Bloody Hands

 Just days after the horrific botched execution of Christa Pike reminded all the world of the inhumanity of capital punishment—and stripped away any lingering illusion that lethal injection is an especially "painless" or "humane" means of taking a person's life by force—Texas apparently proceeded last night with yet another state murder. 

Jamaal Howard was taken to the death chamber last night in Huntsville, where he was administered a fatal dose of pentobarbital. Multiple courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, declined to spare his life at the 11th hour, despite claims he is intellectually disabled. According to the Associated Press, he was "pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m." 

Like the young man hanged in Shrewsbury jail, in one of A.E. Housman's great poems against capital punishment in A Shropshire Lad, he "hear[d] the stroke of eight / And not the stroke of nine." Indeed, he'll never hear the stroke of another hour. And not because nature ended Howard's life—but because our politicians, laws, and court system did.

State governments still carry out the majority of executions in this country (with my other home state of Florida leading the body count this year). But the federal government hardly has its hands clean either. The Trump administration has made it a matter of official policy to encourage state prosecutors to bring death cases more frequently (pour encourager les autres?)

Howard was convicted for murdering a woman twenty-six years ago in a store robbery gone wrong. That is indeed a terrible crime. But the Trump administration that seeks to encourage state governments to execute more people like him has, in just the past year, itself ordered the murder of more than two hundred unarmed and defenseless civilians in boat strikes. 

And they have faced no legal penalties or repercussions for these acts, which by any account constitute murder and war crimes, if not a crime against humanity.

Christa Pike, a woman in her fifties—tortured in the execution chamber by multiple attempts to inject burning chemicals into her veins; Jamaal Howard, a man with intellectual disabilities—killed by order of the state just days later, by the same cruel method; while the biggest murderers of them all—the ones running our government—publicly boast of their crimes without consequence... 

It's almost as if they were trying to prove the terrible truth of Hugh MacDiarmid's searing words, from his poem The Battle Continues, when he wrote of that hypocrisy, falsity, and callousness of the Law,

The infernal sadism that hauls to the scaffold 

A poor woman sick at both ends, and places

A congenital idiot playing with his dolls

In the Electric Chair—yet kisses the bloody hands

of mass murderers...