It was cold outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on the morning of November 15, where some two dozen people formed a circle in the parking lot. They had traveled to Lucasville from various parts of the state, wearing heavy jackets and carrying handmade signs. A large banner read: “We remember the victims … BUT NOT WITH MORE KILLING.”
Inside the prison, officials were getting ready to kill 69-year-old Alva Campbell, convicted of murder in 1997. His execution was scheduled for 10 a.m. For weeks, Campbell’s lawyers had fought for a reprieve, warning that his severe health problems posed serious risks to carrying out lethal injection. Campbell had been diagnosed with an array of chronic illnesses in recent years, from cancer to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He used a walker and an external colostomy bag and relied on oxygen treatments four times a day. During a recent examination at the prison hospital, medical staff found he could not breathe lying down.
Of particularly grave concern were Campbell’s veins, which his attorneys repeatedly said were not viable for inserting an IV.
Ohio death row inmate Alva Campbell.
Photo: Ohioans to Stop Executions
The execution had been delayed for nearly an hour that morning as staff reportedly examined Campbell’s arms and legs one last time. Then, just before 11 a.m., the protesters got word that witnesses were being led to the death chamber. The execution would soon be underway. One by one, they struck a large homemade bell, brought by Abraham Bonowitz, a veteran organizer with Ohioans to Stop Executions, and head of the new group Death Penalty Action. Bonowitz constructed the bell from a retired gas canister. Its sound was startlingly loud by design. After the last execution in Lucasville, relatives of the condemned man had said they could hear the bell inside the prison – it was comforting to know someone cared.
The protesters were solemnly waiting their turn to toll the bell when they saw people leaving the death house. It was 11:27 a.m. The execution appeared to be over. But moments later, a Columbus Dispatch staffer posted a tweet from inside the prison. “Media and pool are back,” he wrote. “Alva Campbell has not been executed. Apparently a vein could not be found.”
Media and pool are back. Alva Campbell has not been executed. Apparently a vein could not be found. @DispatchAlerts
— Joshua A. Bickel (@joshuabickel) November 15, 2017
“He’s alive,” Bonowitz said cautiously. It was not clear what would come next. But before long, a flurry of phone calls and tweets confirmed what people were hoping: The execution had been called off.
In the parking lot, there were hugs and relieved laughter. Some looked pained, unsure what to feel. Whatever had happened was surely traumatic for Campbell and prison staff alike. As people got in their cars and headed home, state troopers began pulling away from the prison as well. Just before noon, the prison gates opened, and a black hearse drove past the parking lot where the remaining protesters stood. There was no body inside.
Campbell’s attorney, David Stebbins, approached the parking lot just before 1 p.m. “We had a difficult morning,” he said. He had watched as his client was stuck with needles four times in different parts of his body, the last time in his right shin. Stebbins and other witnesses could not hear the sounds from the execution chamber, but he saw his client throw his head back and cry out in pain. After some 25 minutes, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction head Gary Mohr halted the execution with the approval of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who denied clemency to Campbell just a week before. “That’s the only way they can stop it,” Stebbins said.
Stebbins only had a few minutes with Campbell before he was transported back to his death row cell at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, just north of Lucasville. “He did say it’s a day he’ll never forget,” Stebbins said. “I don’t think I’ll forget it either.” He did not know how long the reprieve would last. “We simply haven’t been told.”
But by that evening, Kasich had answered the question. Campbell’s new execution had already been set, for June 5, 2019.
An empty hearse drives out of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility after Alva Campbell’s execution failed and was postponed, on Nov. 15, 2017.
Photo: Liliana Segura
“It Don’t Work, It Don’t Work, It Don’t Work, It Ain’t Working”
The failed execution of Alva Campbell was historic — it was the third time a person has survived an execution in the United States since 1946. Yet it was the second time a man has left the gurney alive in Ohio in less than 10 years. The same thing happened at the Lucasville prison in 2009 after the attempted execution of Romell Broom. For two hours on September 15, 2009, execution team members tried and failed to find a vein in order to carry out his lethal injection. At one point, they took a 45-minute break, then tried again. It was only after 18 failed attempts to insert the IV lines that then-Gov. Ted Strickland stopped the execution. A prison spokesperson would later praise Broom for being “extremely cooperative and respectful” during the ordeal. “He actually attempted to help the team find an access point,” she said.
