Viscerally, I am in favor of the death penalty, but in more sober reality I am against it. There are some crimes so heinous, so beyond all extenuation, that death seems the only just punishment; but justice is not the only desideratum in human arrangements, so this is not a decisive argument.
I would not be prepared to execute someone myself in what might be called cold blood: that is to say, not in immediate self-defense. It seems to me that I cannot depute to others what I would not be prepared, for both ethical and psychological reasons, to do myself. It follows that I cannot support the death penalty.
The Law
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There is also the question of error. All jurisdictions, no matter how scrupulous their deliberations, make mistakes, and to execute an innocent man (that is to say, a man innocent of what he is charged with having done) is peculiarly terrible. The fact is that innocent men have been executed. No utilitarian argument, such as that some murderers will go on to kill others if they be not executed, and that the number of the wrongly executed will be smaller than the number of those killed by murderers who were not executed, can excuse wrongful execution. Rather, this is a refutation of utilitarianism as a moral theory.
Nevertheless, I accept that decent people can have a different opinion from my own. I find it difficult to believe, however, that a decent person would not be appalled by the recent execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama by asphyxiation with nitrogen, at least if reports of the execution bear any resemblance to the reality of it.
It put me in mind of what my friend, or friendly acquaintance, Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer, was reported to have said when the first four attempts to hang him (he had been sentenced to death by a kangaroo court on trumped-up charges) failed: “In this country,” he said, “they can’t even hang a man properly.”
Facts the Historians L...
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The whole episode in Alabama was appalling. Smith murdered Elizabeth Sennett in 1988, having been paid, with others, to do so by her husband. No one disputed the fact of his having done so, or the extreme brutality of his crime. He was first sentenced to death in 1989; he was then retried and sentenced again to death in 1996.
In 2022, he was due to be executed by lethal injection, but because the executioner could find no vein through which to inject the lethal drugs, the attempt was abandoned. It was only this month that he was executed by an experimental method.
Apparently, he took 22 minutes to die, and for several of them he was still conscious. The Alabama corrections commissioner, a man called Hamm, said that it was Smith’s own fault that he took so long to die, because he attempted to hold his breath rather than breathe in the nitrogen. All I can say is that I am glad I am not a prisoner on one of Mr. Hamm’s prisons.
