8:25 PM

 At 8:25 this evening, Central Time, the state of Alabama executed a man by suffocating him to death with nitrogen gas. It was the first time this method had been used to kill a prisoner in U.S. history. 

I'm not sure it is better or worse than receiving a lethal injection—or, for that matter, death by electrocution or firing squad. The horror of the scene lies not so much in the method used or the suffering it caused; but in the fact that the government—the institution nominally charged with protecting the life of its citizens—deliberately strapped a man's face into a mask with the intent of forcibly ending his life.

It is said that the man, Kenneth Smith, struggled for several minutes while the gas filled the mask. This was attributed not to the effects of the poison—which, once inhaled, is said to kill the victim much more rapidly than that—but to the fact he was trying to hold his breath for as long as possible. As any person would, he tried to prolong his life for even a few minutes more—whatever he could have—and certainly died in panic and anguish. 

I am reminded of Orwell as a member of the Burmese colonial police, when he walked a condemned man to his death. He saw that the man made sure to step around a puddle on the ground on his way to the gallows. Even with his death just moments away, he did not want to get wet. So it was with Kenneth Smith. No matter how inevitable the death that was coming, he could not help but behave until the last seconds as if life still stretched before him. 

That is unspeakably human. 

No one should ever experience the anguish Smith felt in that chair. No one should have to fight for their last breath. But what are we to say of it when such a fate is not just a natural tragedy, but rather is inflicted gratuitously, willfully—by a government—in our name as members of the public—upon a person who is already confined in their power, hence utterly at their mercy? 

What are we to say of the moral cowardice of the White House—of a president who campaigned against the death penalty, but declined even to issue a statement questioning the justice of this execution?

What are we to say of the six Supreme Court justices, who had it in their power to intervene at the last moment to save Smith's life? They let the opportunity slip by, and now it can never be reclaimed. That is the nature of the death penalty: of all the criminal sentences, it is uniquely irrevocable. 

What is one to say of the six justices who could have halted the evening's relentless march toward death, but didn't? Perhaps one can say of them only what Edgar Lee Masters's "Circuit Judge" said of himself: that "even Hod Putt, the murderer/ Hanged by my sentence/ Was innocent in soul compared with me."

Masters is far from the only poet to speak out against the gallows. Some of the greatest writers in English (and other languages) have lodged similar protests. I was reminded of Housman's verses on the subject, in A Shropshire Lad, and I went back to look them up. There I found a haunting line, written in reflection on a condemned man in Shrewsbury jail: "he will hear the stroke of eight/ And not the stroke of nine[.]"

The line could hardly have stood out to me, the first time I read it. It had not come to mind when I remembered Housman's commentary on capital punishment. But on this occasion, it seemed all too terribly apt. 8:25 PM: this was, after all, the time of Smith's death. He lived to see the stroke of eight. But not the stroke of nine. 

This is the intolerable obscenity of the death penalty. It blots a human consciousness out of existence. One hour it is here; the next it is gone. And what's worse—it does this needlessly, without benefit of any claim of self-defense, while that consciousness is still struggling for breath and life. As Orwell wrote, upon seeing the condemned man step around the puddle: 

I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. [...] He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone--one mind less, one world less.

That is what an execution means. And all needlessly. For we could end it tomorrow; all it would take is to stop doing it.