Death Penalty
If you want to get into an argument with a group of people, any group of people, bring up the death penalty. If you play your cards right you get a real fight to break out. Americans don’t really have a consensus opinion on the death penalty. So, there is no wonder that we don’t agree on lethal injection either.
I’m not sure that you can say that injecting drugs into someone to kill them is cruel and unusual punishment. Then again, I don’t believe that the State should be in the business of killing its own citizens for any reason. Here’s the problem that I see. Doctors who make up the cocktail of drugs that are to be given to the prisoner seem to have an ethical dilemma. You can’t be in the business of saving lives and relieving suffering if you are actively killing a healthy human being. So, who is going to give the meds? Who should give the meds?
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From WaPo:
The Supreme Court issued an eleventh-hour stay for a Mississippi murderer scheduled to be put to death last night, the third execution the justices have blocked since agreeing to decide whether lethal injections violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The reprieve came less than an hour before Earl Wesley Berry was to be put to death for the kidnapping and murder of Mary Bounds in rural Mississippi in 1987.
Death penalty activists and criminal justice experts said the court’s action is further evidence of a de facto moratorium on executions until it decides the lethal injection issue. The court itself has not declared such intentions, but its actions in Berry’s case were closely watched for clues. (more…)