In fact, the episode was traumatizing for all those involved. At a subsequent hearing, members of the execution team testified anonymously about what happened. One woman — identified only as Execution Team Member 9 – had rushed out of the room after failed attempts to find a vein left blood streaming down Broom’s arm. Asked if she was OK, she said no. Broom described his own experience in a self-published book, co-written with a British writer in 2012. He described the pain of the repeated punctures; how he was told to relax; how one needle hit the bone in his ankle. “At one point there were 15 people in the room, all intent on executing me,” he wrote. “Some of them went out, but one guy in particular was really determined. He just kept on trying.” That night, Broom said, he dreamed that he was lying down while birds pecked at his body.
Broom, 61, remains on death row. He has insisted he is innocent, arguing that it would be cruel and unusual to try to execute him again.
Romell Broom shows his puncture wounds of his failed execution after 18 attempts in 2009.
Photo: Death Penalty Information Center
For a person to survive execution is certainly rare. But in death chambers across the country, botched executions — and in particular, clumsy attempts to find a vein — are disturbingly common. Ohio has a particularly ugly track record. In 2006, Ohio executed a man named Joseph Clark, whose vein collapsed during the procedure. He lifted his head from the gurney and said, “It don’t work, it don’t work, it don’t work, it ain’t working,” according to one witness, later moaning, crying, and making guttural sounds. In 2007, Ohio’s execution team took so long to find a vein to kill 37-year-old Christopher Newton, he was given a bathroom break.
Perhaps most famously, in 2014 the state executed Dennis McGuire using the unprecedented combination of midazolam — the now controversial sedative — and the pain medication hydromorphone. State officials were warned in advance that the untested drugs put McGuire at risk of a suffocating death. Horrified witnesses watched as the 253-pound McGuire “repeated cycles of snorting, gurgling, and arching his back” and appeared to “writhe in pain,” according to a lawsuit filed by his family.
As Ohio has revised its execution protocol again and again, death penalty supporters have widely scoffed at the suffering of the condemned. Those on death row showed no such concern for their victims, after all. Campbell’s “special pillow” became tabloid fodder – the ultimate symbol of the coddled criminal. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed that a executions need not be painless to adhere to the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. The justices have upheld execution by lethal injection, most recently ruling in Glossip v. Gross that a three-drug protocol using midazolam does not pose an intolerable risk of cruel and unusual punishment – despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Glossip significantly changed the rules for challenging executions by lethal injection. Under the ruling, lawyers for the condemned must offer a better, viable alternative to a state’s given protocol. “The problem with Alva is that if you have problems with vein access – which he does – any form of lethal injection is not going to work,” Stebbins told me on the eve of Campbell’s scheduled execution. “So you’re then forced to choose something outside lethal injection.” Campbell opted for the firing squad – a choice that made national news. But Ohio responded that it could not accommodate the request, because it has no law on the books authorizing that method of execution.
For lawyers and their clients, this is perhaps the most perverse outcome of Glossip. “We’ve got to suggest ways for the state to kill our client,” Stebbins said. “That’s really difficult. Clients don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to pick a way.” But it is what the law demands.
Photo: Liliana Segura
“I See a Lot of Bad Childhoods”
No relatives came to witness Campbell’s execution on Wednesday. By all accounts, he is estranged from his family. Like many on death row, his early childhood was marked by severe abuse and trauma. But even compared to the average death penalty case, Campbell’s clemency petition paints a truly harrowing life. “I see a lot of bad childhoods – horrible childhoods,” said Stebbins, who has defended capital cases for 35 years, “but I’ve never seen this level of violence directed at children.”
