[Dion]

Americans want the punishment without the gory details, but that can't happen.

I thought about this as I read about yet another gruesome execution, this one in Arizona. Coming just months after another botched execution in Oklahoma, the episode had the condemned man gasping for breath and snorting for two hours after the lethal injection was administered. It was disgusting. It was, by any reasonable definition, cruel and unusual punishment. There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. It’s not what civilized societies do, for one. And there’s always a chance of making a mistake. Just ask Kevin Martin, a D.C. man who spent 26 years in prison for raping and murdering a woman, only to be exonerated recently with the aid of DNA evidence (he had been paroled in 2009). But what if Martin had been convicted in a place like Oklahoma or Arizona? Would the answer just be, “oops”?

But the real lie here is the idea that there are peaceful deaths. We like to convince ourselves that our loved ones experience such things, and it’s true that some deaths are more painful than others. When it comes to capital punishment, Americans have an odd, hypocritical kind of blood lust. They want to take someone’s life, mostly out of vengeance (since there’s no consistent evidence at all that the death penalty prevents murder). But they want it to be civilized, peaceful even.

That’s where lethal injections got started – it’s so much easier for people to see a person lose consciousness, much like an old diseased pet being put down, than to, say, watch the person’s neck snap and his body swing from a noose. Firing squads, too, bring back images of an era of crude street justice, and put other people in the position of having to live with the knowledge that they shot another human being to death. We don’t like to see our pigs being slaughtered; we’d just rather pick up the pork chop. And we don’t want to see a human being – no matter how odious a person he or she may be – have the life snuffed out of them. We just want to feel satisfied by the result.

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t endorse capital punishment and then expect to be shielded from the loss of humanity that comes from its practice. The horrific episode in Arizona isn’t an argument for finding another way for the state to kill people. It’s one more reminder of why it’s time for the U.S. to join the civilized world and stop executions entirely.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/...ty-needs-to-go