YOU ARE HERE: Central Kentucky Home→Collections→Death Penalty

Cruel and unusual?

January 10, 2008|Randall Patrick

Cruel and unusual?

Does lethal injection violate the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment?"

That's the question the United States Supreme Court is being asked to decide in a case involving the murder of a Winchester police officer's father.

Officer Dennis Briscoe's father, Powell County Deputy Arthur Briscoe, was killed along with Sheriff Steve Bennett in 1992 by Ralph Baze, who is on death row in Kentucky.

Baze's attorneys argue that, when the three-drug mixture used to put people to death in 35 of the 36 states that allow the death penalty is administered improperly, the result can amount to torture. There has been at least one instance in which it took more than half an hour for a felon to die, and others in which the convicted person screamed in agony or had chemical burns on his arms from the injection.

That doesn't seem nearly as revolting as electrocution, the method used until 10 years ago. Kentucky and other states switched to lethal injection after a 1997 execution in Florida in which witnesses reported flames and smoke coming from a condemned man's covered head after the executor pulled the switch.

This reminds me of an earlier debate I heard when I was a reporter for The Richmond Register sometime between 1986 and 1993. It was "media day" at the state Capitol in Frankfort, and other reporters and I were attending a committee hearing in which lawmakers were arguing about whether Kentucky should switch from electrocution to lethal injection.

At the time, there were concerns that electrocution was too barbaric. But I recall one legislator being against the change because, he felt, execution should be as painful and gruesome as possible in order to be an effective deterrent.

There's little evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent to violent crime; it is about retribution not deterrence. But that lawmaker's argument must have carried the day, because, according to the Legislative Research Commission, there was no change in Kentucky's method of execution until at least five years after I left the Register.

I find it interesting that in that length of time, the argument has evolved from whether lethal injection is too humane to whether it is too brutal.

What do you think? You can comment below.

|

|

|