needle?
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When the Eighth Amendment was written, the founders looked to Europe for
examples of "cruel and unusual punishment," like drawing and quartering. For
more than a century, most executions in America were by noose or firing squad.
But by 1890, we were enthralled by technology and queasy about public
executions. The electric chair and gas chamber became "advanced" tools of the
trade.
Each step toward a more humane standard of state-inflicted death seems to
have been followed by horror stories. By the late 1970s, the search for
better-dying-through-chemistry led states to adopt the needle as the gold
standard.
Forgive me for being graphic, but graphic is the issue. Lethal injection is a
cocktail of three drugs. The first is to put the prisoner to sleep. The second
is to paralyze him. The third to stop his heart.
That neat, medicinal description doesn't say what happens when the procedure
is botched. If the first dose doesn't work, is administered improperly or wears
off, the inmate dies in a pain he is paralyzed to express.
There's no doubt that executions have been botched. There was the dyslexic
doctor from Missouri who admitted that he didn't always calculate the dosages
correctly. There was the Lancet study showing that almost half of the inmates
were conscious when they received the heart-stopping drug. Then there was the
inmate in California who watched as executioners repeatedly poke him with
needles and asked, "You guys doing that right?"
Fordham Law School's Deborah Denno grades the quality of executioners found
in her surveys this way: "We wouldn't allow them to cook a hamburger. This is a
level of gross incompetence." The American Medical Association has barred its
doctors from performing executions.
Once again, what looks antiseptic is not. We have seen another failed attempt
to find the execution that fits what the court has defined as America's
"evolving standard of decency." A case about competence may drive another hole
in the notion of a death penalty with decency.
Americans support capital punishment, though not by the margins of the past.
When asked to choose between the death penalty and life without parole, they
are evenly divided. Twelve states had suspended death sentences before this
case began and last year there were only 53 executions among some 3,300 inmates
on death row.
We Americans have become more wary of convicted criminals found innocent and
of racial bias in sentencing. Now lethal injection is also being desanitized.
Ironically, we know how to end life painlessly. There are Web sites with
information on "death with dignity" and instructions that involve sleeping
pills and plastic bags. Surely there are better "cocktails" than the one on
trial. But how merciful do we want our capital punishment? How merciless?
The argument about the ways and means of execution reflects our great
ambivalence - the thrust and the recoil - between the desire for punishment and
the revulsion from inflicting cruelty, pain, death. I have long shared that
ambivalence.
But as the Supreme Court takes up this issue again, I remember what Justice
Harry Blackmun said after a 20-year struggle about just ways to administer the
death penalty: "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the
machinery of death."
We are still tinkering. This time, we're tinkering with the dosage and the
training. Tinkering with competence and mistakes. We are tinkering, tinkering,
tinkering to avoid the possibility that we can't have our death penalty and our
humanity, too.
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