There is no question that Clayton Lockett, the inmate whose execution on Tuesday April 29, 2014 was terribly botched, was guilty. No last minute appeals could be filed based on new evidence, and no mishandling of appeal paperwork by incompetent lawyers. Lockett hadn’t found faith or hope on death row, hadn’t turned his time in prison towards helping other inmates, or even begged his victim’s family for forgiveness. Long story short, Lockett made the perfect death row pensioner, and because of it, his writhing painful death, makes the perfect opportunity for us to look at the death penalty not as something we’re worried will impact wrongly convicted innocents, or destroy those capable of change after the fact, but rather whether or not putting individuals who well and truly deserve punishment to death, is something we as a society should continue doing.
The botched execution could have been caused by a catheter inexpertly inserted into Lockett’s groin, or it might have been the new secret mixture of drugs that Ohio has had to resort to since no drug companies will currently sell to prisons or states that conduct executions by lethal injection. There will be no knowing what happened during the long 26 minutes that resulted in a fatal heart attack, until a state investigation of the procedure is complete. In the meantime, Lockett’s highly publicized death, has brought the issue of capital punishment once again to the forefront of public attention.
The debate over the death penalty across the United States has taken many forms. Once a British Colony our history is steeped with a sense of justice. An eye for an eye, so the old saying goes. At one time, before we declared our independence, crimes as simple as petty theft, or as made-up as witchcraft, could leave one dangling from the gallows. The eighth amendment to the Constitution isolated death as a penalty for only the worst crimes. Aggravated murder, and even then, a jury or judge could decide on each individual case whether or not a defendant deserved to die. Decisions that over the years saw racial minorities and men far more likely to die at the hands of executioners than whites or women. Regardless of the crime.
The US constitution also leaves the sentencing standards up to each individual state---unless a federal crime is being charged. Today a full 18 States and the District of Columbia either have no death penalty law, or one so nonfunctional that it cannot be enforced.
Oregon, although a death penalty state, has not executed a prisoner since 1997. In total, only about 60 people have been executed in the State of Oregon since 1904--paltry compared to Texas, which has executed 68 people since 2010. In the intervening 110 years since 1904, the death penalty has been abolished and then re-established in Oregon twice. Today 37 individuals, including women, sit on death row under a temporary reprieve issued by Governor John Kitzhaber in November 2011, when he stated that he would sign no death warrants during his time in office. Giving our State a handful of years to sit back and consider the merits and drawbacks of what it means to authorize the state--the government--to take a life. To come to grips with the fine delineation between justice and vengeance.
The 501c3 Oregonians Against the Death Penalty (http://www.oadp.org/) also known as OADP, spearheads a campaign in Oregon to abolish the death penalty in our little corner of the Pacific Northwest. Pointing out the strong tie between income and minority status, even in Oregon, and receiving the death penalty, and firmly advocating for a view of justice that does not engender increasing levels of violence, and simultaneously OADP works hard to acknowledge the rights of victims and survivors to seek out justice.
OADP, and similar groups, seek to remind us that sometimes “an eye for an eye” isn’t particularly “just” and in the wake of executions such as Lockett’s, we are reminded both that there are human beings capable of the unthinkable--and that sometimes we ask our corrections staff to engage in similar unthinkable acts on behalf of ourselves and our governments. We are also reminded that Lockett’s family, however guilty he was, didn’t necessarily deserve to lose a man they called brother or son, and they certainly didn’t deserve to read article after article of how he died in pain.
No matter how it’s approached, capital punishment in a modern world is a topic almost impossible to address, but maybe it’s time for Oregon to join the majority of the Western world, and abolish the death penalty once and for all. To state that Oregon is a state in which justice can be meted out without the added dose of vengeance.
*Sources include the OADP website, and The Washington Post’s Coverage of Lockett’s execution.
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