Our unhappiness with the US goes back to the Reagan era, and was unabated during the Clinton years. What's more, some of the most important differences between the US and Canada have been in place for most of my lifetime.
When the United States Supreme Court opened its new term this month, one of those differences was in full display: capital punishment. The Supremes agreed to hear a challenge from two death-row inmates - Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling, incarcerated in Kentucky - who say lethal injection as practiced by the state amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The last time the Supreme Court considered a challenge to a method of execution was in 1879, when it upheld the use of a firing squad in Utah. As the Globe and Mail recently put it: "You've come a short way, baby."
For death-penalty abolitionists, the Supreme Court agreeing to hear this case is good news, as it's likely to slow the pace of executions, thus saving lives. Fewer Americans are being executed - 40 so far this year, down from the record high of 98 in 1999. (Statistics here.) There's a much greater awareness of how deeply flawed the practice of capital punishment actually is, thanks to groups like The Innocence Project, whose work exposes wrongful convictions in capital cases.
The trends are good, and activists are hopeful. However... the United States retains the death penalty. Period. This, to me, is as backwards as it gets.
I thought this editorial in the Globe and Mail was very good. If you haven't read it, I recommend it.
Just abolish executions
How much pain and suffering should the state be allowed to inflict when it executes a prisoner? That is the constitutional question facing the United States Supreme Court, which agreed this week to hear a challenge to the particular mix of lethal drugs employed by 36 of the 38 death-penalty states. It is a bizarre question to be asking in 2007, when nearly all of the Western world has stopped using the death penalty.
You've come a short way, baby. In 1878, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked whether executions by firing squad were permissible. Yes, it said, but burning alive was not; the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment applied only to forms of torture. In 1947, the court was asked whether a man could be electrocuted a second time if the first attempt went awry. Yes, it said, he could be - though the minority wondered why, if five attempts would be cruel, two would be any less cruel - and Willie Francis, a 17-year-old black youth, was put to death. Today's question belongs to the primitive past.
It is good that, unlike some Islamic states, the United States does not lop off heads. But try though it might, the U.S. will never be able to dignify the death penalty. In making a deliberate choice to take a life in return for a life taken, the state descends to the killer's level. That was common in the world in 1878 and still common in 1947; it is now rare. In Europe, only Belarus maintains the death penalty. In Africa, only six states executed people last year. Canada won't permit suspects to face extradition to death-penalty states unless those states promise no execution will occur.
It is good that death-row inmates in the United States can ask the highest court to do something about a painful death. But it is also good that human life contains no on-off switch that the state needs merely to flip in an execution. A wrenching death is terrible for the one who suffers it, but it at least calls attention to the horror of state-imposed killing.
Like firing squads and electrocutions, lethal injections have proved wrenching. In 11 states, the death penalty has been suspended because of problems with the injections. The main risk with the three-drug cocktail (one drug knocks a prisoner unconscious, one stops his breathing and one stops his heart) is that a prisoner will be paralyzed and unable to cry out as he dies a drawn-out death. The headlines say it all: "Lethal injection takes 34 minutes to kill inmate"; "Condemned Man Sits Up and Tells Executioners, 'It's Not Working.'" But the inevitable problems in trying to kill prisoners humanely have not woken up the nation to the death penalty's absurdity.
Even as the United States persists in searching for a method of execution that meets "evolving standards of decency," as defined by the Supreme Court, the vast majority of the developed world has rejected the death penalty. That rejection is the standard of decency.
The best sites for death penalty information are Death Penalty Information Center, and the group we belonged to, National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The Innocence Project has lots of important reading on the subject, too. To date, there have been 208 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the US. And for every one of those 208 lives that would have been lost, a murderer, a rapist, a criminal was still enjoying his freedom.
But I'm not the man.
He goes free
as I wait on the row
for the man to test the rope
he'll slip around my throat...
and silence me.
On the day he was tried
no witness testified.
Nothing but evidence,
not hard to falsify.
His own confession was
a prosecutor's prize,
made up of fear, of rage and
of outright lies.
But I'm not the man.
He goes free
as the candle vigil glows,
as they burn my clothes.
As the crowd cries,
"Hang him slow!"
and I feel my blood go cold,
he goes free.
-- Natalie Merchant, "I'm Not The Man"
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Now might be a good time to remind stray readers of the wmtc comment policy.
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