Death is Death: The More Capital Punishment Evolves, the More it Stays the Same

James Eagen Holmes, who faces the death penalty for
his alleged role in the murder of 12 people in
Colorado, may not have faced the same penalty
in ancient Babylon. Photo Credit: Flickr

Vengeance and retribution are both human responses to tragedy, especially violence on a large scale. We’re not interested in justice when unspeakable acts take place. We want blood – now. Because our society is one of laws, angry mobs don’t usually hand down guilty verdicts and exact punishment. We have to wait for the guilty to go through the motions – arrest, “fair” trial, and sentencing – to get what we paid for: that sweet execution. Decades may pass from the time a judge hands down a death sentence to the day it’s carried out. The somber, private occasion that is our modern version of capital punishment brooks no cheers, no joyful singing that the guilty is soon to die. It is not the vehicle of satisfaction the public envisions it to be. There’s no catharsis for the victims, and no deterrence for those who might commit similar crimes in the future. In fact, employing it as a mechanism of the justice system has no place in our modern society – not even for the worst of the worst.

Murder Wasn’t Always a Capital Offense
The Code of Hammurabi contains the first recorded death penalty laws, according to ProCon.org, a nonprofit research charity. Of its 282 separate laws, citizens of ancient Babylon could face death for a number of offenses, including lying in open court, receiving stolen property, or bringing false accusations. However, murder was not a capital offense. Buying a stolen goat results in horrible death, but killing the goat’s owner isn’t such a big deal. What’s this say about those early civilizations? Life was relatively cheap. Possessions, including the buying and selling of slaves, mattered more than the careful application of laws and justice. Monarchical rule also streamlined the carrying out of sentences. If the king (who his subjects also consider a god) believes you to be guilty, there’s little room for an appeal.

As governments increased in size, and decision makers became more varied, the offenses that could land citizens under a headsman’s sword became equally divergent. Methods of execution became just as inventive, and gruesome, designed in large part to exact maximum pain before death finally came.

Death, in and of itself, wasn’t the main deterrence so much as the manner of killing. Governments, lawmakers, and monarchs used these terrible methods of execution as public warnings to the populace.

• The Brazen Bull – designed in ancient Greece, this method of capital punishment took the form of a hollowed-out bull statue, which executioners placed the condemned inside. A fire placed beneath the statue roasted the condemned alive.
• Drawing and Quartering – popular in England up until the 1800’s, those executed by drawing and quartering were first hanged until nearly dead, then disemboweled alive. Severed parts of the person’s anatomy shown in the varying parts of the kingdom.
• Slow Cutting – seemingly fit for a noir thriller, this Chinese method of capital punishment involved the methodical severing of the person’s joints and limbs with the killing stroke (usually a stab to the heart) coming last.
• Stoning – one of the oldest methods of execution, stoning is a biblical punishment for a variety of offenses, including adultery and blasphemy. Buried up to their waist a gathered crowd throws rocks – not large enough to cause death in a couple throws, but larger than pebbles – at the person until they’re dead.

Killed for Counterfeit Stamps: England and Colonial America

Currently, there are 41 capital offenses in the United States for which death may be the ultimate punishment. The majority involve the murder of another person, though others (treason) involve the betrayal of state secrets to foreign nations. During the 1700s in England, there were more than 200 separate offenses for which death was the only punishment, including cutting down a tree, stealing more than 40 shillings from a house, and counterfeiting tax stamps, according to PBS Frontline. During the reign of Henry VIII, says PBS, the estimated number of people put to death in England ranges upwards of 72,000.

Methods execution varied by class. For royalty and the wealthy, death was a (mostly) painless beheading. However, for those without prominent station, the manner death often took more painful forms from boiling alive to burning at the stake.

Colonial America wasn’t much different when it came to capital punishment. Colonists executed their first criminal, George Kendall of Virginia, for plotting to betray the Crown to the Spanish. By 1612, Virginia’s governor instituted laws so restrictive that residents could suffer the death penalty for seemingly minor offenses, including stealing grapes and killing chickens.

Death is the Best Kind of Psychological Warfare

Fear of death isn’t as big a motivator as being pulled back from the brink of certain execution. During the French and Indian War, then militia Commander-in-Chief George Washington used the threat of summary execution of deserters to keep his remaining troops loyal as he fought battles along the western frontier. On one occasion, he ordered death by hanging for a massive group of deserters, but recanted, and hanged only two, according to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Why sentence a large group of men to death and execute only two? To show mercy, and at the same time, show others a willingness to punish the guilty. The psychological impact of capital punishment, in both its application and reprieve from it, can instill compliance, loyalty, and even improve morale.

