The first, a botched execution in Florida in which it took the state 34 minutes to kill someone has forced Governor Jeb Bush to place a temporary moratorium on executions.
'All the people that are against the death penalty whenever there is a chance will call for suspending the death penalty,'' Bush said. ``That would be like ready, fire, aim. I think it is better to actually determine what happened; if there was any thing out of the ordinary that took place, before you would call for that kind of delay.''
Mark Elliot, with Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, retorted that Bush's comments and the death penalty itself are an example of ``ready, fire, aim.''
In California, the land of so-called liberal and 'San Francisco' values which still carries out executions despite that leftist leaning, a US district court judge decided that lethal injection is, in fact, cruel and unusual punishment.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld executions – by lethal injection, hanging, firing squad, electric chair and gas chamber – despite the pain they might cause, but has left unsettled the issue of whether the pain is unconstitutionally excessive.
California has been under a capital punishment moratorium since February, when Fogel called off the execution of rapist and murderer Michael Morales amid concerns that condemned inmates might suffer excruciating deaths.
Fogel found evidence that the last six men executed at San Quentin might have been conscious and still breathing when lethal drugs were administered.
A four-day hearing in September revealed that prison guards were inadequately trained to participate in executions. One prison official who was part of the execution team had been sanctioned for smuggling drugs into San Quentin.
Drugs were not properly accounted for, at times they weren't properly mixed and unused drugs were not returned to the prison's pharmacy. Executioners worked in the crowded chamber under dim lights.
Fogel ordered anesthesiologists to be on hand, or demanded that a licensed medical professional inject a large, fatal dose of a sedative instead of the additional paralyzing agent and heart-stopping drugs that are normally used. But no medical professional was willing to participate.
Since the US Supreme Court has determined that executions do not violate the constitution, it's obvious that the constitution needs to be amended. The federal government is only too eager to propose amendments that would take away a homosexual couple's right to marry or to stop people from burning the US flag, but it seems that even though so many Americans are proud to tout the fact that the US was founded on so-called Judeo-Christian values, the first commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill', is routinely ignored in the name of seeking revenge. The common retort is that of 'an eye for an eye' but, as Gandhi rightly reminded us:
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
It's not the fact that poorly trained or corrupt prison officials tasked with carrying out these executions are the problem. It's that the death penalty should be outlawed.
The long US history of horrendous execution scenarios such as those that occured with Florida's electric chair 'Old Sparky' ought to have been a sign to people who were bound and determined to continue killing people with the state's stamp of approval that the bigger issue of whether executions should be carried out at all needed to be addressed. Instead, states have decided to look for more efficient ways to kill people. Obviously, that has failed.
You have to wonder just what it will take for the United States to finally catch up with much of the 'civilized world' that it so likes to refer to and put an end to executions once and for all.
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