The Case Against Lethal Injection

This week, as the Washington Post points out today, the United States Supreme Court will take up the question of capital punishment.

At issue is not whether capital punishment is constitutional but whether lethal injection violates the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

In question is Kentucky's use of lethal injection.

"Lethal injection," the Post writes, "was conceived 30 years ago as a more humane alternative to electrocution." But "should states be held to a tougher standard, as Kentucky death row inmates ... urge, and be forced to change or abandon a technique if it carries an 'unnecessary risk of pain and suffering'?"

The Post admits that it has been a long-time opponent of the death penalty. "But if capital punishment is to be carried out, it should be done as humanely as possible by a method that causes no pain. Evidence submitted in the Supreme Court case suggests that the current protocol for administering lethal injection cannot meet this standard."

The Post concludes, "There is a danger that the justices will get so deeply involved in parsing the technical aspects of this case that they become micromanagers of state execution methods. ... They should insist simply that states not rely on a flawed execution method that carries the unnecessary risk of pain when a more humane alternative is available."

The Chicago Sun-Times puts it a little more bluntly: Fix the death penalty, it says, or end it.

The latter may be closer to becoming a reality than you might think, according to the Sun-Times.

"Ultimately," the newspaper says, "reforms might be irrelevant because juries increasingly are rejecting the death penalty."

Here in Texas (which became the first state to use lethal injection in 1982) and in other Southern states, that may not seem to be the case, but in Illinois, the Sun-Times goes on to say,"[j]uries in recent years have approved the death penalty in only one or two cases each year, down from 15 or more in the 1990s. In Illinois, the death penalty is all but dead already."