Thumbing its nose at my argument in The Tennessean, in 2019, that, “There are many facts that clearly show the death penalty should be obsolete,” Tennessee is set to execute folks again.
As The Tennessean reported recently, the state “has announced plans to resume capital punishment with a new, more vague protocol for lethal injection — [one even vaguer than the previous protocol the state had a track record for botching. Now it will use] one drug called pentobarbital.”
This will satisfy only the animalistic desire for violently fatal retribution which civilized societies around the world long ago outlawed; they hoped the U.S. someday would follow suit, or, at least, that individual states like Tennessee would start to shutter their barbaric death penalty regimes; that’s why in that 2019 essay I insisted: “We must be honest about the death penalty’s repugnance.”
I advanced then — and resubmit — that, “In these times, we must embolden noble, courageous people who exist in America, people with integrity, to call lethal injection the vile torture it is.”
Tennessee has plenty of prison space to incarcerate the “worst of the worst,” saving Tennesseans a whole heap of money in lawyers’ fees and other costs of maintaining Tennessee’s barbaric machinery of death (think of the officials who get paid to be involved, the lethal drugs, etcetera). And as The Tennessean astutely reported, there is a real “lack of transparency over how the state is securing” the pentobarbital it will use, and therefore questions about whether it could be of shoddy quality. This should be especially alarming as witnesses of pentobarbital executions have described condemned prisoners “gasping for air before they died and autopsies showing their lungs were filled with fluid akin to drowning” (and the horrific torture known as waterboarding).
The Tennessean rightly observed that despite Trump’s Justice Department’s gung-ho approach to the death penalty, “former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland halted the use of pentobarbital for federal death row inmates after it was unable to determine whether the drug causes ‘unnecessary pain and suffering.’” However, it’s critical Tennesseans understand that legal experts who study executions have come to much starker conclusions about pentobarbital.
In a new book called Secrets of the Killing State — about “the untold story of lethal injection” — Corinna Barrett Lain, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, minces no words in her scholarly work, which anyone who wants to know the truth about lethal injection must read. She concludes that “pentobarbital executions are torturous in their own right.”
About Lain’s book, Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, wrote: “A compelling, thoroughly researched, brilliantly written investigation of how governments kill prisoners whose very lives may depend on the moral outrage of a nation that dares to look more closely at lethal injection and the death penalty. Disturbing, devastating, an urgent must-read.”
As I’ve argued before to Tennesseans: “Abolishing the death penalty requires morality, but it also requires people of conscience to speak honestly — and ask tough questions — in support of an unshakeable belief that should be uncontroversial in a civilized, principled society. The death penalty is racist, barbaric, and immoral.” And: “There exists too much mental illness, and far too much death and suffering in America already,” so all Americans, including Tennesseans, need to insist the state stop throwing scarce resources away on the death penalty in an immoral pursuit of “justice.”
Pardon my reliance on my past publications in The Tennessean on this subject of great importance — to Tennesseans who care about human rights — but it needs repetition: “The constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment bears no asterisk for crimes committed by society’s most despised.”
Scheduling a flurry of lethal injections using pentobarbital is the wrong decision for Tennessee. It has already led to a flurry of litigation — with much more expected — and the amount of taxpayer money that is being used by the state to defend this torture will only mount.
It is important for Tennesseans to let the politicians who represent you know that this is not what you want. And it is not what you will vote for going forward. Tell them you want a government that focuses on improving the quality of life for its citizens — not one focused on secretive protocols for torturous killings.
Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California.