Whether you believe in, support, or abhor capital punishment, we need to pause and have some tough conversations about it. First, I haven’t had a family member or friend on death row, nor have I had one of these prisoners harm anyone I know personally.
With that said, I still do not believe killing people to prove that killing people is wrong is the right thing to do. It is not an effective deterrent to crime, and after Tennessee failed miserably to kill *two death-row inmates earlier this year, instead subjecting them to extreme agony and misery, Governor Bill Lee called a moratorium on Tennessee’s plans to execute more prisoners.
I’m suspecting the moratorium’s goal is to find a more excellent way to kill prisoners rather than doing away with capital punishment altogether. With the botched attempts our state garnered national headlines as Christa Pike, Tennessee’s latest victim, lay handcuffed, hospitalized, and unconscious while officials decided what to do next.
If that wasn’t troubling enough, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then announced that Nidal Hasan, a Fort Hood army psychiatrist, who opened fire at the Texas base in 2009, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others, would be executed by a firing squad.
Really? Instead of us moving forward in a more humane way–investing in prison reform, rehabilitating inmates, we’re seeing how low we can go. If executing prisoners through a lethal injection or in an electric chair wasn’t cruel enough, let’s have soldiers shoot Hasan, and make an example of him while viewers grab fresh popcorn, the trusty remote, and watch live and in color.
What am I missing here? This reminds me of the grainy historical pictures where families packed a picnic basket and put on their Sunday best to attend hangings and lynchings. Barbaric, uncivilized, and unacceptable are the only words that come to mind.
I am encouraged that people on both sides of the aisle condemned Hegseth’s plan but what baffled me is that he suggested, and President Trump and others seemingly supported it, without regard to what this says about who we are.
If a firing squad is the method the U.S. chooses, let’s not brag about the human rights moral high ground we like to assert when we talk about foreign countries and their brutality. If this is the best we can do when it comes to crime and punishment, in my humble opinion, we no longer have any ground, high or low, to stand on when it comes to humane treatment or civility.
I’m not defending Hasan’s horrific acts or other heinous crimes that land folks on death row. Certainly, their punishments should fit the crimes but if we can live in a space station for months, and create artificial intelligence to transform virtually every task, surely, we can find a better, more humane way to punish wrongdoers.
*Tennessee tried to execute inmate, Tony Carruthers, in May.