His opinion is echoed by an array of experts cited in the clemency petition, who describe the abuse Campbell endured as “shocking.” One psychologist likened his childhood home in Cleveland as a “hostage situation.” According to affidavits from Campbell’s sisters, their father was a vicious white racist who would beat their mother, who was black, unconscious, saying, “I should have never married a nigger.” He beat his children as well and raped his own daughters. Campbell’s sister Gwen recalls being forced to perform oral sex on her father. She said she believes he also sexually abused Campbell. “My father was a very sick individual.”
When Campbell was 10, his father pleaded guilty to incest and statutory rape of one of his daughters. He was sent to the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Left with their mother, an alcoholic, Campbell and his siblings remained severely neglected. In February 1959, according to court records, the children showed up at a Cleveland bar begging for food. The police were called, and they were taken into state custody. Between foster homes and juvenile facilities, Campbell endured a new cycle of abuse and neglect.
If Campbell’s untreated trauma was no excuse for his crimes, it certainly helped explain them. The effect of early abuse can be catastrophic to a person’s social and psychological development. “What happened to Alva when he was growing up clearly destroyed him,” one expert opined in his clemency petition. By the time Campbell was 20, he had gone to prison for an armed robbery that left an Ohio patrolman wounded. Soon after his release, in 1972, Campbell shot and killed a man at a bar on Cleveland’s east side. He went to prison for 20 years. He was almost off parole in 1997 when he committed another armed robbery. On the day of his arraignment, Campbell feigned paralysis, arriving to court in a wheelchair. Then he overpowered the guard, carjacked a truck, and drove around for hours drinking beer while keeping the 18-year-old driver, Charles Dials, captive. He later shot Dials twice in the head.
Among those horrified by the murder was Campbell’s ex-wife, Sharol Kelly. She had met Campbell while he was in prison and married him before his release. They were together for 10 years. In the clemency petition, Kelly said that it was only after he left prison that she realized “how damaged Alva was.” The man she had known as kind and compassionate while he was behind bars became “a dysfunctional mess” after he got out. “It was like Jekyll and Hyde,” she said.
In a phone call two days before his scheduled execution, Kelly shared how she herself was victimized by Campbell. She had first met him in 1982, while working the night shift at St. Anthony Hospital in Columbus. It was a hard period in her life; she was going through a divorce and her oldest son of six was facing prison time for a drug offense. One night, Kelly recalled, a nursing assistant asked her, “ ‘Have you talked to the patient in 910?’ I’m like, ‘Well, no, not really.’ And she said, ‘Well, you should talk to him. He’s very nice.’”
The patient was Campbell. He was shackled to his bed, with a guard standing watch. He had been admitted to the hospital for foot surgery. Kelly found him handsome. But more importantly, she quickly realized he was someone she could talk to about things she could not easily discuss with other people. “I didn’t have to feel embarrassed about talking about my situation,” she said, “and I thought with my son going to prison, that maybe he could give me some insight.”
Over Campbell’s three-week stay at the hospital, she came to look forward to their conversations. Campbell told her that he was in prison for killing a man who had been molesting a young girl. “So, I thought, ‘Well, that’s still wrong, but yet it was for a good reason,’ if you can look at it that way.” After he was discharged, they wrote to each other – and eventually she went to visit him. She was struck by how many prison employees stopped by their table to chat, taking it as a good sign. As their relationship deepened, she would cry during her drives back home from their visits. “He was what I thought I needed at the time,” she said.
It wasn’t until Kelly picked him up on the day of his release that she realized the life she’d envisioned was not going to be possible. “I thought he’d come out and give me a big hug and kiss,” she said. Instead, when she reached out toward him, “he says, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.’ I said, ‘What?’” He explained that he had been in prison for too long. They never consummated their marriage.
