The White House found Eugene’s killing ‘very troubling’ and lawyers involved called it ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ but I guess that’s a requirement for getting rid of a guy on Death Row these days.
In fact, institutional death always has been cruel and unusual
Certainly, dropping the floor out from under you with a rope around your neck has a certain amount of last-minute terror. The smoke and dimmed lights of the electric-chair were part of the reason chemical executions now tend toward the flavor-of-the-day—simply too cruel and unusual for the required witnesses to bear, not to mention the victim.
Victim, you say? These people are murderers and worse.
Well sometimes they are and sometimes not. Since 1978, five California death row inmates out of the seventeen executed were later exonerated. Whether any of the other 12 were innocent may never be known. But a 29.4% ‘misunderstanding’ is way too high a percent when a single wrongful death is a crime in itself.
We know there are better m…