Definition of Death Penalty
Death Penalty as defined by Barron’s Law Dictionary is “the ultimate punishment imposed for murder or other capital offenses.” (Gifis, 2003).
The United Nations Resolution 62/149, that is, Moratorium on the use of the death penalty, dated February 26, 2008 states that: “Considering the death penalty undermines human dignity and convinced that a moratorium on the use of t death penalty contributes to the enhancement and progressive development of human rights, that there is no conclusive evidence of the deterrent value of the death penalty and that any miscarriage or failure of justice in the implementation of the death penalty is irreversible and irreparable…” (The Advocates for Human Rights).
The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution asserts that: “Excessive bail shall net be required be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” (Gerhardt, Rowe, Brown & Spann, 2000).
The Eighth Amendment
Death penalty is one issue which alienates the United States from its allies in various countries of the world. For a patriotic nation such as the U.S., it is ironic to know that this country is among the three nations which are in the lead in terms of human execution; the other two being China and Iran. Statistically, approximately 80% of the execution conducted worldwide in the year 2002 was from these three countries.
Currently, the European Union has become a regular critic of the practices of death penalty by the US. In several European capitals, the practices are met by angry people who express their disapproval through conducting public demonstration and street protests against what they see as cruelty. One instance wherein the British government shows its displeasure of the America’s practice of capital punishment is their dispute to bar its possible application on the British individuals who are being detained at the Guantanamo Bay. In 2001, the United States los its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission, an event which proved to be an embarrassment for most Americans.
In this present time, it is always being pointed out in speeches by Supreme Court justices that the incompetence of defense lawyers through their failure to find and their effortless search for significant evidences which will prove the innocence of the defendants are among, if not the main problems concerning errors in capital sentences.
According to statistics, the period covering 1995 up to 2000, approximately 74% of the criminals whom US attorneys recommended for capital punishment belonged to minority groups. It has therefore become a bothersome question of political commentators and leaders whether or not the capital punishment or death penalty has been serving its purpose.
Execution of People with Mental Retardation
The Advocates for Human Rights quote the American Heritage Dictionary on the definition of mental illness as “any of various conditions characterized by impairment of an individual’s normal cognitive, emotional or behavioral functioning, and caused by social psychological, biochemical, genetic or other factors such as infection or head trauma.”
Although the 1986 Court ruling states the exemption of mentally ill or insane defendants, it has become a pre-requisite that they undergo competency evaluation upon claiming that they are suffering from mental disorder to determine the legitimacy of their claim. Moreover, due to the court’s strict protocol concerning competency evaluation, it does not exempt an individual from being executed despite the severity of their mental illness unless the definition of competency is gratified in accordance with Ford and Panetti.
The 2002 Supreme Court rule which states that the execution of mentally retarded inmates fall under “cruel and unusual punishment” does not exempt an inmate with mental illness from being executed if the defense attorney is not able to prove his or her unstable mental condition.
In order to prove that the inmate is genuinely insane or suffering from mental disorder or illness, the following requirements must be met:
- The individual must prove his or her extensive logical defect;
- The mental disease has a strong impact on the person’s daily activities and in his or her life as a whole;
- The illness started showing before the individual reached the age of 18.
In the argument contained in the Brief of Amici Curiae dated June 8, 2001, it is stated that “the United States of America is the only established democracy in the world that is known regularly to execute people with mental retardation…In diplomatic settings, the United States faces daily and growing criticism from the international community for maintaining a cruel and uncivilized practice.” (Pickering & Hongju Koh, 2003).
There are three first-hand observation-based submissions made by amici curiae and they are as follows:
1. The execution of people with mental retardation in inconsistent with evolving global standards of decency.The current United States practice of executing people with mental retardation has become manifestly inconsistent with evolving international standards of decency.2. The growing international consensus against t execution of people with mental retardation has increasingly isolated in the United States diplomatically.…Nations that are otherwise our allies, with strong rule-of-law traditions and histories legal systems and political cultures similar to our own, have most consistently protested our practice of executing people with mental retardation.3. In evaluating “evolving standards of decency” under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, this Court should weigh international as well as domestic opinion.The Eighth Amendments bar against cruel and unusual punishments embodies broad “concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity and decency.”…“…Our earliest understandings of the Eighth Amendment reflected the opinions and practices of other civilized nations……International condemnation of the United States practice of executing people with mutual retardation has been significant factor in state legislative moves to eliminate the practice.” (2003, p.23).
Death Penalty Moratorium
In 2007, as a result of the granting of the United States Supreme Court of certiriorari in the Baze v. Rees case, the U.S. encountered a genuine suspension of death penalty. In this particular case, it was the main interest of the Supreme Court to ensure that the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution has not violated through creation of substantive risk of unnecessary pain to the convict who underwent the procedure in relation to the protocol for lethal injection.
During the first few months of the death penalty moratorium, the following were observed:
Four black men out of five death row prisoners were released making a total of about129 prisoners of death row who have been absolved in the period of thirty five years.