Modern Saudi Arabia also employs psychological effects when it comes to capital punishment, but with an old twist. In a move that mirrors ancient Babylonian law, Saudi officials are reportedly considering a sentence of paralysis for a man who was 14-years-old when he stabbed and paralyzed his friend, according to CNN. Government agents will reportedly carry out the “eye for an eye” style sentence unless the accused can pay $266,000 in compensation to the victim. Of course, that’s going to be hard to come up with considering the attacker has been in prison for the last 10 years.

Public Executions like Carnivals?

Public executions were both a means for the populace to see the guilty punished and to witness the fate that awaited them should they commit similar crimes. The last public execution in the United States took place in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936. Authorities hanged Rainey Bethea in front of more than 20,000 witnesses for the rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman, according to National Public Radio. Journalists and photographers attending the event, many from as far away as New York, lambasted what they considered to be a “carnival” rather than a somber, dignified occasion. Rainey ascended the scaffold near dawn and died by hanging a short-time later. The public spectacle of the execution is reportedly what led to the banning of public executions in the United States.

States chose to ban these events in the large part because they violate Constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The Eighth Amendment protects U.S. citizens from punishments considered to bring undue suffering, pain, or humiliation. The need to remove the pain from capital punishment, while still using it as a component of the justice system, is what led many nations to develop more efficient means of executing those convicted of capital offenses.

The gas chamber, electric chair, and lethal injections are all methods developed by modern countries, including the United States, to end life without pain in a humane manner.

However, authorities still screw them up, and when they do, there’s no shortage of collateral damage.

Botched Executions are Justice Served?

Willie Francis survived the electric chair, but that didn’t stop authorities from strapping him a second time and throwing the switch. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that second attempts at execution do not violate the Constitutional rights of the condemned, citing that the electric chair’s malfunction in Francis’ case was “completely accidental.”

Some may argue those convicted of capital offenses deserve whatever punishment they get. The families of victims might suggest that any pain and suffering the guilty experience is “icing on the cake” for the tragedies they’ve forced them to endure. Baying for blood isn’t the same as carrying out a death sentence, and those who witness particularly horrible executions carry the haunting memories for the rest of their lives.

• Romell Brown leaves an Ohio execution chamber alive after 18 failed attempts to administer a lethal injection.
• Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw reacts in horror at photos of Allen Lee Davis who died by electric chair. Shaw reportedly commented that Davis appeared as if he had been “tortured to death.”
• John Evans caught fire in 1983 when authorities turned on the juice to his electric chair. Evans lived for 14 minutes, and two additional jolts while still burning, until doctors finally pronounced him dead.
• Authorities cleared the room of witnesses during the gas chamber execution of Jimmy Lee Gray due to his continued desperate gasps for air and loud moans. He reportedly bashed his head continuously on a pole in the chamber as cyanide burned its way through his body. His executioner was allegedly drunk.

We Haven’t Learned: Death and the Dance of Justice

“For James Eagan Holmes, justice is death,” said Arapahoe County district attorney George Brauchler, according to ABC News. Holmes is alleged to have killed 12 people and wounded 70 during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. Brauchler, and his prosecutorial team, turned down a proposed plea agreement from Holmes, which would have required him to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. They’re seeking the death penalty, and many victims and the families of survivors applaud that decision. How many times did Brauchler practice that headline worthy snippet in the mirror? Did he imagine it broadcast across the globe by info-hungry media outlets?

Executing Holmes won’t bring back the dead, or provide those left behind with greater comfort. After his legal defense exhaust all of his appeals it may be decades until he sees an execution chamber – if a jury or judge sentences him to death at all. Victims, seeking to move on with their lives and heal, may only have their emotional wounds from that horrible night reopened, all the recovery washed away in a small black box of a room to watch a man die. Suppose a better punishment might be to sit in a maximum security cell for the rest of his days, and know that life goes on without him. If the state sentences this man, who reportedly has a history of significant mental illness, to death, will the execution go as planned? Will witnesses see a man spend his last moments writhing in pain or quietly slipping off to sleep? Suppose neither act gives the emotional release we might all crave as a killer’s survivors.

What does it say about us if we like what we see?

Courtesy: Console & Hollawell Blog