Morality, law and punishment
Inter Lake editorial
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment.
Unfortunately, that will not stop the American Civil Liberties Union from continuing its effort to prevent the execution of Ron Smith for the murder of two men in Flathead County in 1982. The ACLU challenge is based on an analysis of the Montana Constitution, not the U.S. Constitution.
Smith has escaped death many times since he took Harvey Mad Man and Thomas Running Rabbit into the woods and shot them because he wanted to know what it would feel like to kill someone in cold blood. Besides that wanton and brutal slaying, Smith's ability to thwart justice for more than 25 years by avoiding his punishment is the only thing "cruel and unusual" in his case.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned back the challenge to lethal injection on a 7-2 vote, saying the three-drug combination intended to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates was not cruel, even if it also was not perfect.
It is somewhat odd, however, that we need to even be debating this since execution itself was not considered "cruel and unusual" at the time of the writing of the U.S. Constitution, and lethal injection is society's response to complaints that other methods of execution such as hanging and firing squad lack dignity even if they are not cruel.
People who wonder what does constitute "cruel and unusual" punishment need only read the history of execution to get many examples. Crucifixion needs no introduction to Christians. It was practiced widely in the ancient world from Persia to Rome, and is still used in the Sudan. Disembowelment involves cutting vital organs out of a person's abdomen. Crushing speaks for itself, as does being buried alive. Other torturous deaths are less known, but equally hideous. Death by scaphism, for instance, means binding the naked prisoner in an enclosed space such as a rowboat and letting him linger on until he is eventually killed by dehydration, insect bites, infection, exposure or some combination thereof.
Knowing a bit of the history of execution, indeed, should convince anyone that lethal injection is not a "cruel and unusual" form of punishment. But of course it doesn't.
That's because opponents of lethal injection are really opponents of capital punishment. They don't really object to the form of the punishment, but to the idea of it. And that ultimately is an attempt to strip one of the primary powers of sovereignty from the people - the power to mete out justice in a manner deemed appropriate by our democratic institutions.
Of course, the people of a state or the people of this nation may choose legislatively to end capital punishment. Many states have done so. But it is best left up to the conscience of the people - rather than the vagaries of the courtroom - to decide morality, and the existence of capital punishment is largely a moral issue, not a legal one.