Maybe pain is good

Five riflemen shooting bullets at a prisoner’s heart from 20 feet away probably isn’t the image that comes to mind when people think about the death penalty today. Yet Idaho last week became the most recent of five states authorizing firing squads for executions.

The method, experts say, might be less painful than lethal injection - because if the gunmen hit their target, death comes quickly. But the practice is also more obviously brutal. That’s probably a good thing.

The country has cycled through methods for killing convicts over the centuries, always looking for the gentlest version of an inherently ungentle act: from hanging, to electrocuting, to gassing, to drugging. Nothing has ever been without issues. The chair scarred inmates’ bodies with burns; the gas chamber made them choke. The worst part was, you could see the burns and you could hear the gasps.

Lethal injection looked peaceful by contrast.

Turns out it only appears not to hurt. The paralytic prevents prisoners from exhibiting whatever pain they may be feeling.

Somehow, our efforts to conjure up a more compassionate way to kill have resulted in perhaps the cruelest way of all. This irony may have been inevitable.

Why can’t we execute people humanely? Veterinarians seem to have little trouble dispatching beloved pets in a manner that allays rather than heightens families’ grief. It turns out that they largely reject the three-dose protocol as inhumane. They just administer a single but sufficient shot of barbiturate that slows, and eventually stops, breathing and heartbeat. Legislators wanted something different, fearful the public would lash out against treating people like animals. The unintended result is we treat them worse.

One problem with lethal injection is that drugmakers won’t provide the go-to drugs: More than 20 U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies have blocked their products from being used in executions, prompting states to resort to untested alternatives, including some from sketchy suppliers. And many doctors won’t administer them: The American Medical Association discourages its members from performing executions. Who can blame these professionals? They’re devoted to protecting life, not taking it.

When it comes down to it, we can’t execute people humanely because we can’t execute people humanely. The same thinking has moved Supreme Court justices, somewhat perversely, to hold that the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” can’t prevent the government from inflicting pain on its citizens - because such a reading would, in the words of Samuel A. Alito, “effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether.” Well, yes.

Elected officials today generally aren’t moving toward firing squads because they prefer it. They’re doing it, mostly, because they’re having trouble getting drugs. Yet perhaps it is preferable. Reliable as the method is supposed to be compared with lethal injection, sometimes, something will go wrong. People will suffer, and this suffering will prove almost impossible to ignore. Sometimes, everything will go right, and even then there will be blood.

Usually the gun of a random member of a firing squad is filled not with bullets but with blanks, so that the shooters can remain unsure whether they loosed a fatal shot. The rest of the country is allowing itself the luxury of a similar illusion by relying on lethal injection. State violence should look like what it is: violent. If, after that, the government can’t justify killing, it should cease to kill.