Is the End of the Death Penalty Near?

Is the end of the death penalty near? All of the statistics and facts seem to point towards this conclusion. One of the reasons the end may be coming is that, after all of the time and effort we've spent to try and improve how we carry out death sentences, moving from hanging, to execution, to lethal injection, in the end, we're not much better at it than we were before. In Arizona, it took prison official two hours to kill an inmate(Drehle, 29) and in Oklahoma, it took prison official approximately forty minutes to execute an inmate. In the beginning, when lethal injections were first being used as a more humane alternative to hangings, electrocutions, etc. it may have been acceptable, but once pharmaceutical companies began not allowing prisons to use their drugs to execute people, more and more executions began to go awry. It’s because of this that we end up with ridiculous situations like the ones in Oklahoma or Arizona. The crime rate has also dropped significantly since the death penalty was reinstituted in the United States. Now that the crime rate isn’t as high as it was before, the death penalty does not really seem as necessary. There are very little ways you can justify the use of the death penalty anymore, most of the historical justifications have since been removed and are no longer valid. Also, state government’s do not have as much money as they may have had before, so buying the chemicals and everything else required to execute an inmate is becoming a cost some governments are not willing to accept. All of these put together with the continued indecisiveness of the Supreme Court Justices that I have mentioned in previous posts, all point towards the end of the death penalty. The more I read, the more I continue to see that all of the experts, essentially every single article I can find everywhere, seems to say that the end of the death penalty is in sight, that it's just right around the corner. They show surveys and charts showing that approval of the death penalty is continuously decreasing, but at the end of the day, state legislatures are still turning down bills to end the death penalty, and there are still people being executed, like those in Arkansas. I feel as if no one is talking about them, and the situations that got them sentenced to death and the hows and whys of it all. It seems as if everyone is just focused on the bigger picture.

Works Cited

Von Drehle, David. "Bungled Executions. Backlogged Courts. And Three More Reasons the Modern Death Penalty Is a Failed Experiment. (Cover Story)." Time, vol. 185, no. 21, 08 June 2015, pp. 26-33. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=102909399&site=ehost-live.

The Death Penalty Today

The death penalty to this day is still a hot topic across the United States. Many States are still having debates about whether the death penalty is constitutional or not. In Arkansas, Governor Asa Hutchinson announced that eight inmates on death row in the state will be executed in a 10-day span, with the first inmate being executed on April 17th, the first in Arkansas since 2005. This many executions in such a short time span in one state has never been done before. The governor stated that the timing was "not my choice" (qtd. in Daniels 1) and that "If we do not set the execution dates, that will not trigger a review and we'll never bring finality to this long and arduous process that really is so difficult on the victims and their families."(1) However, it is believed that they are rushing the executions due to a lack of execution drugs. According to reports from the New York Times, their Midazolam supply will expire by the end of April. Midazolam is a sedative used in a drug cocktail for executions in certain states across the US. Whether Midazolam is constitutionally acceptable or not is currently being debated in the state of Ohio, with attorneys representing inmates currently on death row. A stay of execution was issued for the three upcoming inmates, after the attorneys argued that using the drug violated the inmate's eighth amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. This issue came to light due to the execution of Dennis McGuire on January 16, 2014. The drug Midazolam was used for the execution, and Alan Johnson, a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch, testified that McGuire "began coughing, gasping, choking in a way that I had not seen before at any execution. And I remember it because I relived it several times. Frankly, that went on for 12 to 13 minutes." (qtd. in Daniels, 2) The issue of Midazolam has even made it to the Supreme Court several times, with the court ruling in 2015 that using Midazolam did not violate the inmate's eighth amendment rights. The issue still keeps trying to make it's way back, but the Supreme Court refused to hear a case involving the stay of execution of Thomas Arthur in Alabama. In Montana, bills were passed through the state house which would end the use of the death penalty, just like they had every year since 1999, and just like every year since 1999, the bill was turned down.

Works Cited

Daniels, Kristen Whitney. "States Debate Death Penalty Issues." National Catholic Reporter, vol. 53, no. 12, 24 Mar. 2017, pp. 1-4. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=122036914&site=ehost-live.