Campbell only lived with Kelly for six weeks. He drank heavily and was emotionally abusive. He had previously been kind to her children, but now he was mean and dismissive. Kelly soon realized that much of what he had told her was a lie, including the story behind his crime. One day, Campbell announced he was going to live with a different woman. He told Kelly she was thinner and prettier than her. But he continued to ask Kelly for money and later for a place to stay, saying he was homeless. Kelly was not sure if she believed him. But she suspected he was addicted to crack.
In the years after Campbell was sent to death row, Kelly followed the developments in his case on the news. As his execution date approached earlier this year, “I could not believe the picture of him that was put on TV,” she said. He was unrecognizable.
Kelly considered trying to witness the execution. “It wasn’t because I would be glad to see him die,” she said. “That’s really the last thing I wanted.” As hurt and betrayed as she felt, she mostly felt sorry for him. She thought he should die knowing that somebody cared.
But in the end, she just wrote him a letter. “I needed to hear him say, ‘I’m sorry for using you’ or, you know, ‘mentally abusing you,’” she said. “I just needed to hear it, because it’s like, it was a story that wasn’t finished. There wasn’t an ending.”
Connie Weaver, a death penalty supporter, holds a sign commemorated the Lucasville Prison riot of 1993, outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on Nov. 15, 2017.
Photo: Liliana Segura
Another Traumatic Ordeal
The family of Charles Dials wanted an ending, too. His uncle and two siblings were at the prison in Lucasville on Wednesday to watch Campbell die. Whatever closure his execution might have offered, they did not receive it that day. Instead, they got another traumatic ordeal.
Outside the prison, others sought a different kind of closure. On the opposite end of the parking lot from where the anti-death penalty protesters stood, a local resident named Connie Weaver stood in sunglasses, holding a large sign reading, “Remember Bobby 1993.” It commemorated the Lucasville Prison riot almost 25 years ago, which left eight people dead, including a prison guard named Robert Vallandingham. Weaver’s husband was working as a guard at the time. She came to the prison on execution days to show her support for the death penalty.
The prison’s history was no less personal to Kwame Ajamu, who was there that morning with his wife. The new chair of the board of the exoneree-led organization Witness to Innocence, Ajamu was sent to death row in 1975 for a crime he did not commit. He was only 17 when he was convicted; his death sentence was commuted to life and he was released in 2003. But it would take another 11 years for Ohio to exonerate him. His co-defendant, Ricky Jackson, was released and exonerated in 2014, after almost 40 years in prison. It was Jackson who had asked presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last fall why she supported the death penalty when it send innocent people like him to die.
Ajamu had not returned to Lucasville since getting out. Looking back toward the prison, he said the experience was bittersweet. On the one hand, there was the satisfaction of standing outside the place where he’d once been condemned to die. But it also brought back traumatic memories. Ajamu found it ironic that the state would seek to kill a man in Campbell’s condition. “Here is a man who is so severely sick that if he laid down, he would literally pass away,” he said. “And someone in this paid facility in the State of Ohio actually took the time to figure out and devise a way to kill Mr. Campbell.” They call people on death row the “worst of the worst,” Ajamu said. But “to me, that is got to be the worst of the worst way of thinking.”
The other protesters ranged from college students who were new to protests, to retirees, like Carl Hyde, a doctor who had come to Lucasville many times before. Standing next to a banner featuring all the people executed since 1999, he pointed to the names and faces he remembered. He had corresponded with several of them, including Campbell, who asked him to send poems. Hyde described lethal injection as a travesty. “It’s unethical for a medical professional to participate in an execution,” he said. He was outside the prison when Ohio tried to kill Romell Broom. “We waited and waited and waited.” He remembered seeing the execution team leave the prison and return to try again.
“It’s just so wrong,” Hyde said. Quakers have a term, he explained. They call it a “leading.” It’s an internal pull, a moral drive to act. For him, that leading is protesting the death penalty until it is abolished. “I have to be here.”
Sharol Kelly was at home watching coverage of the execution that morning. She was flipping back and forth between two local channels when news of the reprieve came out. “It’s just really a weird feeling,” she told me on the phone the next day. “I know it had to be hard on the [Dials] family. And probably on Alva, too.” Kelly said the TV news reported that Campbell had shaken hands with the execution team and that he had tears in his eyes.
