Bloody revenge

"Oh, my God," said Amber McGuire as she watched her father die, strapped to a table like a sacrificial victim snorting and  gasping for air for almost 25 minutes. Dennis McGuire was guilty of  the rape and murder of a pregnant woman, there's no doubt about it.  The only doubts, and there are quite a few, is whether killing him was so urgent a matter to the State of Ohio that they had to use a new method, yet untried and without any particular regard to the chances of yet another, screwed up execution or should I say, state murder.

No pig or other animal was harmed in this experiment, only a human. Since the manufacturer of the three-drug killing machine drugs refuses to sell to executioners and Doctors refuse to administer far more humane injections, it's left to the kind of loathsome creeps that manage executions to choose how to kill people and besides, as Assistant Ohio Attorney General Thomas Madden said over the objection of McGuire's lawyers that while the U.S. Constitution bans cruel and unusual punishment, "you're not entitled to a pain-free execution." Not any more than you're entitled to humane imprisonment, entitled to be protected against unwarranted search and seizure or due process these days. And apparently we like it that way. We won't give it up. We won't stop finding lame excuses for doing it.  Unusual?  Sad to say, no. Cruel?  Well not if you're angry enough 

I have no idea whether the electric chair produces severe pain.  I suspect that in some cases it does and of course it's so gruesome to observers that the very first time it was tried, the witnesses fled the scene sobbing and vomiting, but that was then. This is now.  We are a far more hard hearted country, or at least the negative pole of our polarized country is. Read any news report that allows public commentary, watch Anderson Cooper with the viewer comments crawl and you skin may begin to crawl at the bloodthirsty rage of Americans.  It's as though we were still the land of barbaric public executions cheered on by the drooling bloodthirsty multitudes.  America treasures it's rage.  I'm sick at listening to people so in love with killing that any chance for doing it legally is a necrodesiac. They want death, they want it NOW and they want it as gruesome as those effeminate, whining, WWJD bleeding heart liberals will let it be.   Mad dogs are treated with far more compassion that mad humans in Ohio. A simple injection and the dog drifts painlessly away. 

So when the family of McGuire's victim says they have forgiven them but he still has to pay, I once again have to give up on Homo Americanus. Payment after all is not punishment. the offended party is not reimbursed nor made whole and the dead remain dead no matter what you do to the man, strapped helplessly to a cross, arms spread wide for the nasty accomplices to pump him full of agony.  While America smiles at the divine bookkeeping entry.  One family feels better, another has to live with having sat by and watched the state of Ohio kill her father. Surely that makes God smile in approval, seeing his books balanced.

Only a few countries execute people.  We're taught to see those countries as barbaric tyrannies.  Statistics don't show any preventative value, we do it because we can and because it's a chance to indulge our blood lust without guilt and so may of those who try to tell us this is a Christian Nation are firm supporters of killing people in cold blood.

I've never been closer to simply getting on a boat and sailing away

Heart of darkness

What do China, Saudi Arabia and Iran have in common? The practice of executing prisoners; and both China and the US have extraordinary numbers of them. It's a condition we oft times associate with tyrannies, police states and governments at odds with the will of the governed. I can't say much as to whether support for the practice owes religious fervor for the passion with which it's defended against all evidence of the inefficacy of 'deterrent' and certainly China has far less of that than do countries without a state religion or those, like the US, that have an unhealthy yearning for one. I can be quite curious when that support stretches the boundaries of what is usually called civilized behavior to the point at which one perceives fangs and claws on the representation of Justice as well as the traditional scales and blindfold.

Virginia once was an important source for the sentiments and values that represented the best of the American revolution although the worst remained an institution there for a long lifetime after the Declaration of Independence. Slavery, witch hunting, the power of religion to make law, define the moral -- and the power to kill people have been subdued in practice if not in spirit. Yet, of late, I think we can see another effort to bring it all back, like buried ancient demons in some H.P Lovecraft tale. I think the so-called Tea Party is but another manifestation of the restlessness of our resident evil and so is the plain but cold blooded lust to kill Teresa Lewis for her complicity in the murder of her husband and stepson.

