Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Shortly after 9:00, the night of June 17, 2004, Steven Oken was executed in Maryland by lethal injection. Convicted of the 1987 rape and murder of 20-year-old Dawn Marie Garvin,¹ he received the death penalty after nearly 20 years on death row. Part of the delay was due to his claim that death by lethal injection was “cruel and unusual,” thus violating the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. His lawyers had won a stay of execution on grounds that the state had not demonstrated the non-cruelty of this method, but the U.S. Supreme Court lifted this stay, and the sentence was carried out.

The Oken case was reminiscent of the Kemmler case of 1890. In those days, thanks to Thomas Edison, electricity was the new, much favored technology. Its application to the death penalty seemed much less distasteful than conventional methods, such as hanging. While agreeing that the electric chair was an “unusual” form of punishment, since the technology was new, the Supreme Court did not find it objectionably unusual, nor did it count electrocution cruel. Rather, it agreed with the lower court that this mode “must result in instantaneous, and consequently in painless, death.”²

However, in the late 20th century, some states wanted to improve on the not-always-reliable and sometimes-gruesome electric chair, so lethal injection emerged as a favored method. Its application has three components, administered sequentially: 1. general anesthesia (e.g., sodium thiopental) to put the condemned to sleep; 2. a muscle relaxant (e.g., pancuronium bromide) to paralyze the diaphragm, stopping the breathing; 3. a toxic agent (e.g., potassium chloride) to interrupt the heart’s electrical impulses. Death occurs within 5 to 18 minutes.³

It is clear that a major effort has been made to protect the condemned from physical suffering. Indeed, one could hardly imagine a path of greater care under these circumstances. But such was not always the case, as the Founding Fathers well knew. They wrote the prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” against the backdrop of centuries of torturous punishment, such as exemplified by the following:

1. Balthazar Gerard, who had assassinated the Prince of Orange in Delft in 1584, was flogged with knotted cords, sliced by split quills, dipped in salt water, and left overnight in a garment soaked in vinegar. In the morning, they placed him on the rack and tore his flesh away with red-hot pincers.⁴

2. Ruy Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, was convicted of collaborating in a Spanish plot to kill the queen in 1594. Hanged, he was “cut down alive, castrated, disembowelled and quartered.”⁵

3. In 1531, Richard Rouse, a cook for the bishop of Rochester, slipped poison into the food, sickening members of the household and killing a visitor and a pauper. As punishment, he was boiled to death.⁶

The list goes on and on, to include burnings at the stake, brandings, and dismemberment prior to execution. The only limit was the human imagination. Fortunately, America’s Founding Fathers were determined to distance the fledgling nation from such horrors, convinced that retribution did not entail torture. In this same spirit, those called upon to apply the death penalty today are striving to carry out the sentence as humanely as possible—as they should, for the cause of justice never warrants acts of cruelty by its agents, for these would degrade not only the victim but also the perpetrators.

The legality and manner of execution are matters of keen dispute in the world today. Capital punishment is commonplace in Asia, where it is practiced in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and India. On the other hand, Turkey has abolished the death penalty to conform to European Union standards, though most Muslim nations continue the practice, some employing beheading and stoning. On these issues, humanity is a house divided, and believers must insist on the best biblical readings, the most reliable information, the demands of justice, and the principle of human dignity.

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