Kelly suspects Campbell will not live to see his next execution date. She is still wondering if he got her last letter. “I haven’t gotten an answer yet,” she said. “If I don’t, you know, in a week or so, I’ll write another letter.”
Top photo: Signs hang outside of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in reaction to the scheduled execution of Alva Campbell, on Nov. 15, 2017.
My sister was murdered in 1991, she was 10, I was 8. There is zero doubt whatsoever who the killer is. He still lives, still fights, still appeals. I have had zero faith in justice since then. At 34 I have lived far short from the life I could. The impact this has had on me, knowing the system fails, knowing my family failed, knowing there are completely misguided people acting like they know what’s best, is almost impossible to quantify. Zero faith in justice, or my fellow man. Line them up, shoot the murdering scum. Somehow this will cause yet another stay of execution. Save the victim mentality for the actual victims. Dude kills my sister at 10 years old and has had over 25 years of hot meals, air conditioning, In general a pampered life. This dude got married….. He has lived a far more meaningful like than my sister did. Not to mention my forever destroyed in every manner family. Cruel and unusual. How about being stabbed and raped and dumped over the side of a hill? liliana. Just go away.
Just put a bullet in his head while he’s sleeping. Keeping him alive is cruel.
And I agree 100% with Pepito.
Save the fetus but if the child it becomes commits a crime, then, put it to death in the most cruel of ways. That makes perfect sense. The Christian god must masturbate day and night with the shenanigans of this country.
An another thought: if the guy were terminally ill and wanted to kill himself to end his suffering, the Christocrats would be doing everything within their power – and then some – to prevent to die in his terms and with dignity.
What a fucked up country!
The death penalty does not belong in a civilized society. I guess that makes it ok for the United States.
Any asshole who ‘s against death penalty should volunteer as prison guard at the nearest state prison .
Let’s kill ’em all and let Jesus sort out his own, eh?
Why? So they can rape the inmates?
It seems wasteful that a country with over 300 million guns finds it so exceedingly difficult to kill someone. This is just another example of government inefficiency, creating a bureaucracy to develop killing protocols that don’t actually work.
One solution is to abolish the death penalty, not due to any moral arguments, but because the government is simply too incompetent to execute anyone. In a democracy, the people attempt to preserve their freedom by electing ever more incompetent leaders, who attempt to act like despots, but don’t have the wherewithal to pull it off. Government incompetence is the single most important factor in preserving freedom. The Founders understood this, although they referred to it as ‘checks and balances’, and wrote the Constitution to ensure that the government was incapable of functioning.
So this botched execution is in the finest tradition of American government.
“a country with over 300 million guns finds it so exceedingly difficult to kill someone”
Are you implying we should just allow people with guns to execute death row inmates?
“creating a bureaucracy to develop killing protocols that don’t actually work”
Lethal injection worked, up until companies began expressing objections to supplying the reagents, especially anaesthetics. Getting KCl to stop the heart is easy (does it need to be USP grade, clinical grade, etc, if you plan to kill the subject outright?), but anaesthetics to guarantee a outwardly peaceful death are more difficult to obtain. Using anaesthetics procured for hospitals for executions places the hospitals in a quandry (aiding and abetting in death), and similarly places the suppliers in a quandry as well. Prepping the KCl solution and then injecting directly into the heart and waiting for death is not likely to be quick either. State governments could synthesize their own anaesthetics (going back to the traditional ones, such as ether), perhaps, but then there is always a reagent question (will people supply the reagents knowing that they will eventually be used in carrying out capital punishment?).
If we have problems carrying out punishments that may result in a prolonged death because we have no means to de-sensate the victim, we may have to opt for the firing squad or hanging. Given the frequency of gun deaths in America, is being shot “unusual”? Another unusual mechanism may be the captive bolt pistol from slaughterhouses…while unusual in human application, it is used in slaughterhouses every day.
