This article was originally published on GrasstopsUSA.com.
The recent lawsuit before the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection as cruel and unusual punishment is outright ludicrous. The suit, filed by Kentucky death row inmates Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling, Jr., has already been rejected by the Kentucky Supreme Court, but opponents of capital punishment are determined to render the death penalty illegal using ever more indirect, sophistical, and bizarre approaches. It would be cruel and unusual punishment for the American people if it were not so outrageously funny.
One could only hope that the Supreme Court justices are sane enough to decisively rule against the plaintiffs – whose entire case against lethal injection in general is based on the fear that a particular mix of drugs used in Kentucky lethal injections might if administered improperly result in pain experienced by the subject, which the subject cannot express due to paralyzed muscles. So let’s get this straight: Because one particular mode of lethal injection might possibly be more painful than anticipated if wrongly applied, this justifies abolishing all forms of lethal injection, even if they are applied in accordance with proper protocol! What spectacular feat of sophistry is this?
Moreover, is it even conceivable for lethal injection to be cruel and unusual? It is certainly not unusual, for it is used in the majority of executions today. Can it possibly be cruel and if so, cruel compared to what? Is shooting the convicted murderer less cruel? What about hanging him? Or putting him in the chair and electrocuting him? How about using poison gas? Is that less cruel than lethal injection? It seems that lethal injection inflicts the least pain on the murderer before he dies,compared to any other existing mode of punishment.
Furthermore, consider the range of means of execution available in 1791, when the Bill of Rights – including the Eighth Amendment – was ratified. Back then, lethal injection did not even exist. The options for killing a convicted murderer were beheading, drowning, burning, hanging, or the firing squad. The latter two in particular were widespread at the time, and the framers of the Constitution found nothing objectionable in this. What they perceived to be cruel and unusual punishment was probably closer to medieval torture devices than it was to lethal injection. So if a noose around the neck or the pain caused by a bullet are not cruel and unusual, then how could lethal injection be?
But behind the inanity lies an ulterior motive. After all, the Supreme Court decided unambiguously in its 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling that capital punishment itself is constitutional. So how could opponents of the death penalty manage to prohibit it nonetheless? Well, they could try to get the least painful and least cruel possible form of execution classified as cruel and unusual punishment, from which it would follow by implication that all the other even more painful ways of execution are cruel and unusual as well. Despite repeated court rulings at the state and federal levels – and despite overwhelming support by Americans for the death penalty for murder – opponents of capital punishment will go to ridiculous lengths to enshrine their objections into law.
Continued efforts to end the executions of brutal killers – who inflict the cruelest possible punishments on peaceful, innocent people – should not be accommodated, in whatever guise they might appear.