It's not just that the two accomplices who carried out the crime were spared being strapped to a cross and having corrosive chemicals pumped into their veins while she has been sentenced to death: it's also that she has an IQ of between 70 and 72. If she dies in Virginia's house of death on the day after tomorrow, she will be the first woman since 1912, when Ms Virginia Christian, a black teenager was broiled to death in the electric chair -- if we can call a 17 year old girl a woman. In that enlightened state, the entity with the motto "thus ever with tyrants," the tyrannical ability to kill human beings is tempered by things like age and mental capacity, and an IQ of 70 is considered to be the borderline between incompetence and fit fodder for the sacrificial altar.

In our day of major candidates for high office rattling about witches, masturbation and the wrath of god and even little mice with human brains, is it surprising that a one or two point difference (well within the statistical noise level) can be like a bank vault door sealing off mercy, decency and respect for human life? For those eager from the lofty vantage point of a 20 or 30 point difference it may seem so, leaving those with an additional 60 or 90 to wonder about the moral quotient of those who presume to educate the public and to pass judgment upon us.

Whether or not Mrs. Lewis spends the 40 years she has left in jail or ends her existence in Virginia's sanitized charnel house, the question will arise repeatedly and inevitably, as long as we continue to confuse justice with a system of accounting and allow it to be driven by public anger and prosecutorial polemics. The mad, the imbecilic and even the innocent will continue to die and the beast will continue to rage in the heart of America and our vaunted respect for life will stink of the grave.

Land of the prison, home of the coward.

Yes, our personal freedom has been irrevocably damaged by a weak attempt to control swashbuckling Insurance company practices and there's nothing ahead but free fall into the pit of Socialism - or Fascism if your paranoia runs better in that direction. I can't get through an hour without hearing the whining about "Obamacare" and "American values."

Of course there's little fear that the attempt to make it legal for a suspect to be held forever without trial will jeopardize our "freedom" at all. There's not too much concern that proof of innocence can't overturn a death sentence either. Freedom you see, is a personal, even solipsistic thing and like personal income, we Libertarians don't want to share it or spread it around. I need to be free to do anything, free from any responsibility to the country, but you can rot in hell, for all I care. Some call that Libertarian, some conservative, but either attempt is like pasting a label to Teflon - it won't stick. What it really is, is panic and what it's really not is justice. Yes, I know, if your one of those Glennbecky sorts, you'll insist that justice itself is one of many gates to hell and the corridor to Communism, but if you're one of those, you belong there anyway.

But here's an example or two: Senator Lindsey Graham, who sits on the Senate's Armed Services, Homeland Security and Judiciary committees, wants to talk us into legislation that allows a "terrorism suspect" to be held forever without charges and without counsel. That's right, I said suspect. What's a suspect? it's whatever some justice department apparatchik or some informant or unnamed source says it is.

“There has to be some type of statute -- and he’s been clear on that -- for indefinite detention,” said Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop. An accused person is "too dangerous to release; but we also aren’t going to try them in either a military or a civilian court. So there has to be a system for that, and that’s why Senator Graham is looking for a legal framework."

Too bad there's no longer any framework to determine whether someone is actually dangerous, is a terrorist or even what terrorism is under such legislation, but never mind -- the government just knows and we're comfortable with that. Limited justice and limited freedom you see, is limited government.

And that doesn't scare you; not like filling out a census form, not like keeping your insurance from being canceled the day after they find that tumor because you had an unreported toothache in 1972. None the less, we want limited government, but only as concerns us, not them. A life sentence for suspicion is

"un-American and violates our commitment to due process and the rule of law,"

says the ACLU, as you'd expect from those Commies. Don't they understand we're afraid? Don't they understand that American values aren't worth taking a risk for?

