The capitol punishment conflict

It took Dennis McGuire 25 minutes to die after he was injected with an experimental drug cocktail containing the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone last Thursday.

McGuire was sentenced to death for the 1989 rape and murder of pregnant 22-year-old Joy Stewart.

The unusually lengthy execution raised controversy about the constitutionality of using lethal injection and of capital punishment overall.

My initial reaction was a lack of sympathy for someone who denied not only a young woman, but also her unborn child, the right to life.

However, the question here is whether lethal injection, and by extension capital punishment, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment banned by the Constitution.

We can start with one of two assumptions. Capital punishment is constitutional, or it is not.

The first assumption is easy.

If capital punishment is not constitutional then no form of the death penalty is allowed. Done.

The other assumption is trickier.

Suppose capital punishment is constitutional — as it is now — but in cases like McGuire’s execution it is unconstitutional, then we have various lines on which to balance.

We must decide the difference between an unconstitutional execution and one that is not.Some consider an instantaneous death constitutional, while others have a larger margin.

It’s hard to say where that margin ends and execution becomes unequivocally cruel.
The truth is, we cannot answer that question for multiple reasons.

The Founding Fathers had no conception of the execution methods we have.
Today’s backgrounds have instilled different belief systems with varying margins of errors, and we don’t know if we can allow our emotions to influence our decision.

Therefore, if we allow the death penalty to be constitutional, we bring into play an unanswerable question.

Our only solution is to make capital punishment unconstitutional.

Then, the only argument against a life sentence without parole is it puts undue financial burden upon taxpayers. But determining the value of human life in relation to money is much easier to answer than trying to discover the line between fair  or cruel and unusual punishment.

Avoiding cruel and unusual punishment doesn’t mean we need to provide detainees with a comfortable lifestyle.  

Anyway, it would be much harder to argue that denying a life-without-parole prisoner dessert at the prison’s cafeteria is cruel and unusual punishment.   

­— allenjo@indiana.edu
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