The presence of racial discrimination is manifested in the country’s death penalty system as evidenced by the situations wherein the jury that will have to decide for the fate of a black prisoner are all white despite the Supreme Court’s insistence that the said practice is a violation of the Constitution.
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation: to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense. (Gerhardt, Rowe, Brown & Spann, 2000).
This is in contrast with the case of Troy Davis, an African-American who was convicted for the 1989 murder of a white policeman. Davis remains in death row due to the Supreme Court’s refusal to grant his request for a new trial by voting 4-3. Despite the absence of concrete evidence that would link the convict to the crime, such as the nonexistence of physical evidence and of the murder weapon, as well as the confession of several witnesses concerning police coercion which led them to testify against Davis and identified him as the killer, the prisoner was not given the chance to prove his innocence.
The same thing is true in a result of a study conducted in Harris County, Texas wherein minority individuals who have been accused of killing white victims are charged with capital punishment which brings us to the conclusion that the basis for the gravity of punishment of the offenders is not the severity of the crime committed but rather the ethnicity of the accused.
Death penalty moratorium is caused by several more factors aside from racial disparities wherein the above-mentioned case is an example of. In the state of Connecticut, there was a study conducted in November 2007 which showed the significance and relevance between the race and the death penalty sentence.
Another factor is the lack of funding of certain counsels – like the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, for instance – to provide the necessary financial support for the defendants; this hinders the offender from having a chance to prove his innocence to the court. Next is the cost involved; surveys and studies show that the prosecution of a capital case is more expensive than a non-capital one. One federal judge in New York commented that pursuing a capital case prosecution is not at all practical.
Another is the worsening conditions of the inmates detained on death row. Due to insufficiency in medical care being provided by the authorities in charge in prisons, some inmates volunteer themselves as subjects for the execution; some even commit suicide, one after another.
Execution by Lethal Injection
While death by electrical chair is considered as “cruel and unusual” (Gerhardt et. al 2000) under the United States Constitution, it is being questioned whether or not the procedures and protocol of lethal injection poses a considerable threat of inflicting unnecessary and unbearable pain on the person who will be undergoing the said procedure. Some states, like Kentucky uses a cocktail of three-drug injection.
Lethal injection is a process being applied to convicts who have been sentenced to capital punishment. The drugs being used in this procedure are intended for the immediate death of the person. There are three fatal drugs which are injected to the subject during the procedure, namely, barbiturate, paralytic and potassium solution. The method consists of the following steps:
- The convict is strapped to a gurney;
- One of the execution team places a number of heart monitors on the subject’s skin;
- Two needles, one of which serves as a back-up, are inserted on the arms of the subject;
- There are long tubes which connect through a cement block to the intravenous drips where the first drug, usually a harmless saline is given immediately;
- The inmate will then be exposed to the witnesses in the adjoining room the moment the jail warden motions the personnel in charge to lift the curtain;
- The next drug that is injected is an anesthetic called sodium thiopental which causes the subject to drift off to sleep;
- The paralytic drug called pancuronium bromide or pavulon stops the subject’s breathing and paralyze his or her entire muscular system;
- The final drug injected the potassium chloride in then injected to stop the subject’s heartbeat.
The inmate’s death then occurs as a result of:
(1) anesthetic overdose;
(2) respiratory arrest;
(3) cardiac arrest during his unconscious state.
The following is a detailed discussion of the functions and effects of the fatal drugs being used in the lethal injection procedure; the purpose of which is to cite arguments concerning whether or not the said procedure really poses a grave threat of causing unnecessary unbearable pain to the subject.
Thiopental Sodium is a drug that is frequently used by majority of the physicians to cause medical comas and as an anesthetic during their performance of necessary medical procedures. The drug is an especially short acting barbiturate. It begins to start working within a period of 30-45 seconds upon injection. For lethal injection, its purpose is to make the subject unconscious in preparation for the other drugs to be injected. It takes approximately 5-20 minutes; the drug which immediately head towards the brain spreads throughout the different parts of the body; the person returns to consciousness once the dose of the said drug decreases to approximately 15% in the brain
Pavulon or Pancuronium Bromide is the next drug to be injected after Thiopental Sodium. The purpose of this drug is to paralyze the subject’s body by preventing the chemical compound known as acetylcholine – which acts as a neurotransmitter in the nervous system – from connecting to the receptors responsible for the muscle contraction stimulation. Its failure to function takes effect 15 – 30 seconds after the drug is injected.
Potassium Chloride is the final drug injected to the subject. Although potassium is naturally found in foods, its excessive dose as in the case of lethal injection can cause hyperkalemia – a mental condition wherein the level of electrolyte potassium concentration increases above normal – which disables the muscle contraction, thus causing the heart to stop beating which eventually leads to cardiac arrest.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The use of lethal injection as a method of execution is being justified by the justice system to be the most humane form of capital punishment as compared to other methods such as electrocution, beheading, hanging and firing squad. However, the procedure still shows several flaws and disadvantages.
