(I got windy on this one. Sorry. Skim away, my friends.)
This past year, the United States has performed some executions.
That’s right. As of the start of November, twenty people, all male, have been executed in the United States in 2024.
The first person executed in 2024, Kenneth Eugene Smith, became the first person in the United States and in the world to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia.
So yes. That’s about two people per month put to death for their crimes. Like the old Roman Emperor giving the “thumbs down” at the Colosseum over and over again.
To be totally honest, there was a time in my life when I favored the death penalty. My reasoning, was that we, the taxpayers, shouldn’t have to support a horrific demon of a person who has committed unthinkable crimes. Also. I didn’t think they should have one more moment of anything close to happiness or contentment in this world. I know prison is a terrible place, but even in that treachery, people are able to do things like laugh at a joke, paint a picture, see a good show on TV. They might get to eat a candy bar or read a delightful book. But most likely, they took all those things away from the person or people they murdered.
So that was my thinking.
However, these days, I’ve changed my mind. I still don’t think it is fair for these people to have moments of beauty.
But, there have been an overwhelming number of people on death row who have been proven innocent of their crimes. And as such, they face death for crimes they did not commit.
It started, who knows when. With Korg and Grok in front of some cave. Yes. Korg decided Grok should have to die for dropping a boulder on his wife’s head.
However, the first execution in recorded history is often attributed to the execution of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s servant. He was executed for a crime in ancient Assyria around 668-627 BCE. However, the exact details of the execution are not well-documented.
And then, sometime later, the first recorded execution in what is now the United States took place in 1608. A man named Daniel Frank was executed in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia for the crime of murder.
This marked the beginning of capital punishment in the American colonies. The execution was carried out by hanging, which became a common method of execution in the early years of the American legal system.
Now, it happens in all sorts of different ways. Hangings, firing squads, lethal injections. The electric chair. That seems to be the one people always refer to when they talk about the death penalty. Someone getting, “The Chair.”
The first death by electric chair happened at Auburn Prison in New York. On August 6, 1890. Yes, the first execution by electrocution in history was carried out against a guy named William Kemmler. Old Willy had been convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe. Not good.
But the idea of electrocution as a humane means of execution was first suggested almost a decade before that. Back in 1881. A man named Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist.
Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard “painlessly” killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York. In the prevalent form of execution at the time—death by hanging—the condemned were known to hang by their broken necks for up to 30 minutes before succumbing to asphyxiation.
So, the design plans went into motion for the electric chair.
And as I mentioned, William Kemmler became the first person to be sent to the chair.
But. It didn’t go so great.
After he was strapped in, a charge of approximately 700 volts was delivered for only 17 seconds before the current failed. Although witnesses reported smelling burnt clothing and charred flesh, Kemmler was far from dead, and a second shock was prepared. The second charge was 1,030 volts and applied for about two minutes, whereupon smoke was observed coming from the head of Kemmler, who was clearly deceased. An autopsy showed that the electrode attached to his back had burned through to the spine.
Hmmm.
Anyway, it continues. The most recent execution by electric chair in the United States occurred on August 31, 2023, in Tennessee. Stephen West was executed for the 1986 murders of Wanda and Sheila Romines, a mother and her teenage daughter. This marked the third use of the electric chair in Tennessee within a year.
I’m not sure how people should be punished for committing horrific crimes. But it seems to me that the death penalty is a shaky means. Too many prisoners can say, “I didn’t do it.” And we need to figure that one out, too.
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“Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared.” — Albert Camus.
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“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
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“Being against the death penalty does not mean being against justice… We can honor the victims without more killing.” — Sister Helen Prejean.
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