On March 24, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed legislation to revive a method of execution that had been removed from the state’s law for almost fifteen years: the firing squad. While a number of states have passed legislation to abolish capital punishment, Idaho has taken the opposite approach. Passed by veto-proof majorities in the legislature, the legislation will enable Idaho’s Department of Corrections to utilize a firing squad as a method of execution if an execution by lethal injection cannot be carried out. As with other allegedly “dated” methods of execution, the legalization of firing squad in Idaho drew outcry from various critics, who argued that the firing squad was both “uncivilized” and “inhumane.” The very same adjectives have been used to describe the death penalty itself, and many states have taken heed to those criticisms by outlawing capital punishment. Yet in truth, capital punishment is actually a necessary component of an ordered society, and it is the violent, even macabre nature of the punishment that makes it such a critical tool for dispensing justice.
When it comes to prominent critics of the death penalty, the Catholic Church represents one of the largest institutional opponents of capital punishment. Pope Francis has called the death penalty “inadmissible,” and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has toed a similar line. However, a closer inspection of the Church’s history reveals consistent support for the death penalty in sacred scripture and the writings of various Church Doctors and saints. Both Romans 13 and Acts 25 delegate capital punishment to the state as a legitimate means of executing justice against evildoers. St. Augustine declared in City of God that an executioner did not become a murderer by killing an offender, but instead acted as an instrument of the State. St. Thomas Aquinas went even further, stating in his Summa Theologica that putting offenders to death for particularly heinous crimes was praiseworthy because doing so would protect society at large from the offender’s influence. He added that capital punishment would also encourage contrition by the condemned and expiate the criminal’s temporal punishment which would otherwise be due in Purgatory. Pope Pius XII echoed this sentiment in 1952, noting that the Church was not ignoring the value of human life, but acknowledging that the condemned had deprived themselves of their right to life by the grave nature of their offenses. Pope Benedict XVI also assessed that there were indeed instances in which capital punishment was a necessary recourse, and that it was perfectly legitimate for Catholics to disagree with each other on the subject of the death penalty.
Setting aside the authority of the Church, capital punishment oftentimes represents the only proportional punishment for particularly egregious offenses. In terms of penalties for crimes, the general standard lies in proportionality to the offense. The more serious the crime, the more severe the punishment which is applied. For a premeditated murder with aggravating factors like torture or sexual assault, allowing the offender to live out the rest of their days with taxpayer-funded prison amenities smacks of insufficiency and impotence. The same is true of cases of child sexual abuse, rape, and prolific drug trafficking. It is not justice to allow criminals who commit these kinds of offenses to continue enjoying life, even a life in confinement, after having robbed their victims of life or having caused such physical and psychological harm as to bring the victims’ lives to ruin. Of course, to put a condemned criminal to death under current statutes is not mere Hammurabian retaliation. The offender is allowed to request a last meal, which can often be elaborate in nature, and has access to a spiritual advisor of his or her choice. Their gastronomic and spiritual needs attended to, the offender is then put to death by a method that, at least in theory, follows a standardized protocol which will end the inmate’s life with haste and a minimal amount of pain, luxuries the condemned certainly did not afford to their victims.
Beyond proportionality, contrary to established opinion, the death penalty both statistically and anecdotally has a deterrent effect on certain violent crimes, particularly murder. A 2003 study conducted by Emory University Professors Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul R. Rubin, and Joanna M. Shepherd examined data from 3,000 U.S. counties from 1977 to 1996. The researchers found that each execution resulted in an average of 18 fewer murders and a negative correlation between executions and incidents of murder. Considering the significant scope of the study, it seems apparent that the death penalty does indeed give some criminals incentive to reconsider their activities.
Of course, there are a variety of problems with the manner in which executions are often carried out in America. Death row inmates generally spend 10 to 15 years on death row appealing their sentences prior to execution, and some are on death row for even longer. Beyond the excessively lengthy appeals process, most states utilize lethal injection as their primary method of execution. Perhaps the most needlessly complex and unintentionally inhumane method of execution, lethal injection is a symbol of everything wrong with American capital punishment. First introduced in Oklahoma in 1978, lethal injection utilizes a protocol of one or more drugs to sedate, paralyze, and stop the condemned’s heart.
Yet, this apparently clinical, sterile method of execution has handicapped state corrections agencies. Drug companies opposed to capital punishment have refused to sell the necessary drugs for execution to corrections agencies, leaving states unable to carry out executions. Alternatively, states have resorted to protocols using alternative drugs, often with disastrous results. In some cases, because of the use of insufficiently potent sedatives, the condemned experience feelings of burning and drowning from paralytic agents used in lethal injection. Meanwhile, the increasing age and questionable health of the death row population means that many inmates lack a healthy vein structure to allow the insertion of IV lines. This has sometimes led individuals to make incisions into the arms or legs of inmates to insert IV lines, with inmates having to assist corrections officials with placement of the lines in some cases.
Thus, if capital punishment is to remain an effective instrument of justice, changes will need to be made. The same Emory study illustrating the effectiveness of deterrence found that the deterrent effect was increased when the execution was carried out with less time between conviction and execution. The appeals process must become more streamlined, so death row will be a transitory station for the condemned, rather than a de facto life sentence. With regard to the method of execution, lethal injection must go the way of drawing and quartering in favor of quicker and more painless methods of execution such as firing squad, long drop hanging, and the guillotine. All these methods of execution have produced very low rates of “botched” executions, and are not reliant on the use of difficult-to-obtain materials as in the case of lethal injection.
While all three are certainly more gruesome, this in itself would likely be a benefit, rather than a drawback. When the state puts someone to death, it does so to exact justice for the most heinous of crimes. To put someone to death in a fashion resembling putting a beloved family pet to sleep seems wholly unbefitting such circumstances, while a more bloody method of execution would certainly emphasize the gravity of the crime. Beyond these steps, it might be pertinent to make executions more widely accessible to the public eye. If the public is to accept capital punishment as a necessary component of the justice system, it must be acquainted with the process, however macabre it may be.