by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Lethal Injection: Beheading by Another Name
In his column for First Things, the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus used to relish pointing out articles that contradicted each other in the same day’s New York Times – evidence, in his highly rhetorical presentation, that the Gray Lady’s left hand didn’t know what her right hand was doing.
Myself, I relish finding pieces in the Times that inadvertently echo and amplify each other. And so it is with a couple of current pieces. In a wise and trenchant column, David Brooks works through the reasons why we as a society find the act of beheading so awfully repulsive. He stresses the Western idea, rooted in religion, that “the human body is sacred”:
Most of us understand, even if we don’t think about it, or have a vocabulary to talk about it these days, that the human body is not just a piece of meat or a bunch of neurons and cells. The human body has a different moral status than a cow’s body or a piece of broccoli.
We’re repulsed by a beheading because the body has a spiritual essence. The human head and body don’t just live and pass along genes. They paint, make ethical judgments, savor the beauty of a sunset and experience the transcendent. The body is material but surpasses the material. It’s spiritualized matter.
Brooks, it seems to me, gets it absolutely right. And his insight seemed even more right when, in the same day’s paper, I spotted a story about the botched execution in Oklahoma earlier this year. The piece begins:
An official report released Thursday about the bungled execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in April says that an improperly placed intravenous line in the prisoner’s groin allowed the drugs to perfuse surrounding tissue rather than to flow directly into his bloodstream.
It goes on to explain that
Because the groin area was covered with a sheet as the injections began — first a sedative intended to render Mr. Lockett unconscious, and then paralyzing and heart-stopping agents — the doctor and paramedic on the scene did not see the bulge, larger than a golf ball, indicating a procedure gone awry …
Now, why was there a sheet over Lockett’s groin area? Because we as a society understand that the body is “spiritualized matter,” and the sheet over the body is meant, first of all, to confer a measure of dignity to the execution.
But in the end it doesn’t work – not in Oklahoma, not ever – because the current mode of execution, by means of lethal injection, is elaborately contrived to evade or deny our sense of the body as “spiritualized matter.” In that sense, the sheet over the body is a cover-up, literally.
The Community of Sant'Egidio’s Mario Marazziti, a founder of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, helped me to understand this. Execution by lethal injection enables the state to kill people more or less in secret. It enables the state to claim that the person killed didn’t suffer – because that person’s body supposedly felt no pain, and this because the body showed no visible evidence of pain. And in so doing, it enables the state to maintain the pretense that execution by lethal injection is something other than killing.
But it isn’t. It’s killing, no less than execution by beheading is – and the obvious pain and suffering seen in the botched execution in Oklahoma ought to make this clear to everyone.
It was clear to the doctor who was engaged by the state of Oklahoma to declare Lockett dead:
The report confirms for the first time that a doctor, whose assigned task was to declare the prisoner unconscious and later dead, joined in the frantic effort to insert a line into Mr. Lockett’s veins once the paramedic ran into problems.
In the end, the doctor was a doctor. And in the end Clayton Lockett, even if not an innocent victim like James Foley and Steven Sotloff, was a victim nonetheless.
