On Oct. 9th, an Arkansas judge made the decision to halt two executions scheduled for Oct. 21st. On Oct. 20th, the Supreme Court of Arkansas threw out the judge’s decision but granted their own stay to the eight inmates scheduled for execution.
I actually sat in on an Arkansas Supreme Court hearing earlier this year when I took a trip with my Judicial Process class, and the case they heard that day was an appealed case of one of the men who was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday. The executions were halted over controversy created by Arkansas’ new law that says the source of lethal injection drugs are not required to be disclosed to the public. The 31 states that allow the death penalty have been scrambling to find these drugs ever since European pharmaceutical companies stopped selling their products to the U.S. four years ago. This has caused many prison systems to turn to companies lightly regulated to obtain their lethal injection drugs. My major is public administration, and I’m highly interested in working for the government as a career. One of the areas that I’m particularly interested in is the criminal justice system, and secrecy about executions and lethal injection drugs are just the tip of the iceberg for me.
I strongly oppose the use of the death penalty, but I think that if your state has chosen to use it, then they need to do so responsibly. The public needs to know exactly where the government is getting their lethal injection drugs and exactly what’s in them. It’s likely that executions around the country are being botched without our knowledge. I can’t assume that the drugs being used are “humane.” I’m very skeptical of the fact that these pieces of information are being hidden. Not only does capital punishment fail at deterring heinous crimes, states that do not impose the death penalty have lower rates of murders. If you want to disregard the morality (or lack there of) of the death penalty and you’re purely concerned about your tax dollars, consider this: In Washington state, it costs $1.7 million dollars total, including court and detention costs, to execute a person. Keeping a person in prison for life would cost $1.3 million.
I believe that the death penalty, no matter how a person is executed, violates our 8th Amendment right that protects us against cruel and unusual punishment. Batman was not the real hero of “The Dark Knight;” The Joker was. This may sound crazy, but just hear me out. At the beginning of the movie, the Joker had three goals: to get rid of the corrupt police system, to get rid of the high-level crime, and to get rid of Batman. Fast-forward to the end of the movie. The police chief is replaced, all of the gangsters are gone, and Batman goes into hiding. I’m not defending the steps the Joker took to complete his goals; I’m just saying that the man knows how to stick to a plan.
The Romantic period of time introduced a type of literature that made the simple, every-day, normal man the hero of his own little story. From a very young age, we are taught there are such things as “good guys” and “bad guys.” In middle school, we were trained to pick out the protagonist and the antagonist from our chapter-books. I hate to break it to you, but there’s no such thing as a bad guy, just a character that the author decides not to focus on.
People make choices in life, and sometimes those choices wind them up in jail. Jean Valjean was not solely a criminal; he stole the loaf of bread to feed his family. Yes, he committed a crime, but that does not inherently make him a bad person. Murder is wrong unless the person in question is a “bad guy,” right? Wrong. Murder is always wrong. You do not have claim over that person’s life even if they have unlawfully taken someone else’s.