After reading your second paragraph, I suppose it changes my interpretation of your comment in general.
You’re right in that government is somehow not capable of carrying this stuff out like it used to, though I note that is probably due to squeamishness related to reagents that were originally procured to address previous squeamishness (“do they feel pain?”).
I suppose the cheapest mechanism to guarantee a death row execution will turn out to be simply leaving the door open, and challenging people to run the gauntlet past guard towers and armed guards. As if it were any less cruel and unusual to kill a running man with a handgun than to strap them to a gurney and inject them with KCl, or to shoot them with a firing squad, or hang them, all in sanitized settings.
Your assertion that the government is incompetent needs to be qualified. The U.S. military is an example of a highly effective, government-run killing machine. So clearly, the government is not “incompetent” at everything.
And you speak of incompetence as if there is no such thing as private incompetence. Or private tyrannies. The founders optimized the U.S. system of government around wealthy aristocrats. What we have is essentially an oligarchy. Private interests controlling the operation of government, and doing a horribly incompetent job of it.
Why make must Americans make such a circus of Everything?
It’s like there is this committee that really want some people dead, but not actually, and not too fast anyway because that would be too easy but it is also nasty if they suffers visibly, sooo – lets pump them full of random crap that will shuts them up and still takes at least a half hour to kill, but, this only after a 20 year legal process.
What a screwed-up mess. Decide and Do, it is not that hard, millions of dead shows that it is possible to kill someone in any way one desires.
If they want the guy dead, have someone shoot him and be done with it.
If that approach is too direct for family-TV, by all means slip him some Carfentanil – widely tested on many a poor drug user and known to work perfectly – in his food on a random day and be done with it.
If they what him to suffer, have CIA call one of their contractors and get on with it.
I’m against the death penalty but since some states do it they should do it right.
Droning might be a solution……sure the industrial military complex will agree.
This execution is brought to you by….
You know the elected whores in congress will vote to privatize executions.
You know wallstreet will put up the money for privatized executions.
You know that grasping-at-straws horywood will do a reality tv thing on it.
You know that mad-stream-media will cast it as a special pre-paid event.
Of course such an event would never be a superbowl halftime event no matter how much money it brings in to the owner’s club.
Can’t wait to see them televize executions on FOX News like the Schwarzenegger movie “The Running Man.”
Killing anything sentient is a moral crime.
Deal.
Meet my pet rock. It talks to me in cosmic vibrations.
….totally lame position. I eat dogs for breakfast.
You talk shit and eat it, too, dickhead.
Because the masses would decry gas chambers, politicians cannot authorize nitrogen, and so our very desire to be humane causes our cruelty.
Cruel and unusual in reference to the crime. Meaning, the punishment should not be more cruel and unusual than the crime committed. And I doubt a few needle pricks qualify as cruel and unusual, especially in relation to the crime.
Technically he survived a few needle pricks.
They should have gotten a physician from out of state, so a cut down could have been performed.
Knowing how problematic this execution could be, as well as the prior problems, one wonders why that was not done.
Time to go to nitrogen gas.
Get a physician from out of state..yeah right..Real smart thinking moron..Probably going to need the nitrogen gas tested on a guinea pig to see how well it works suffocating the person..Any volunteers Dud…..need to stop flapping that pie hole because you’re fucking up the family name and making the Sharps look like morons..sheeeesh
THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
After a time, persons who violate this commandment, will have injested and digested and assimilated this spiritual poison and like cancer, slowly and surely mutate into sadism. Expect such supporters of these practices to introduce legislation to the whores in congress to make such exhibitions entertaining and profitable. After all, the TORTURE hurdle has already been overcome.
All sanctions are based within justice. Justice my be the greatest of all goals and attainments of man.
All major religions allow justified killings, those being in self defense, defense of others, in a just war and with justice, in the executions of certain criminals.
2nd, killing should be very rare. Agree that two wrongs do not a right make. But is it wrong to enforce accountability and prevent more? None of this is good.
