-- Utah State Police officer and firing-squad volunteer
America, as sad as it is for me to write these words, is a morally-bankrupt nation besotted with cruelty and a complete disregard for life.
Friday's execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner in a hail of gunfire at the state prison in Utah confirmed this beyond any reckoning. The only remaining question centers on what America will now do - shrug its collective shoulders and move on, as the officer in the quote above suggests, or take this as a wake-up call to step beyond its collective savagery.
Utah is probably not America's greatest example of forward-thinking.
Run for years by the Mormon church, Utah (among other things) never outlawed bigamy - this was left to the Federal government in 1862. They were one of three states to allow a firing-squad as a first-line option (Idaho outlawed it in 2009; Oklahoma retains it as a 'backup method' - in the event the electric chair and lethal injection are both ruled unconstitutional).
The Mormons, you see, have this mystical 'thing' about blood-atonement - the notion that the only way to square accounts with the Imaginary Friend is to spill one's own blood in this life to 'atone' fully, and get a clean slate in the next. This past Friday's circus in Utah is a carry-over from those days.
That the officials of Utah's state prison were able to find five moral-degenerates-in-uniform from their State Police who were willing to aim a rifle at a man who was strapped to a chair with a hood over his head, twenty-five feet away is, or shouldn't be, of any particular surprise, given that Utah is also the home of Orrin Hatch and the many descendants of Joseph Smith. We shouldn't be surprised that one of the executioners elected to fire at the count of 'two' (not waiting until zero - we can only suppose he wanted to be first).
We also shouldn't be surprised at the comments of the man, above, who chose to talk big, but remain anonymous. However, what should be appalling to everyone outside of Utah (and Texas) is the lack of protest from the rest of us.
We've done an excellent job, us Americans, of rationalizing the process of allowing the state to take someone's life.
I'm told, "But you don't know how the victim's families feel," or "What about justice?"
Let's talk about justice, just for a moment.
The United States ranks fifth in the use of the death penalty. We're only surpassed in its use by such enlightened social-democracies as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the People's Republic of China, and our newest-conquered province, Iraq. We've executed 28 people so far this year; a little less than 50% of whom were persons of color (that disproportion should speak to several things - among them the incidence of poverty among persons of color in the U.S., as well as the increased likelihood to apply capital punishment to dark-skinned peoples here in the U.S.)
Japan is the only other industrialized/first-world nation to apply the death penalty. If we're looking at a 'top-ten-of-barbarous-nations', Yemen, Sudan, Vietnam and Syria all precede Japan, which rounds out the list at #10.
We're in pretty rotten company.
As to the process, it's also pretty rotten - in fact, it was so corrupt in Illinois that the governor announced a moratorium on executions after a staggering 13 people were freed from death row after their convictions were overturned on DNA evidence. It would appear that while we're pretty good at throwing the switch/pulling the trigger, etc.; etc - we're not terribly good at fingering the right perpetrators.
With this sorry company and equally-sorry record, one might think that the United States, an educated, enlightened nation, would demand of its state representatives that the death penalty be overturned.
However, any recent attention spent following the national political debate-in-general will convince even the most casual reader that America is not terribly well educated (remember all of those Tea Party placards?), and not terribly enlightened, either.
No - with people like Palin, Angle and Bachmann driving the national political agenda and their handmaidens, Porter, LaHaye, Dobson, et. al. providing their 'spiritual leadership', it's small wonder the rest of the world views us as they do.
I'm just sorry to have to admit that they're right.
Reading:
Capital Punishment Statistics (Wikipedia; upd. 2010)
Executioner: 'Death By Firing Squad Is 100 Percent Justice' - (CNN; June - 2010)
Illinois Moratorium on Executions (JusticeDenied.Org)
Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (Wikipedia; 2010)
Reynolds vs. United States (Wikipedia; 2010)
Executions in 2010 (Death Penalty Information Center; 2010)
Firing Squad Executes Convicted Killer (Yahoo News - June; 2010)
