On Monday, Utah brought back the firing squad as a way to
carry out the state-sanctioned execution of death row prisoners.
This is because every other “less barbaric” method of executing a human being has failed. Lethal injection doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. More often than not, the drug cocktail is either is mixed incorrectly or consists of second-rate chemicals, as was the case with the Arizona murderer Joseph Wood last summer.
A dose of poison 15 times the amount necessary was injected into his bloodstream, leaving the hapless victim strapped to a chair for hours, struggling in frightening pain while what appears to feel like napalm floods his veins.
We, obviously, don’t have the luxury of asking what he felt like. We can guess from his gasping and choking that he was in extreme distress. Reading about it immediately brought back images of Wilfred Owen, the World War I poet, watching a young soldier in the trenches “guttering, choking, drowning” as the gas hit him.
When Wood died two hours after the injection, it must surely have been a deliverance.
So, after something like this, one might understand the reasoning behind returning to the tried-and-true method of putting a bullet into someone's body. It’s efficient, quick and 100 percent effective. It requires no one to order costly, death-dealing drugs. All it requires is a gun and a bullet. There’s a reason that military executions throughout history have used this method.
So why is the immediate reaction of many of the American public to squirm at Utah’s use of the firing squad? Why does it seem less “humane” than lethal injection?
I believe it is because the entire purpose of lethal injections is to make the executioners feel better about themselves. Lethal injections are clinical. They inherently remind us of a hospital procedure (although with the exact opposite purpose.) They happen in rooms with white walls and marble floors.
And, most importantly, lethal injections are not tied to any well-known historical images. The method has no taint of being used unethically in a historical context, unlike firing squads and other “baser” methods of execution.
There is a reason we do not use gas chambers to execute prisoners anymore.
Put short: the public outcry against Utah’s decision to bring back firing squads isn’t a moral one. It’s an aesthetic one.
Proponents of the death penalty don’t like the fact that every time one performs a firing squad execution, one aligns oneself with every firing squad execution in history.
With lethal injection, the outcome is the same — the death of the prisoner. The only difference is that the executioners get to go home having pressed a button instead of having pulled a trigger.
Because in the end, the means don’t matter. There is no humane way to execute a human being. The act of killing someone who is no longer a threat and who has no power over his condition is inherently inhumane, whether the person being executed is guilty or innocent.
The death penalty in the U.S. has survived this far into the present only because it has been able to hijack the practice and aesthetics of medicine to “sterilize” it’s image. As long as it’s clinical and clean and requires no outright bloodshed, the 63 percent of Americans who support capital punishment will continue to do so.
They have reconciled, through an image of a “clean” execution, the idea of sacrificing a human being to please their own death-lust.
And they are disturbed when the already false idea of that “clean death” is taken away by Utah’s return to more effective, if bloodier, methods.
Perhaps such a return is necessary to help us see what has been the case all along: the death penalty is an assault on the supposed humanity of our justice system and the sooner we end it, the better.