According to Teresa Zimmers, a physician based at the University of Miami, Florida, the set of rules concerning the drug combination used by executioners may not be reliable. According to her, “Even if all the drugs are delivered intravenously in the quantities specified, they still may not produce death reliability.” (Reilly, 2007)
An even worse scenario is that as evidenced by execution logs, the heartbeat of some if not all inmates who underwent execution by lethal injection continues for approximately 2-9 minutes after the administration of the second drug – the Potassium Chloride. Although it should cause immediate cardiac arrest upon reaching the heart, according to some researchers who conducted studies, there is a possibility that combining it with other drugs may tend to reduce its effectiveness.
Even the last drug that is injected to stop breathing and paralyze the muscles – the Pancuronium Bromide – may not work compatibly with the other two drugs in the cocktail. Though it reliably induces death, it is not certain that the inmate would not die due to oxygen loss in the brain instead of the supposed effect of the cocktail drugs.
Inasmuch as participation in the execution opposes doctors’ responsibility to save human lives, they neither participate nor provide medical suggestions concerning the drugs being administered during the execution process.
Consequently, the entire procedure is done by non-medical staff who frequently experience troubles as they proceed with the process. Some of the common dilemmas that are being encountered by medically unskilled and inexperienced technicians include the following:
- Finding the veins of the person subject for execution;
- Wrong insertion of the needles; sending the lethal drugs into the wrong part of the body would result to unbearable pain on the part of the inmate, thus causing “cruel and unusual punishment” which is a violation of the United States Constitution’s Eighth Amendment;
- Incorrect drug dosages;
- Incorrect time intervals; the inmate’s paralysis will prevent him or her from confessing to anyone that he or she is suffering from an excruciating pain.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee discusses the following concerns as contained in Paragraph 29, Articles 6 and 14 dated July 28, 2006:
The Committee regrets that the State party does not indicate that it has taken any steps to review federal and state legislation with a view to assessing whether offences carrying the death penalty are restricted to the most serious crimes, and that, despite the Committee’s previous concluding observations, the State party has extended the number of offences for which the death penalty is applicable.
While taking note of some efforts towards the improvement of the quality of legal representation provided to indigent defendants facing capital punishment, the Committee remains concerned by studies according to which the death penalty may be imposed disproportionately on ethnic minorities as well as on low-income groups, a problem which does not seem to be fully acknowledged by the State party. (Dakwar & Hill, 2008)
Banning Death Penalty
There are a number of reasons why death penalty should be banned as a form of punishment:
- Death penalty’s financial cost is greater than that of life imprisonment;
- It falls under “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore proves to be a violation of the US constitution;
- The image of the country will be projected more positively if the said practice will be abolished;
- There is a strong possibility that many innocent prisoners, both male and female who were wrongfully accused and convicted may be executed;
- The execution of individuals who are not in their right state of mind;
- The procedure’s inability to bring back the life of the victims.
For the victims’ families, it is painful to learn that their loved ones lost their lives because some people did them harm, but we should keep in mind that we are not in the position to take the offenders’ lives in return; these people might have done a crime due to different reasons but spending the rest of their lives in prison is a punishment worse than death. If we continue to practice human executions, we will be no different from the criminals who will be executing.
Bibliography
Advocates For Human Rights. Human rights and the death penalty in the United States. http://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/ Retrieved 14 April 2011
Amnesty International, United States of America: Death by discrimination – the 9. continuing role of race in capital case, Apr. 23, 2003, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/046/2003/en/bd8584ef-d712-11dd-b0cc-1f0860013475/amr510462003en.pdf.
Amnesty International, Death Penalty and Race, 7. http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-race/page.do?id=1101091. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
Dakwar, T.R., & H. Hill, C. (2003). Capital punishment in the United States. In American civil liberties union. (pp 2-7). www.aclu.org/pdfs/capital/cap_pun_in_the_us.pdf. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
Deterrence: states without the death penalty have had consistently lower murder 35. Rates, death penalty information center. http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-the-death-penalty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
Dieter, R. C. The death penalty and human rights: U.S. death penalty and international law. In Oxford Round Table U.S. Death Penalty and International Law. (pp. 1-34). www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/Oxfordpaper.pdf
Donohue, J.J. (2006) The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrence, Economists’ Voice 33. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
Gerhardt, M.J., Rowe, T.D., JR., Brown, R.L. & Spann, G.A. (2000). Constitution of the United States. In Constitutional theory: Argument as perspectives. (2nd ed. App-11).
Gifis, S.H. (Ed)(2003). Death penalty. In Barron’s law dictionary. (5th ed.). Hauppauge, New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc
Lethal Injection http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/descriptions-execution-methods. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
Pickering, J. & Hongju Koh, (2008). American diplomacy and the death penalty. In Focus on diplomacy and the death penalty. Foreign Service Journal. October 2003 issue. (pp 19-25) uspolicy.be/issues/deathpenalty/deathpenalty.asp
Reilly, M. (2007). Lethal injection drugs 'unreliable' http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11695-lethal-injection-drugs-unreliable.html. Retrieved on 14 April 2011.
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