Chief of Police of Malibu

Recently, two of these United States that are most prolific at killing people, California, and Florida, have had problems with it.  In Florida, a lethal-injection execution went wrong and required over 35 minutes and extra dose to kill a guy, leading Governor Jeb Bush to suspend executions there.  Meanwhile, here in California, all executions have been suspended since earlier this year and now might be ruled unconstitutional.  What has happened to our great country’s ability to kill people?  Has it become infected with the same incompetence with which our nation’s ability to prosecute war has?  I would say, yes.  If we wanted to really fight the war in Iraq well, we’d have sent half a million troops in there from day one.  But we wanted to do it painlessly, and ended up making a mess of it.

The same is true for the death penalty.  In an effort to abide by our constitution’s 8th amendment, a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, we’ve tried to create more and more painless ways to kill people.  Instead of the horrific experience of hanging, we substituted the electric chair, which later was superseded by the seemingly less painful gas chamber, and now a lethal injection, that would merely "put you to sleep", right?  Apparently not with with this guy in Florida!

So if we want to get serious about killing people, we need to return to older ways, more tried-and-true methods, and there is, in fact, an ideal method out there that will kill you dead with much less uncertainty than depending on possibly incompetent people mixing up the wrong solutions, or faulty wiring on decades-old electrical equipment.  Moreover, this method of death is instantaneous, and insofar as it is, probably the least painful out there.  We should take a lesson from the French, and bring the guillotine into common use in death-penalty states (now that I’m a citizen of a killer-state, it’s my duty to suggest this to help my community, of course).

Now some might say that the guillotine, by severing head from body, is more cruel and unusual than what we’ve got going now, but this is demonstrably false.  The 90-lb sharpened, angled blade, if kept in good working order (which is much more straightforward than any other execution equipment, except maybe the gallows), will, with its nearly 900 lbs per square inch of pressure, cut right through your neck so fast that there is no time for pain, and thus cannot be considered cruel.  Also, since your head is facing the ground, you don’t see the blade coming at you.  I can only imagine (with the help of John Grisham’s descriptions in The Chamber) the mental experiences of a man during the seconds or minutes (as many as 35, apparently!) after the chemical forms execution are administered, before death.  The guillotine would allow for no such mentally anguishing interlude between life and death.  And as to "unusual", this is clearly absurd.  Until the invention of firearms, beheading was one of the most usual forms of execution.

So if the guillotine really would be more painless (and efficient), why don’t we use it now?  For the same reason that we sent so few soldiers to fight this wrong-headed war, and now are banned from seeing their coffins come home.  The "cruel and unusual" aspects of capital punishment that our society has been trying to minimize are those that act not upon the condemned, but upon everybody else.  It is our own society’s wish to avoid the painful suspicion that we, as a nation, are cruel and unusual in how we punish people that has driven us to try and find more and more clinical ways to kill people (even if they do not work, just as the "surgical" tactics of the war in Iraq have not worked), not our concern for how the punishment is felt by the condemned.  Lethal Injection, particularly, allows us to feel smugly self-righteous about how we kill people, almost like we were doctors carrying out the unhappy duty of amputating a limb to save the greater body of society, and taking every care to do so with the least pain and suffering.

But if we want to kill people, we should own up to it, and kill them in a painless way that does not make any bones about the brutality of the act itself.  We don’t have to put their heads on spikes afterwards (though if we really wanted to be consistent with the idea of capital punishment as a deterrent, we would do exactly that), but we should at least force ourselves (or those of us who choose to contemplate these things) to imagine the severed head, dropping into the basket or bowl, blood spurting from carotid arteries, the crack of the snapping vertebrae, and the lifeless eyes, still open in that instant of supreme victimization by the sovereign state.  That’s what it means for our society to kill people, and if we want to be humane, instead of ostriches with our heads in the sand, that’s how we should do it, in the way that minimize pain for the one who dies, not for those of us sitting at home on our couches.