South Carolina senators want to bring firing squads back.
Photo: Jeffrey Collins / AP / Shutterstock
The execution chamber is more American than “The Star-Spangled Banner”, than the Pledge of Allegiance, or the democratic process itself. Many countries hold free and fair elections; many also claim to be concerned with justice and freedom. This is often a lie, the pretext for counter-revolution or for war abroad. But in America, the lie is so great that it swallows all the virtues it touches. Freedom falters in the face of a broken criminal justice system that punishes instead of rehabilitating, that kills. Built for public display, the execution chamber combines justice not only with death, but with death as a brutal spectacle.
State senators in South Carolina understand what the death penalty is for and what it means for America. Weeks after South Carolina passed a bill that would make most abortions illegal in the state, the Associated Press reports that a bipartisan group of senators added the firing squad to a bill that would give the state governor alternatives to lethal injection. (The Senate approved the bill, but it has not yet been finalized, and the House would have to approve it before it reaches the governor’s desk.) Medicines are not always easy to obtain and as the global opinion changes Against the death penalty, pharmaceutical companies are afraid to quench the American thirst for blood.
“The death penalty will keep the law here for a while. If it is going to stay, it must be human, ”Senator Dick Harpootlian, a Democrat who co-sponsored the project, told the AP. Hanging can lead to beheading, he added, and electrocution can lead to death. People had a stomach for both of them, not long ago; the electric chair used to be common and the curtains used to be public events. If the average American got a little more queasy, a little less eager to burn someone alive, it certainly has implications for Harpootlian’s definition of human.
While South Carolina senators try to follow the example of Utah, Mississippi and Oklahoma, where firing squads already exist, they inadvertently prove a great truth about the death penalty. There is no way that it can be human. Firing squad death raises liberal nerves, but it is faster – and possibly more painless – than death by lethal injection. When the federal government killed William LeCroy last September, the man’s stomach “turned uncontrollably” for about a minute. Tribune reported. In about half of the federal executions carried out in the last months of the Trump presidency, a “characteristic jolt and bumps were visible”, the Tribune continued, a potential sign of painful pulmonary edema. These movements do not appear in the official reports compiled by the prison authorities. Believe the words of the authorities and the people who killed just fell asleep.
Without drugs to medicalize the inhumanity of the procedure, America may have to accept the death penalty for what it is. An execution does not cure anything and does not restore any victims to life. It simply increases the count of bodies associated with a crime. In some cases, it attributes a number of deaths to crimes that did not exist before; in America, we kill people who never took a life. For defenders, executions are not merely a necessity; they are cause for celebration. When the state of Utah killed Ronnie Lee Gardner by firing squad in 2010, state corrections issued a commemorative coin to employees who participated in the death. They chose a currency, a spokesman said. Deseret News, because traditional tapes no longer looked “modern”.
In its truest heart, America is still the firing squad nation. It will remain so as long as the death penalty exists. Glad to stand out from other democratic nations, America grants itself the power of life and death over everything, starting with its own people. She invented freedom and has nothing more to learn from anyone – not from the rest of the world, nor from the men and women she sacrifices for revenge. All that’s left is blood.