They aren't worth taking a risk for in Texas; just ask Troy Davis, sentenced to die for a brutal triple murder in a trial so flawed it makes my hair stand on end. One of the victims, for instance, had complained of abuse and threats from a third party, who was not even interviewed by police. Ten years ago David Protess, at The Innocence Project at Northwestern University, whose group has exonerated 17 condemned prisoners using DNA evidence the court never saw, re-examined the case with his students and concluded Skinner is innocent. Texas won't reconsider a conviction based on new evidence. In Texas, innocence is no defense and Texas, for all it's guns and bravado is so terrified of Davis that they're willing to kill him and the hell with reasonable doubt. Fortunately, the Supreme court isn't from Texas and has granted a stay, just an hour before the execution

Sure, we want limited government, but with unlimited power to do whatever feels expedient and damn the very idea of social justice and screw anyone who ever thought the USA was worth fighting for. Don't you understand we're afraid?

If at first you don't succeed

I've written often enough about my opposition to giving our government the power to execute people and I'm not going over it again. This time it's about the method. Many people really don't care if an execution is agonizing or hideous. It's apparent considering the number of years we've been using the electric chair. The first time it was used, witnesses ran howling from the building, some went down on their knees with projectile vomiting - but we took a long time about looking for something less grotesque; a long time during which victims were set on fire, steaming eyeballs and sparks were popping out of smoking skulls and one prisoner who survived the chair was led back to it a year later after the Supreme Court said there was nothing cruel about it.

After the Conservative recrudescence when public sentiment responded to fear mongering and swung toward executions again, the idea of a quick painless death by injecting some drug seemed the most humane and thus more marketable. It's what we do with pets we love as though they were family after all, but instead of using a single painless shot of a barbiturate which insures loss of consciousness and a quick end, we rig up a contraption that requires an IV needle to be in place and a series of three injections. If the needle, which is installed by non medical professionals, is done incorrectly, and it often is, it produces a long, excruciating death while the prisoner is paralyzed and conscious. There's no reason for it that I can find except they started doing it that way and conservatives don't like change, whether it's an improvement or not. It's more important to appear "tough" to the other Republicans.

A recent Ohio case where the victim was strapped to the death chamber crucifix, involved 2 hours of jabbing him with needles while he sobbed and begged to be able to help end it all. The executioners couldn't find a vein and gave up, allowing convicted rapist/murderer Romell Broom a one week reprieve until his veins heal. Then they'll try again and God forbid they should try something proven to work well. Ohio Gov Strickland assures us no thought will be given to this.

"That does not mean there will be a review of the larger issue of lethal injections," Strickland said Wednesday. "That's been settled."

There's no report as to whether he washed his hands afterward.

Cast the first stone

I'm disgusted by violence. I always have been. I'm human enough, none the less, to recognize in myself the urges we inherit from the common ancestor we share with Chimpanzees and yes, I'm quite capable of committing violent acts under the right circumstances, my antipathy and morals notwithstanding. One of those circumstances would be to prevent violence being committed upon others and particularly upon women and children. I'm afraid I would become uncontrollable if forced to witness what Iran plans to do to a group of women for having sex or something close to it in violation of some religious code from the dark minds of the dark ages.

Despite a pledge to hold a moratorium on such crimes against nature, decency and humanity, Iran announced last week that it was going to stone 9 women and one man for adultery.

"The European Union calls on the Iranian government and parliament to abolish, in law and in practice, recourse to cruel and degrading punishment and, in particular the use of stoning, as a method of execution,"

reads a statement from France Thursday, which holds the current EU presidency. Fat chance.

