Florida still has the death penalty and they (we) like to use it, apparently enough that will use it twice on the same person.Angel Diaz did not die on Wednesday after receiving his lethal injection, at least, not right away. It took 34 minutes and a second dose of a “lethal injection” for him to die. The Department of Corrections apparently doesn’t keep records of how long it takes executees to die now how many doses they get. So, we have no historical record to look to about whether or not this is common. The fact alone ought to disturb people. Life, considered by nearly everyone to be precious, is apparently so inconsequential to the DOC that they fail to measure how long it takes to be extinguished when they are the cause (and yet manages to track the break time of each employee with considerable accuracy). This recent execution ought to inspire conversation and discussion about the rightness or wrongness of executing criminals even if we end up deciding that we should continue (to stop asking is to become dogmatic). But, honestly, I am not really trying to start that particular fight today.
Maria Otero, Angel’s cousin, was understandably upset by the death of her cousin (seriously, I don’t know what kind of criminal he was, but I worry that failing to be upset by the death of even hardened criminals lessen our humanity). But she is quoted as saying something that bugs me all to hell. “Who came down to earth and gave you the right to kill somebody?” Presumably she was talking, rhetorically, to Governor Bush. And further, we can assume that what she meant was something on the order of “I do not think you have the authority or the right to execute any individual” and not the odd query about who specifically told JEB he could do it (would she be content with response ‘Lord Worfin, leader of the Red Lectroids’? or equally as ridiculous but clearly more in line with her beliefs ‘Jesus’?).
I am here admitting to the vast nothingness of the internet that this type of question, more than the argument about the death penalty, really pisses me off to no end. It is this type of question which I think exhibits and encourages misunderstandings about right and wrong. All other discussions aside, we live in a republic that, at least claims, to be ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. When you ask “who gives you the right” to the governor, the obvious answer to anyone who has taken a civics class is, “you, me, and everyone else.” We are the architects of our own nation. We are responsible for how our government acts. If our government behaves in a manner that we find unacceptable it is not the officials who are acting that are responsible, it is we, who allow our government to act that way, who are responsible (JEB could execute no one if we did not allow him to). We are, and should be, collectively responsible for what we, as people, do (to eschew this responsibility is to believe that we have done enough, all that we can, to stop those things that we find unethical).
Personal involvement, a direct connect to some set of events, is great for getting individual’s to feel connected to a concept or idea, to give them the motivation necessary to fight for a cause. But it sucks as a justification. ‘This is wrong because you are hurting my cousin’ fails to motivate anyone else. You might try to demand, ‘imagine if it was your cousin.’ But you are simply further the notion that personal involvement is how we should determine right and wrong. One of the presuppositions of justice in these American States is that justice is blind, that all individuals are created equal. Neither of these beliefs supports a subjective, personal experience approach to right action. The rhetorical fallacy ‘imagine if your brother was being executed’ is matched perfectly by the alternate rhetorical device ‘imagine if your brother was murdered’. They appeal to the same part of us emotionally. They are dreams of revenge not retribution. They are not justice.
It probably doesn’t bother me as much as it should. He was a convicted murderer, it’s harder to care about someone who killed people. And her argument of who gave you the right…it really seems obvious to turn it on him, well, what gave Diaz the right? Her indignation bothers me more than anything.
All that aside, I feel like there is no need for the death penalty in a civilized nation. A death penalty merely quenches a base bloodlust that we should have long outgrown as a people. It does nothing…nothing to deter, nothing for justice, nothing to heal, nothing to help anyone. It only demeans us as a people.
What sort of statement is it, when your deterent isn’t carried out for 27 years? I mean, how does that help anything? Someone killing someone else while in a heated argument while drunk, is a long way from an institution methodically taking planning and killing a person. And then, not even doing that right. According to an article I just read on CNN, it’s very likely that Diaz went through some excrutiating pain before he finally died. Way to go, Florida.
Also, the folks tried to claim that he had liver trouble which made his body not metabolize the chemicals properly, resulting in the need for the second dose. That is, until the autopsy showed they messed up the first IV and all the drugs went into the muscle tissue. Good job covering up there, guys.
First off, what you meant to discuss, the rhetorical question of who bestows you with god-like powers: if you assume that Maria Otero is at least a little disallusioned with Florida’s state government, and she believes her destiny (as well as her cousin’s) is ultimately decided by a supreme being, then her rhetorical question seems very reasonable to me. Unlike Dr. Wagner, I don’t think there is anything wrong with her indignation, I doubt she thought her cousin had the right to take someone’s life, which is assuming she thinks her cousin is guilty.
Now on to the part of this that really interests me: how the fuck can we believe that this is not cruel or unusual? Last time I checked there is no state where lethal injection is even supervised by a doctor, so seems the odds of someone putting the cocktail in the muscle tissue seems pretty good to me. I’ve had someone with medical training screw up an IV, so I don’t have a lot of faith in the state executioners. Also, paralyzing someone before we kill them seems to be lessening the “cruel” part for the spectators only, not for the person being executed. Add to this the spate of DNA exhonorations and I just can’t understand why this practice continues.
I think her question is reasonable from the perspective she is asking it, it is the perspective that bugs me. And, I don’t believe she was actively working against the death penalty until her cousin became one of the people on whom it was being used. Perhaps I am overly cynical here but in my experience the a large portion of the openly religious are ardent supporters of the death penalty; a substantial number of people believe not only that we should “get what we deserve” (which in this context is best understood as an eye for an eye or if we murder we should be murdered) but that murderers have abdicated the basic human rights that we all share (that is, they no longer have a right to life or liberty, or to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment. I have often heard “the murderer didn’t care about his victim’s right, why should we care about his?”). [I should add that a fair number of very religious people are adamantly against the death penalty as well. I often use Jimmy Carter's discussion of the death penalty when I teach this issue] It may be that Ms Otero was actively working against capital punishment prior to her cousin’s transgression but I doubt it.
But the part that bugs me, which is not that I think her position is strictly and only motivated by her personal involvement, is that “who gave you the right?” mistakes what we are doing when we act ethically. It mistakes this for a number of reasons not the least of which is that we live in a society that purports to have religious freedom; in this case, my religious freedom should include that the functioning of government is not dictated by any particular religious group’s perspective. But the question also mistakes the very origin of these rights. On the one hand, no one gave this right to the government (there is no single source of power which determines right and wrong action) while on the other hand, the right that our government has to take human life is derived directly from the rights that we allow it.
I am disagreeing only with the way she phrases her attack on the death penalty; the “who gave you the right” line doesn’t work for anything (try using it on a cop the next time you get pulled over). I agree that the death penalty, especially as it is practiced, is nothing but cruel and unusual (why don’t we just give them overdoses of morphine? It will kill them, do we just not WANT their deaths to be pleasant?) Further, I don’t think, and have arguments for, that the death penalty functions in the manner that most current arguments claims it does: as a deterrent to other murders. And beyond that, I think simply looking at the statistics on which countries even have the death penalty should be enough to stop us from practicing it; yes, I want to use and argument about character to claim that we shouldn’t execute criminals. 5 countries execute 98% of the people in the world. China does the most but the United States kills as many as Iran (and Iraq before the war); the company we keep is dreadful.