“Thou shalt not kill” was a commandment that only applied to non-jews.
Moses, and his successor Joshua, killed many non-jews (the red sea closed in on thousands of Egyptians, for example, and Joshua’s people murdered millions in “the name of the Lord”) and enslaved millions.
So fuck that so-called ‘commandment’ to death. And then fuck it again.
‘Thou shalt not kill’ should mean don’t kill anything sentient. Not just non-jews.
But it doesn’t.
So shut the fuck up about that bullshit.
Sorry, this comment is directed to “Gladio,” and the idiotic quoting of the “thou shalt not kill,” which did not ever, ever apply to non-jews.
To clarify, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was meant for Jews to not kill each other, but gave carte blanche for Jews to kill anyone else, as evidenced by the fat the Moses and Joshua murdered and enslaved millions under the auspices of this ‘law.’
It was not given or ordained by a god, but by a tribal bigot.
Oh, for chrissakes, Roch,
If the death penalty prevented ‘more’ crimes, we would have had a crime- and death-penalty-free society ages ago.
This is revenge, pure and simple.
If one reads the old testament in the Christian bible, you will find lots of justified killings of lots of sentient beings. Even though the commandments say that killing is a sin. Hmmmmmmm religions are really scary.
First part of the Hippocratic Oath, “First do no harm”. I guess this is not correct.
Why not a bullet in the head? or the good ‘ole hangman? Surely this is more dignified for our species than this state sanctioned death by torture.
This is a society that has mastered the infinite ways of killing, now at a loss to produce one for an execution. So they have to invent more exotic poisons.
voice1: Looks like we have an execution
voice2: Quick let’s try the latest pancreas dissolver “apple juice”
Perhaps it’s time the death penalty ended here in the US. The ability to carry out a state sponsored death is severely compromised by physical handicaps, availability of chemicals and the possibility of killing an innocent person. I personally am not against the death penalty per se. There are certain criminals that don’t deserve to live but the practicalities are inherently flawed within the system itself. The disparity between states too are problematic. Commit a capital crime in Texas and if convicted they will extract their self righteous pound of flesh. Other states such as mine, NM, did away with the death penalty years ago because it was applied unevenly depending on the crime committed. So due to the fact that chemical means of execution is highly problematic I propose using a firing squad because there’s no chance of failure and bullets are cheap and highly effective and if not do away with it altogether. One last point; if there’s even a remote chance the person on trial and convicted is innocent a life term with no parole is the only option. It should only be used in a 100% slam dunk case.
Agreed. Looking at Innocence Project’s track record, one bad conviction is one too many. Death penalty should indeed be reserved for the most unambiguous cases, especially those where the killer is caught in the act (though I think the temptation in some cases will be to kill the killer first, which is probably why not many of these particular types of people don’t end up on death row).
Campbell is perhaps fortunate that his executioners are not fans of The Knick. There may be places they did not think to look for a vein; but how much competence can you expect from this sort of “doctor”?
Among all the possible excuses that can be provided, the execution of a man who has killed after incarceration is one of the best. Nonetheless, when the axe fails to fall until an old man is scarcely able to walk, it is time for accused and execution alike to die of old age. Execution is at its very best an admission of impotence by government, but in most cases now any murder taking place in custody is more legitimately considered an isolated act of incompetence.
The instinct to kill, not just in a justice-based sense but in general, is a human, really predator species one (although we’re the only species that does it so often for reasons other than self-protection, dominance and sustenance). The ability to not kill when our instincts urge otherwise is uniquely human. I’m going with the latter here. Legitimate self-protection when all other options are unavailable or unlikely to succeed is really the only justified reason to kill others. Execution is never that.
The essence of being human is to hate. It is to imagine a world that “should” be, and compare it to the one that is, and want to make a change. But we can choose whether, for example, to direct our hate at one another, or at the idea of murder. It seems like hatred is everywhere, but it really isn’t; more often than not we cast our eyes down before our masters, too lazy even to see what is happening to us. Hate is a scarce, precious resource that ought not be wasted on sickness, evil, instinct and propaganda, but called forth to inspire us to reject what is false and stand forth for what is true.