In case the procedure is too vague to depict the horror of watching women and girls buried up to their shoulders be pelted with fist sized stones until they either bleed to death or as the skull fractures, the eyeballs hanging by threads from a pulped face, the brain damage becomes sufficient to cause them to stop breathing, here's a picture.* Here's a glimpse into the dark heart of religious madness. Here are the people who worship a merciful God and thereby demonstrate his non-existence. Here are people I would gladly kill regardless of the personal cost.

Look into her eyes and smash her in the face with a brick - go ahead, but just don't let me get my hands around your God fearing neck.


*This picture is a simulation - just to make the viewer confront the horror. The reality of course would be much uglier and of course you might have to deal with the screams.

Just shoot him

So Florida is finally going to kill Mark Schwab. It's 16 years since the 23 year old man was convicted of the kidnap, rape and murder of an 11-year old boy and I so think it's safe to use the cold blood metaphor. Of course the government of Florida won't be shedding his blood, they'll strap him to what looks like a cross, try to get a needle into a vein to make him unconscious with Sodium Pentothal. They'll then hope they guessed right enough about the dosage and that it lasts long enough that he won't feel the searing agony of the pancuronium bromide used to paralyze him flowing through every blood vessel in his body like Liquid Plumber, making it impossible to scream or even twitch. If that goes well, they will stop his heart with potassium chloride. It doesn't always go well.

We've read about Florida's electric chair that has set people on fire, blowing boiling eyeballs out of their sockets while shaking the victim like a rag doll and causing witnesses to vomit in disgust, but for the most part, people don't care because they don't have to watch. We've read about the botched "three chemical" process that has taken over half an hour of indescribable agony to finally kill the strapped down and paralyzed prisoner, but again, not all of us are capable of caring.

It doesn't help that Schwab is as loathsome a man as any; the rape and murder of Junny Rios-Martinez occurred about a year after he got out of jail for raping another boy. The fact that the same government that let him out of jail however is the same government that is going to kill him, doesn't reflect well on the capability of Florida to deal with violent criminals.

But this is not about my horror of trusting demonstrably inept State governments with the legal ability to kill people. It's not about the corrupt and incompetent judicial processes, the correlation between race and the severity of punishment. It's not about my moral and ethical objections to executing criminals: it's about human pigheadedness, the propensity to stick with a decision long after the abject stupidity thereof has been proven. The process now being mandated as a merciful alternative to traditional executions is far too unreliable and cruel to be used on a pet cat, but governments and the supporters of legislative death share much with the pit bull that needs to be put down. Nothing will dissuade them once they have that taste of blood.

When it comes to the time when Fido has to go, the veterinarian will simply give him a shot of pentobarbital and he will drift away and be gone in 30 painless seconds. For larger animals there are stronger barbiturates, but even a bullet in the head is a certain and more painless death than the one we have turned to because the electric chair was too grisly and firing squads and hangings are emotionally unsanitary.

Self-important people with Junior College Criminal Justice degrees and people in politics however cling to this medieval drama as though it was a procedure handed down from Sinai. Somehow, the people who insist that the government can't do anything right are sure that the government does this right -- and maybe not often enough. Of course the intentional infliction of agony on a helpless and bound prisoner and it's place in that hilarious concept: the "Judeo Christian ethic" doesn't seem to be discussed here as much as it is in other areas.

But basically, it's all about cowardice. We want government to make the bad men go away and we want them to do it where we cant see it or smell it or hear it. That's all we care about. We care more about that than we do about reasonable doubt, about cruel and unnecessary suffering, and if we have scruples about casting the first stone, why then we pay others to do it.

For Christ's sake, just shoot the guy if you have the stomach for it and since you don't, lock him up forever. There will be plenty of room once you let the dope smokers go home.

If it feels good, kill him.

