Why end death penalty? First, botched executions

The Death Penalty Information Center has released its 2022 year-end report, and three items caught my eye.

First, 2022 was a year of botched executions.

The report notes a “high number of states with failed or bungled executions. Seven of the 20 execution attempts were visibly problematic … as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves.”

All three of Arizona’s executions had “significant problems,” including the “surreal” scene of one prisoner helping the executioners find a usable vein for his own lethal injection.

There were 18 executions last year, with five each in Texas and Oklahoma. The Death Penalty Information Center, or DPIC, however, cited “serious concerns about the application of the death penalty.” Among the executed “were prisoners with serious mental illness, brain damage, intellectual disability, and strong claims of innocence.”

Texas prisoner Andre Thomas, who has ripped out the hearts of family members, stabbed himself and gouged out both his eyes, is seriously mentally ill. His execution is set for April 5.

The report notes that the victims’ families objected to two executions. The executions were done despite these objections. In two other executions, prosecutors requested to withdraw their death warrants. These requests were ignored.

In July, Alabama executioners “took three hours to set an IV line putting Joe James Jr. to death.” It now stands as “the longest botched lethal injection execution in U.S. history.”

In Tennessee, the governor stayed the execution of one prisoner when he discovered there was no testing of the execution chemicals for impurities or contamination. The governor then canceled all pending executions and appointed a former federal prosecutor to conduct a study of Tennessee’s execution process.

Second, the DPIC cited National Public Radio reporting that “corrections personnel who participate in executing prisoners experience emotional trauma so profound that it often changes their views about capital punishment.”

It has long been known that an execution exacts an emotional and physical toll on prison personnel, often leading those individuals to doubt any justification for the “ultimate penalty.”

An NPR reporter interviewed 26 current or former corrections workers who had carried out executions in 17 states and the federal government, and most “reported suffering serious mental and physical repercussions.”

To make matters worse, NPR reported “only one person said they received any psychological support from the government to help them cope.”

Of those who were required to witness an execution, including at least one person in

Texas, “none said they still support the death penalty, including those who were in favor of capital punishment when they started their jobs.”

In other words, some supported the death penalty when it was remote and distant. When they actually had to watch it carried out, their views changed dramatically.

This reminds me of my late friend, the Rev. Carroll “Bud” Pickett, who spent 15 years as the death house chaplain at the Walls Unit of the Texas prison system.

It was Pickett’s responsibility to be in the death chamber with the condemned prisoner.

Pickett ministered to 95 men during their executions. At first, he supported the death penalty.

Pickett recounts in his book, “Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain,” that when he began his career as a Presbyterian minister, he had “embraced the idea of putting murderers to death.”

Following the execution of Carlos DeLuna, arguably an innocent man wrongly put to death, Pickett began to reassess his feelings about the death penalty.

He confided to another chaplain, “I do not believe it’s right. And with every execution that is carried out, that belief grows stronger.”

Pickett would eventually be a strong public voice calling for abolition of the death penalty.

The third important item I found in the DPIC report was titled “Oregon’s governor commutes death row.”

Before leaving office last year, Gov. Kate Brown commuted all 17 death sentences and ordered the dismantling of Oregon’s execution chamber, declaring, “The death penalty is immoral.”

Further, she said: “It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.”

The same is true of Texas’s death penalty.