Ghouls at the Gallows: Capital Punishment

Skip the B.S. 

By Skip Eisiminger

“Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”—Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) 

“When the state stubs out a life in its hand,

the light grows dimmer all over the land.”—The Wordspinner (D-South Carolina)

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—3/19/12—Though their beloved innocent writhed on a cross for six hours before he died, zipper-Bible Southerners agree on most everything regarding capital punishment—except the voltage.

About 30 percent of us would like to see lynchings, I mean executions, on television, where the voltage is a given, or we’d be debating that. In the 1960s, a North Carolina or Alabama public-school field trip often meant a visit to the electric chair in the state capital. In Mississippi, the unplugged chair was hauled to the schools in the back of a truck.

Meanwhile, in California, they debate such niceties as: should the needle delivering a lethal injection first be sterilized?

Paraphrasing Jesus, “Find me a perfect human being and let him or her administer the injection.”

Frankly, ever since Yahweh sentenced Cain “to be a fugitive and vagabond” for the murder of his brother and then turned around a few chapters later and sent the flood to punish “the wickedness of man,” the world has not known what to do with killers. One state recently debated what to do if electrocution failed. The consensus was: revive the condemned for the sake of justice and try again.

If we could only get that voltage right.

Elsewhere, legislators here and abroad have quibbled over the mix of poisons, the height of a scaffold, and the weight of a guillotine’s blade.

Just as killers are infinitely creative, so is the state.

In India, the executioner once led the condemned to a courtyard where a trained elephant crushed the victim’s head. In China, the jailer locked a heavy wooden yoke around the killer’s neck to insure that he could neither feed nor wash himself until he died. In England, the hangman would either let the prisoner place stones in his pocket before opening the trapdoor, or he’d let friends pull the inmate’s twitching legs if the fall didn’t break his neck. All for a price, of course. In Germany to please the mob, they hanged a man by his feet between two starving dogs. Resourceful hatchet men have also drawn and quartered, starved, keelhauled, stoned, crucified, boiled, slow-roasted, gassed, and beheaded prisoners in the name of “life’s sanctity.” We have killed those who have told a joke about Saddam Hussein, stolen a handkerchief or loaf of bread, sold state secrets, driven an automobile under the influence of alcohol, or been born to a Jewish mother.

However, judging from the preponderance of cartoons I have seen over the last 40 years, most cartoonists are flatly opposed to capital punishment. Heartless guillotine operators have been overheard offering a condemned man “paper or plastic,” while a prisoner, on his knees, green to the bitter end, says, “I brought my own bag.”

Meanwhile, the stinkards below prepare variously for a “bowling ball,” a “basketball,” or a “football” to start the “game.”

One white-collar criminal says to a tumbrel of his fellows, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m very disappointed in the severance package.” Satirists traditionally are politically conservative, but many refuse the argument that an execution is needed for “survivor closure.” If I’m ever an auxiliary victim of a capital crime, locking the guilty party away for the rest of his days will suit me just fine. This assumes, of course, that “life without parole” means “until the prisoner dies.”

Capital punishment is a complex issue with a long history, so permit me to bullet (forgive the verb, please) the remainder of my argument.

• The most ignorant are the most executed.

• In 2009, 53 percent of death-row inmates were either African-American or Hispanic, when these “minorities” constituted only 28 percent of the American population. Lady Justice may be blindfolded, but she isn’t colorblind.

• Since higher murder rates are recorded in states that have capital punishment, and lower rates are found where they have abolished it, the “deterrent effect” is negligible to non-existent.

• “Taking a life means forfeiting your own” is a simplistic concept; indeed, it’s seldom black and white unless you’re Black.

• Given the lengthy appeals process, an execution costs about three times more than maintaining someone in prison for 20 years, the national average for murder.

• A study conducted in 2009 showed that two-thirds of all death-penalty decisions are overturned because of prosecutorial error.

• According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 138 prisoners sentenced to death between 1973 and 2010 were ultimately freed. Eight Americans have been executed who, the DPIC states, were “possibly innocent.”

• Reprieves are often granted as personal and political favors; not on the merits of the case.

• In 2007, 310 felons in Italy sentenced to life in prison wrote their wardens begging to be executed. The authorities unanimously decided that pacing about in a jail cell, wrestling with a tormented conscience, was the proper consequence of the killers’ deeds, for “life” is neither cruel nor unusual.

• Rehabilitation is impossible if the candidate is dead. Redemption is a harder nut to crack.

• Finally, no one’s self-respect should depend on blood vengeance.

In 1956, after 680 executions, Albert Pierrepoint resigned from his job as Britain’s “Home Office Executioner” for several reasons, not the least of which was killing an innocent man. Among the men he hanged under the provisions of the “Visiting Forces Act of 1942” were two African-American rapists who had served under my father during the war. Though the men claimed that, despite the mud on their knees, the incident was consensual, the White woman said that the bruises and scratches on her body proved otherwise. Rape, however, was not a capital crime in England in 1945. After brooding over these two cases and 678 others in his book Executioner, Pierrepoint concluded that state-sponsored revenge had diminished his and everyone else’s moral capital.