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Questions remain on death penalty

The United States Supreme Court has upheld the three-drug protocol in lethal injections for capital punishment — applied in 36 states, besides the Federal government — thus lifting a seven-month de facto moratorium on executions. Yet the divergent opinions expressed in the ruling on the constitutionality of the drug regimen and on the deterrent value of the death penalty itself are hopeful pointers to the ultimate, if distant, goal of the abolition of this barb aric punishment. The contention of two death row inmates in Kentucky state was that the administration of pancuronium bromide, the paralytic, carried the risk of excruciating pain in the event of inadequate dosage of the anesthetic sodium thiopental. They maintained that the continuation of the current protocol was a violation of the bar on cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The judges were not unanimous on the gratuitous harm that could result from the maladministration of the protocol, or on the preparedness of the Kentucky prison administration to ensure that inmates were rendered unconscious before the paralytic and cardiac drugs were injected. Moreover, the plaintiffs’ plea for the anesthetic to be administered in large amounts minus the other two drugs was overruled on grounds that such an alternative, while applied to put animals to sleep, may not be appropriate in the case of human beings.

Against this backdrop, the court’s disposition to leave open the question of less painful alternatives to the existing protocol no doubt allows limited room for manoeuvre from the standpoint of the reversal of the death penalty. But such a stance perhaps affords an opportunity to establish that a pain-free lethal injection may after all be non-existent, just as the trauma that accompanies death is inescapable. The idea may not be fanciful, considering the enormous evidence of witnesses on the suffocation of death row victims. Technicalities concerning the lethal injection do not detract from the basic truth that capital punishment is inherently a degrading and irreversible form of treating convicts by civilised and democratic states — a point affirmed by the New Jersey legislators’ resounding no to the practice last December. That should be the future for the entire U.S. and many other countries of the world. The 27 member-states of the European Union have set an admirable example by removing the death penalty from their statutes and laying down its abolition as a precondition of membership.

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