To Hang a Man

 The New York Times published an article yesterday about yet another botched execution in the United States—this time in Idaho. The officials administering the lethal injection apparently tried and failed several times to find a vein, eventually jabbing the prisoner in all four limbs, before giving up for the day. A line in the article stands out. The head of Idaho's prisons was quoted as saying, of the attempt: "Our first objective is to carry this out with dignity, professionalism and respect."

Dignity? Respect? What dignity and respect is there in trying to inject a person with lethal chemicals? What respect can there be in taking a breathing person, who wants to live, and forcing death upon them against their will. Respect? What about respecting a person's will to live? To be sure, if executions there must be, one would rather have them conducted with as much decorum as possible; but to characterize this as respecting the "dignity" of the prisoner seems an abuse of language. 

Almost inevitably, though, when debates about the death penalty come up, people will respond: but look what he did! Doesn't he deserve it? And whatever the prisoner did in this case, one can no doubt imagine a scenario sufficiently heinous that one might conclude that death seems warranted. We each of us draw a line somewhere. We can probably come up with some sequence of events that, if they really did happen, would make it hard to maintain that the person who committed them still deserves life. 

But, as Bryan Stevenson has always argued, the real question about the death penalty is not—should this person live?—but rather: should the state kill? And those are two very different questions. The spectacle of the state taking a living body and trying to turn it into a corpse—hunting for veins in a person's body, with however much "dignity" and "respect" they can muster—in order to inject fatal poison into them—is a sufficient answer in itself. The state does not have a moral right to kill. 

As my previous post mentioned, I was reading Ralph Hodgson's poetry earlier this week; and I found there a poem that makes this point more eloquently than I can. Hodgson often writes with something of the same moral earnestness and pastoral setting as A.E. Housman—and, in this poem, he tackles the same theme—namely, capital punishment by hanging—that Housman addressed in some of his most powerful verses of social protest, which I've quoted before, from A Shropshire Lad. 

Hodgson's poem on the subject is simple and direct. It rehearses the few steps necessary to ready a person for the gallows. "To fit the cap,/ and fix the rope"... Hodgson then concedes whatever point the defenders of capital punishment may wish to make about how horrible the condemned may be; however much he may "deserve" death. "I know, I know," says Hodgson, "What can you do [...] a man like that?" But then he leaves us with the lingering doubt: "But Oh it seems—/I don't know what—/To hang a man!"

So it is with Idaho's botched execution; or the recent execution by nitrogen gas in Alabama. One can look into the details of the cases. The condemned in both did terrible things. Maybe some would conclude that their lives are not worth preserving. But, to echo Hodgson—to actually ready the needle; to strap down the victim; to hunt for the vein; to pump in the gas—still it just seems... to kill a man. Perhaps the sheer mechanics of that process—the actual sight of what it entails—is argument against it enough.