A Painless Death?

 The Supreme Court unexpectedly did the right thing yesterday when they granted a zero-hour reprieve to a death row inmate in Alabama, sparing his life (if only temporarily) from imminent execution by nitrogen gas. 

The case prompted a surreal back-and-forth in the lower courts, though, about just how painless the various available methods of execution in American prisons might be. 

Nitrogen gas, some say, puts one instantaneously into a state of unconsciousness. But witnesses of the execution describe scenes in which the body heaves and shudders, sometimes for whole minutes. 

The prisoner in this case, Jeffrey Lee, pleaded instead for a firing squad. The district judge agreed—as the New York Times put it—that shooting "four .30-caliber bullets at his heart" would likely leave him "unconscious before his brain could register feelings of pain."

And if not a firing squad, the federal judge suggested, why not one of those other vaunted "painless" methods of execution widely available in our great land: lethal injection or the electric chair? 

As Arthur Koestler puts it in his classic polemic against capital punishment, Reflections on Hanging: "[T]he defense of a savage method of execution on the grounds that 'it doesn’t really hurt' is [a] leitmotif down to our day."

And yet, in an unusual moment, the lower court judge in this case may have dared to utter a word of truth in her opinion: "human life cannot be purposefully extinguished without some risk of pain."

And if not physical pain—what about terror, dread, humiliation—those agonizing scenes from the death house that Koestler wrote "should only happen in nightmare dreams"?

Come to think of it, perhaps we should not, as a society, be trying to "purposely extinguish" people's lives against their will at all? 

Fancy that! What, you mean join every other peer nation in the developed world?

"I shall never achieve real peace of mind until hanging is abolished," Koestler wrote. 

We should feel the same today about the various lethal injections, suffocations, electrocutions and shootings our society is still inflicting on unwilling condemned prisoners to this day. 

We should feel, as Hugh MacDiarmid put it, whenever we think of those men and women Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars

Their trousers slit for the electrodes

And their hair cut for the cap

that we are 

suddenly completely bereft 

Of la grande amitié des choses crées,

The unity of life which can only be forged by love.