Hate is not the only thing that can “inspire us to reject what is false and stand forth for what is true.”
And yet think about it. You hate being tricked, hate not knowing how to make a pain go away, hate evil, hate waste, hate to make a mistake, hate sleeping alone, perhaps. We see a world, set a different goal, look at the difference. And hate it.
Laziness is said to be the mother of invention.
Here in the US the death penalty is but one of many manifestations of the ever so slowly dying but still quite potent medieval/feudal component of US social, popular, legal and political culture that have managed to survive the onslaught of modernity and post-enlightenment notions of morality, law and order.
I.e. the component that’s still into cat massacres, drawing and quartering, albeit in an only slightly more “civilized” form (although no doubt a large portion of this component would certainly not begrudge a literal return to these barbaric practices).
Also, the component that hungers for ever more wars and is ok with the mass killings of innocent civilians in the mideast, central Asia and now Africa, all in the name of “fighting terrorism”–and would be perfectly fine with nuclear war (provided that mostly non-Americans died).
But, this component is dying, far more slowly than we’d like. The fact that it appears to have made a resurgence of late, in the form of Trump and all that, is, I believe, a manifestation of its increasing desperation and panic as it senses the walls closing in, slowly but surely.
What I don’t get is why Dems and the left aren’t moving in for the kill. It’s far past time. I might be getting away from the core issue here, but it’s all about politics in the end, isn’t it?
You might not know this, but many prominent “Dems” are pro-execution, not the least of which being the Clintons. “Dems” who are pro-execution won’t move away from that position until its politically expedient to do so.
Those who oppose the death penalty/capital punishment/whateveryoucallit are just as guilt of cruelty as the cruelty they attribute to the state’s taking the life of a homicidal threat to society. Killing somebody whose hands are tied is not tricky. Hanging, firing squads, guillotines, electrocution are all fast and efficient. Americans are dying in droves from fentanyl ingestion. Nevertheless, states cannot seem to do to convicted murderers what they readily, and often inhumanely, did to others – and – might very well do again if left alive.
Western society cannot bring itself to call the death penalty what it is – extermination. Imprisoned for life, proven killers are free to kill their jailers and fellow inmates whose imprisonment was for nonviolent crimes. Some have done, and will likely do so in the future.
This whole mess is due to pressure from groups who hide behind language in the US constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Any educated person understands that this refers to prohibiting punishments such as putting people in stocks, scourging, severing the hands of pickpockets, and castrating sexual offenders. In the case of homicide it means prohibiting capital punishments that involve that torture and mutilation such as spit roasting, disembowelment, and quartering.
These executions would not be the circuses they are today were in not for well-intentioned but short-sighted people whose efforts to undermine the extermination of killers who might kill again by limiting access to effective methods in order to make them appear to be torture. I guess they rationalize their behavior as justified by the few who wind up being tortured because of their oppositional behavior.
And you hide your lust for sadism and revenge behind cowardly technicalspeak. By your own words you literally want to execute every convicted murderer and not just those on death row. Because a very very very small percentage of them might kill their jailers or fellow inmates. In which case, why not execute all inmates convicted of violent crimes, since they too might kill in prison? Hell, why not execute non-violent inmates, for the same reasons. Why not execute all males under the age of 40 in the general? See where I’m going with this? You’re not interested in reducing murder, for which no credible evidence exists that the death penalty accomplishes. You just want to murder–not execute, but murder–people you don’t like and fear, being a sadistic coward who is too cowardly to admit it.
“Extermination”–hmm, in what contexts have I heard that word being used before when applied to human beings…
Thank you kovie and thanks to the Intercept for telling this story which must be told.
Suits brought against the State on behalf of the subject of attempted executions must engage in some truly tortured logic. Objecting to the incompetence of the method and manner? Arguing the Plaintiff deserved a better Hangman? Pleas to conscience of the State?