Ending the death penalty, exhibit A

Consider that sometimes it is in vogue to have emotions. Consider this man in Ohio, who was convicted of doing, yes, terrible things. & when the time came to die last month, & when it proved much harder than expected, & when after two hours they still had not managed to get into his veins, he tried very politely to help.

"Several times, Broom rolled onto his left side, pointed at veins, straightened tubes or massaged his own arms to help prison staff keep a vein open. He was clearly frustrated as he leaned back on the gurney, covering his face with his hands and visibly crying." - Cincinnati Enquirer

If you cannot imagine this with needles and veins, consider moments in movies when the loser of a fight pulls his opponent's knife upward into the heart. Or lifts his arms above his heads to make a bigger target for the firing squad. I know this is not quite accurate or analogous, but it might be a useful image. Regardless, Mr. Broom's magnanimous effort to help the state kill him (like some other inmates before him who encountered difficulties in the process of being executed) is neither proof of his innocence, nor on its own reason enough to keep him alive if you have already decided that logic favors his execution. But it's a sliver of something both extremely painful and important, I think, and, I hope, a wake-up call to those who would dismiss Death Row inmates as utterly without humanity.

As I said in a comment way earlier, the problem I had with this bit of news is not that it was difficult to administer the drugs. He's just the most extreme example of a common problem in medicine - veins don't always cooperate. (Thanks to my friend Sam for pointing that out, p.s.)

The problem I have is
1. Cognitive dissonance. The process of killing killers has changed throughout human history, and lethal injection is the humane alternative to every other method that we have used in the past - hanging, the gas chamber, guillotine, firing squad. So when there is such vivid evidence that we still don't have it quite right - who would have thought ending a human life is actually a tricky and difficult business - then I question what values are driving the decision. Do we care about the inmates' wellbeing or do we not? Should we pretend we care if we don't? If we did care, would we still execute them? If we can care and still execute them, then what more can we do to ensure we are acting on how much we care?

2. As a social body, what is the impact on the rest of us to be complicit in killing our fellows? Perhaps we would be complicit by suffering murderers to live, even behind bars. But capital punishment is so much more a machine of death, a series of calculated decisions involving both elected officials and the ordinary citizen, and I wonder, following one measly philosophy class three years ago, if it makes us harder, if it tells us revenge is the Right Way Of Doing Things. In addition, if we say killing is okay at all, if we say all you need are many many rigorously-defined criteria and the backing of the entire justice system, aren't we still, on some level, condoning even those most violent and awful "illegal" killings? I'm not trying to turn this into a slippery slope argument, but I think the question of "Who are we as a society if we collectively commit these actions?" is one that should be invoked in any discussions of law.