 by Dr. Jeffrey Lant Author's program note. Since the beginning of human time, we have been engaged in finding ways of killing each other in every imaginable way. For thousands of years with no respite whatsoever, we have used our potent ingenuity to hack each other to bits, stab, slice, mince, pierce, shred, pull, burn, smother, shoot, poison, impale, boil, flay, disembowel, crush, stone, dismember, crucify, and otherwise eradicate anyone deemed unacceptable and because they were deemed unacceptable we gave no thought at all to the means used to dispose of the offending humanity. They transgressed against our exacting standards; whatever those standards might be. It was enough, therefore, that they be removed; never mind how or when or where. We decreed death... it didn't much matter how that death was delivered, so long as it did not affront our comfortable morality or mental serenity. Yet despite millennia of experimentation with the tools and means of eradication, we find ourselves today in a state of utmost confusion on the matter of how to end the lives of people who have with malice aforethought destroyed the innocent people who did nothing more than find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had hurt others even unto death itself; thus it was fair and equitable that they be hurt in their turn, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and if they suffered as they approached eternity, what difference did that make? They were, after all, despicable, contemptible, humans in name only, the dross of humanity, not worth a single thought, much less pang or regret. Kill by all means. Kill by every means. Kill whenever necessary. Kill wherever necessary. It was all in a day's work, every day. Thus even amongst the most civilized of people the apparatus of death and disposal grew, a growth industry flourishing everywhere though we made every effort to ignore its grisly manifestations and ghastly secrets and procedures, pretending we just didn't see. Thus for a lifetime, I took in my stride the unending series of grainy newspaper photos, condemned thuggish men (for they usually were men) who starred at me with dead eyes and a look of baleful resignation. They had caused maximum pain; they must receive maximum pain in return, for of course that is what the victim's family wanted as well as 60% of Americans overall for whom the implementation of death was insufficient. What America wanted was a Death Row morality play of the kind portrayed by Montgomery Cliff in the 1951 masterpiece "A Place In the Sun" where the film ends as the regretful convict truly sorry at last walks to oblivion, his brain already overwrought with the sharpest of memories, the most pitiable of fears; a fervent prayer in every step, that there is a God of mercy, that this God will "save a wretch like me". Hallelujah! Dennis McGuire must have prayed for this with unrestrained ardor, but if he did his prayer went unanswered. Dennis McGuire, rapist, murderer, chemical experiment, human being. It is hard to feel sorry for McGuire. After all he brought his travail on himself when on February 12, 1989 he raped and stabbed to death pregnant newlywed Joy Stewart in Preble County in western Ohio. It was the kind of brutal, senseless crime that screams out for capital punishment, swift, sure, certain, unlamented in any way. Thus when he was later arrested on an unrelated assault charge, he bargained for an acquittal by telling investigators he knew the murderer. Then he named his own brother-in-law. This assertion unraveled quickly; McGuire himself was then charged and with DNA evidence convicted. Last month, he admitted his guilt in a letter to Ohio Governor John Kasich who then rejected clemency. The decision had thus been made that McGuire would be eliminated... but how? Here the insistent bumbling of local officials at every level turned a man of obloquy and disgust into a fellow human being worthy of civic consideration and God's unmitigated love, to the point where ignoring his egregious history diminishes us. How did this happen? What is "cruel", what is "unusual" punishment? For most of recorded history, capital punishment was designed not merely to kill, but to do so with maximum pain and suffering; responsible officials would have been sharply criticized and seen as derelict if any part or portion of their hurtful, brutal agenda had been neglected... and so no part ever was; their success to be measured in the screams and shrieks their unsurpassed finesse rending fragile flesh ensured. However, in the late 17th century things began to change as "cruel and unusual" punishment began to be seen, at least by progressive jurists, as intolerable, unjust, unnecessary, a manifestation of the barbarism they had as enlightened men outgrown, to their honor, credit, and glory. Thus did the English ensure that such punishment be sharply condemned in one of the essential documents of our civilization, the 1689 Bill of Rights, drawn up 300 years before McGuire's heinous crime. This being the case surely more humane methods of execution must have been implemented in the last three centuries. You may judge for yourself. Three centuries ago it took 10-15 minutes to hang the accused. When the sharp descending knife was invented by Dr. Guillotine in 1791 that was slashed considerably, in a deliberate attempt to decrease pain and increase efficiency. Now consider Dennis McGuire. He was the "beneficiary" of the latest killing technique, intravenous doses of two drugs, the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone. The result was that McGuire lingered 26 horrifying minutes, the slowest minutes of a life which was ending in squalor, terror and Hell... and unnecessary pain, sudden snorts, irregular breathing, writhing, gasping. "Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God" his daughter, Amber, said as she watched these final, excruciating minutes which passed so slowly. The double drug injection, never used before, so little studied and known had produced by far the slowest execution in Ohio history and one which could not possibly be regarded as anything other than cruel and unusual punishment. How did this happen? Herein is the heart of the terrible dilemma confronting officials in every state and the Great Republic overall. The problem. In a nutshell the problem is this: There is at this moment no reliable way in Ohio, where 5 more men await their fate on Death Row for executions to be carried out. Thus Ohio found itself in the unenviable position of needing to execute a man but having no convenient and reasonably inexpensive way to do it.Thus as Dennis McGuire's attorney Allen Bohnert said, what Ohio did was simply "a failed, agonizing experiment", not least because the drugs only arrived the day before and no one at the prison had ever used it before. No wonder it took such an unusually long time to kill... and why the condemned man gasped so often and so loudly as he approached his end. He was suffering from a medical phenomenon called "air hunger" that caused him to suffer "agony and terror" but which no one involved expected, for the simple reason they were completely unfamiliar with these drugs, their application, and consequences of use. But was it legally "cruel and unusual"? It is clear the execution of Dennis McGuire was botched, bumbled, flubbed, mishandled, mismanaged, muffed, muddled, goofed up, and generally bollixed. However, does that automatically and necessarily mean it was cruel and unusual punishment? To see, I sought the opinion of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan in the 1972 case "Furman v.Georgia." Here are his four essential queries: 1) Was the punishment too severe for the crime? 2) Was it arbitrary? 3) Did the punishment offend society's sense of justice? By these three criteria, the deed was neither cruel nor unusual, but Brennan's fourth point is telling. 4) Was the punishment more effective than a less severe penalty? The answer is clearly that McGuire's amateurish execution was far more severe than it needed to be to achieve the objective, for he deserved capital punishment for his crime but not the debacle of its execution. And it is here that Ohio and the other 30 states using lethal injection must act... for no one at any time for any reason deserves to be treated in the profoundly unsettling way Dennis McGuire was. Kill the man for the deed, but do not humiliate or degrade him.This is the right and civilized thing to do, and as we aspire to and claim civility, so we must do this and do it now for we are little more than barbaric until we do. Envoi I have selected as the musical accompaniment to this article, the score for the 1967 film "In Cold Blood," based on the runaway best-selling 1966 book by Truman Capote. Composed by Quincy Jones, the music is stark, threatening, menacing, frightening. In these eerie notes you can feel the crime and the death of 4 innocent people and the two guilty ones, by hanging; the means Dennis McGuire might have selected, had he been given the chance... Go to any search engine and find it now. Don't listen to it alone and never of a stormy evening when the wind blown trees brush against your windows and the night breeds contorted figures who mean you no good and seem to be inching towards you with looming threat and horrid purpose. Don't open the front door to anyone. |
