Bloodlust, not justice
by digby
Ian Millhiser has written a great post about our “botched” execution problem. It starts out like this:
Clayton Lockett was supposed to be unconscious. The state of Oklahoma, like most states that still enforce death sentences, uses a three-drug cocktail to execute inmates. The first drug was supposed to knock Lockett out. The second drug would paralyze him. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart.
But it was clear midway through Lockett’s execution that he was not unconscious. Lockett’s “body started to twitch,” according to his attorney Dean Sanderford. Then Lockett “mumbled something I couldn’t understand.” Soon, “[t]he convulsing got worse, it looked like his whole upper body was trying to lift off the gurney. For a minute, there was chaos.”
At 6:39, sixteen minutes after the execution began, Lockett was still alive. According to Cary Aspinwall with the Tulsa World, Lockett lifted own head shortly before corrections officials closed a curtain that obscured the execution chamber from witnesses. By one account, Lockett tried to speak during the botched execution, saying the word “man” aloud. Corrections officials later said that Lockett had a “blown vein” and that they were “not sure where drugs went in his body and how much absorbed.” Lockett’s vein, according to a Department of Corrections spokesperson had “exploded.”
It literally makes me ill to read that. But I urge you to read the whole article anyway to understand just what a nightmare our death penalty is and what mockery it makes of justice. That too will probably make you sick.
But whatever you do, don’t wander into the right wing fever swamps and read what those people are spewing unless you want a real insight into the minds of people who enjoy the kind of detail
excerpted above. Indeed, I suspect that if one were to hear their bloodthirsty, sadistic commentary in isolation one would assume they were psychopathic killers themselves. The suffering of the prisoner obviously gives them much more than a sense of justice. It gives them visceral pleasure — exactly the same kind of pleasure the convicted killer got from his crimes.
The sickest part of it is that most of these fine folks like to portray themselves as anti-government. But they certainly do enjoy using the state as their instrument of pain and death. This is bloodlust, pure and simple, and it’s got nothing to do with justice.
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