The concept of punishment is inseparable in people's minds from the concept of justice. I have a hard time understanding either one. In the youth of our species, the notion prevailed that some sort of balance existed in the universe and that balance had to be maintained scrupulously lest the sun not rise and the crops fail. A more modern knowledge of the universe makes it a bit hard to believe in such things, yet we do. We do at least in as far as we talk about debts to society being paid in kind or in body part. Of course with regard to crimes of theft or property, the notion that justice prevails in the return of value to a rightful owner seems obvious, but in other cases where there is no value to be returned, such as in the case of rape or murder, the accounting model for justice runs into trouble. Does taking away a life provide a new one for the victim or the victim's heirs? Does inflicting pain and suffering or death upon the perpetrator satisfy any debt or does it satisfy the urge to kill we have inherited from our hirsute ancestors?

Being a person for whom the abuse of women and children is sufficiently loathsome that I would readily shoot someone to stop certain crimes, I still maintain that taking an eye for an eye repays no one but fictitious gods, and the universe continues to expand at the same rate and our little world goes on in the same trajectory. Yes, I would love to inflict a great deal of suffering on people who rape children. Given the opportunity I probably would, but I do not try to fool myself that I'm talking about justice. I want revenge because revenge feels good and if feels good because like anyone who reads this, I am an animal and the heir to a host of animal instincts and emotions. Instinct is expressed as the urge to do what feels good. Somehow I believe that justice needs more justification than that.

Short of denouncing judicial killings, the Court has ruled that "evolving standards" have made it less acceptable to kill someone for a lesser crime than killing someone else. While I agree, I would apply that same standard to the unnecessary ending of human life entirely. That strapping people to a cross and pumping their veins full of drain cleaner is tolerated in a nation fulsomely bellicose about its Christianity stretches the bounds of the term hypocrisy.

That's my opinion anyway, although I could be wrong. But I don't think so.

Blood on our hands

"summa awilum in mar awilim uhtappid insu uhappadu"

If a man destroy another's eye, his eye shall be destroyed.

-Code of Hammurabi, 1795-1750 BC-

_______

It's funny in a grisly sort of way, to listen to the moral absolutists try to avoid the fact that if you kill a man for a crime he didn't commit, you are a murderer; A murderer with an excuse perhaps, but a murderer none the less. Of course some versions of morality insist that if you kill anyone you were not forced to kill, it's murder. Morality is no more absolute than any other opinion.

In my opinion, arguing for the Death penalty by saying that most of the people you kill are guilty, aren't worth the rebuttal; it only takes one to make it murder and one to make us all accessories, and the fact seems to be that it's been quite a bit more than one. Arguments that justify the probability of killing at least a few innocents, or indeed for killing anyone because doctrine says it's a deterrent are simply arguments for expedience and from fear, not from reason. Arguments that depend on some cosmic system of double entry book keeping are arguments from an ancient religious tradition with no basis in the actual cosmos. I'm fed up with all these attempts to justify hate crimes and so apparently are others.

It's New Jersey however, and not some Bible Belt state that has taken the lead by stepping away from blood sacrifice and away from the totalitarian notion that a life can be taken in cold blood by some committee of citizens made sufficiently angry by paid professionals. To this writer, it provides a glimmer of hope that the United States might some day follow the path of enlightenment, but just a glimmer.

The joy of killing.

There nothing uglier than turning killing into a virtue. It degrades everything about our country and its legal system, and the strengthening and "streamlining" of the process after years of right wing bluster reveald the true basis of a practice that is based on little more than anger and blood lust. Justice delayed may be justice denied, but the risk of killing an innocent man outweighs the expense and lack of patience, or at least you'd think it would in a place like Georgia with all it's Christian family values pretensions.

Although Troy Davis now has a 90 day reprieve during which his attempt to have his conviction reexamined based on new testimony and recanted testimony, the rhetoric coming from prosecutors and family of the murder police officer does a great deal to lessen my sympathy for them. From what I read, it seems they simply want to kill someone as a way to ease their pain and they don't want to be bothered with details like the reasonable doubt that the right man will be anesthetized and suffocated.

