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| "The Walls" Unit, Huntsville, Texas |
There are lots of ways to execute a prisoner. But in the U.S., at least, the 32 states that still execute prisoners have decided on lethal injection. On its face, lethal injection seems like a clinical, modern, hopefully low-pain, and usually low-key way to kill somebody. Except when it isn't, as we saw in last year's crop of botched executions.
The prolonged, evidently painful deaths of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma,Joseph Wood in Arizona, and Dennis McGuire in Ohio were tied to experimental drug cocktails necessitated by a shortage of traditional death drugs. This shortage is due largely to a ban by European countries on exporting certain drugs to U.S. states that practice capital punishment.
The free market is making a case against capital punishment. So far, the states that actively execute prisoners have been willfully plugging their ears.
But now, Texas is down to its last dose of pentobarbital, the lethal injection drug it has used since 2012. As other states' supplies of proven drugs dry up, they're working toward dusting off old methods — firing squad (Wyoming, Utah), the electric chair (Tennessee), and even the gas chamber (Oklahoma).
Providing lethal injection drugs to state prisons is so toxic that no European country will do it and no American company is willing to do it openly. Gunmakers and abortion clinics advertise their services, but pharmacies and drugmakers won't publicly associate with a form of punishment approved of by 63 percent of Americans.
That's the market talking, and it's saying it wants no part of this.
The American Board of Anesthesiologists and the American Medical Association prohibit their members from helping administer capital punishment.
If you believe in free-market capitalism — and presumably a good number of the 76 percent of Republicans who favor capital punishment do — then the scarcity of lethal injection drugs should be a signal that life without parole may be a better option.
But, you may argue, what about the other forms of execution? Well, states are only returning to them reluctantly. And the reason seems to be that shooting people, hanging them, electrocuting them, and gassing them are too flamboyantly deathly for many Americans.
Source: The Week, Peter Weber, March 16, 2015
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