With Gov. Asa Hutchinson's killing season on death row inmates scheduled to open in Arkansas in eight days, a few anecdotes might lend themselves to worthy and somber contemplation.
It's been more than a decade since I found myself standing before about 120 people on a November evening at the annual fundraising banquet of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. I was presuming to offer the banquet speech. And I was feeling an obligation to confess.
What had happened, I related, was that I was driving along one day with the car radio on when a news bulletin announced that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had just been given the death penalty. And I--the evening's anti-death penalty speaker--had exulted, right there, alone, at 35 miles an hour.
I paused so that I could receive the sneers and boos and shouts of "sit down" or "leave" that these bona fide abolitionists might choose to give me. I received none.
Free to proceed, I said that my confessional was the point.
It is a natural emotional instinct to want such a monster as McVeigh to meet his ultimate doom. But that--the momentary passionate appeal of it--represents the death penalty's central flaw.
A passionate moment, an instinct, should not be turned into public policy and made into an officially sanctioned state crime of passion.
The death penalty never makes more sense than in a sudden burst of emotion. But it makes less sense as the car rolls down the highway, and less after one reaches his destination, and less still as years pass.
In time, someone would wonder whatever happened to McVeigh. Did he get death or the systematic rotting of life imprisonment? And would it matter at that point?
Not so much.
After the speech, it seemed that half the audience told me they'd experienced the same instinctive emotional reaction about McVeigh. But they agreed public policy can't be made on emotion and that public morality must transcend it.
Then there's this story: There were six young men ranging from the early 20s to 15 sharing a Boone County house and living off the checks they could steal and forge. One day the 15-year-old got detained in town and gave up the other five. Three of the other five kidnapped the 15-year-old and tortured him. Then one of the three young men told the two others to kill the boy, which, horrifyingly, they did, by strangling, with the third young man--the one who had ordered the killing--participating in taking strangulation turns.
The one who told the other two to do the killing--and who was a participant in the killing--got the death penalty. The other two got life in prison.
Why would three men who combined by their bare hands to kill a 15-year-boy get such vastly different sentences--ultimately vast, that is, in that one would be sentenced to die and two to live?
That's another central flaw in the death penalty. Like most criminal punishment, it is imposed unevenly from one jurisdiction to another, from other jury to another, from one prosecutor to another and from one defendant to another.
This uneven administration of justice, or what passes for justice, is unfortunate in all cases. But it is absolutely tragic--an utter abomination, in that it can't be corrected--when it causes one man to die and another to live when they took turns choking the same child's neck.
By the way: That murderer who got death from Boone County while his fellow murderers got life in prison was among the eight executions the state was planning over 10 days beginning April 17. But the Parole Board last week recommended clemency for him. A federal judge ruled the next day he should be spared for now to allow more time for gubernatorial consideration of the recommendation for commutation to life in prison.
Sometimes, you see, keeping a monstrous murderer alive permits a chance to get his case adjudicated more thoughtfully.
Justice late is better than no justice at all. But justice for the already-dead is too late.
Finally, there was this little story out of Ohio on Thursday: The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a temporary stay halting a scheduled Ohio execution because of concern about the drug "midazolam."
That's a powerful sedative that is the first step in a three-step killing cocktail. Evidence suggests that it can, in some cases, cause cruel side effects, such as prolonged gasping, and fail in part of its intended function to numb the pain and burning of the next two killer injections.
That's the very drug Asa wants Arkansas to use now seven times in 10 days before the end-of-the-month expiration date on our limited supply. Getting someone to send us more is an uncertain prospect.
The drug has a bad reputation, you see. So does the death penalty.
So, alas, does Arkansas.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/09/2017