"I believe they are setting a precedent for all criminals that it is perfectly fine to kill a cop and get away with it," said the wife of the slain Savannah police officer. "By making us wait, it's another sock in the stomach. It's tearing us up."

I'm sure she's torn up but I can't excuse her grossly illogical and grotesquely untrue statements because of a now 18 year old grief. I can't have any sympathy for disregarding a reasonable doubt because you think you'll feel better if someone dies. Anger is not the Basis of law and the relief of anger through violence is not justice otherwise the jungle would be a just and orderly place.

Testimony received in the hearing included the murdered man's son telling how it was to grow up without a father. Very sad, but that has nothing to do with the question of guilt or innocence. Does he really not care who dies as long as someone feels the needle and the sooner the better? Perhaps so and as I said, justice is not about how angry you are or how much you want someone to die. The urge to kill is no more noble in an offended party than in anyone else.

If you feel as I do, that participating in the death of an innocent man is murder, whether sanctefied by faith or law or anger or political expedience, then perhaps you will agree that the only way to avoid being a murderer by proxy is to halt executions entirely. I think it's simply idiotic to assert that somehow this would grant license to kill cops as it is to officially smile on the good feelings some aggrieved person might have in watching someone die. In fact saying it's legitimate for the state to kill someone out of anger, it weakens the concept that it's not legitimate for an individual to kill someone out of anger.

But that's just my opinion - you might be an idiot.

People who kill people

According to CNN's Elizabeth Cohen, "it took nearly 90 minutes to execute Joseph Clark, who'd murdered two people in Ohio. Witnesses reported that Clark raised his head off the gurney and said repeatedly, 'don't work, don't work,' and moaned and groaned as he struggled with prison officials." News accounts of the execution also quoted Clark as asking, "Can you just give me something by mouth to end this?" No one did. The story is one of a great many like it.

People who believe that killing people deters other people from killing people believe it for reasons having nothing whatever to do with evidence. All evidence is that it does not. That there are a lot of this kind of believer in the US doesn't need to be pointed out, but I suspect that the death penalty as a deterrent is espoused by some public figures simply because they're afraid of incurring the wrath of the true barbarians among us who style themselves as "conservatives."

I call it barbarism because the philosophy behind hanging, poisoning and shooting people isn't a philosophy at all, it's the simple expression of our "apeness." We kill because we are angry and the people we choose to legally kill tend to be people we fear or are angry at for other reasons. The evidence that the odds of being executed are heavily correlated with race and social status is compelling. Arguments frequently heard ask us if we wouldn't want to kill the person who killed someone we love and of course we would and of course that isn't any kind of justice at all; it's just the law of the jungle.

There has been, over the decades, an effort to make the forcible termination of human life more palatable, the better to sell it to those with objections, but not only is the success of such methods in reducing pain and suffering very questionable; to many people the attempt itself is somehow effeminate, liberal and vaguely French. Real men want to see pain.

When Florida's "old sparky" would set convulsing prisoners on fire, eyeballs and great gouts of blood popping out of smoking skulls, "conservatives" had little in the way of objection other than that it was slowing down the death process, but switching to lethal injections performed by State hired killers with no medical training and little brains may have caused agonizing and prolonged deaths, far worse than an electric chair set on slow roast.

The man who proposed the series of intravenous injections that has been widely adopted, thinks it needs to be changed and more effective chemicals and procedures used. Indeed the stories of executions entailing lengthy periods of maximum agony are nauseating to most people even Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a group that advocates the death penalty. He'd rather do what Hitler did to Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled at places such as Sobibor - hook up a big diesel and kill them with carbon monoxide.

Dr. Jay Chapman, the inventor of the current lethal injection scheme disagrees with that. He simply thinks the chemical used to asphyxiate the victim while waiting for the potassium chloride to give him heart failure could be eliminated and the anesthetic replaced by something more effective. He does concede that the old French way of killing involving a guillotine would be more painless and foolproof.

I suppose a cross would be out of the question.