Texas Does It Slowly

There was an execution in Texas the other day. Elliot Rod Johnson, 28, who murdered two men while robbing a jewelry store, was dispatched by the state, but without dispatch. Texas, being a humane place, murders murderers by lethal injection. The trouble was that the executioners couldn’t find a vein in Johnson’s arm, and it took them 35 minutes to get the catheter inserted so that the poison could be injected. Thirty-five minutes during which the condemned man was awake and fully conscious of what was going on.

Before everyone starts cheering that it was too good for that bum, recall that the Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” and consider whether what was done to Johnson was cruel and unusual or not.

The Texas attorney general, Jim Mattox, who witnessed this performance, explained afterward that Johnson was a drug addict and had destroyed his superficial veins, and that was the cause of the delay. The prison authorities should have found that out before they had him strapped to the gurney in the execution chamber.

And what of the medical doctors who participate in this grisly rite? Have they not sworn an oath to use their knowledge to preserve life, not end it? How do they reconcile that oath with the administration of lethal drugs? What does the medical profession think of doctors who do this? Shouldn’t disciplinary proceedings be instituted against them?

Lethal injection was introduced a few years ago as an improved method of execution--better than the gas chamber, the electric chair, the hangman’s noose or the firing squad. But, as the recent debacle in Texas shows, all of these methods degrade those who implement them and the society that orders capital punishment.