Two executions on a single day in America

The Atlantic Daily, May 2, 2022: Two executions on a single day in America

“Last year, 11 people were executed under the death penalty in the United States—the fewest since the late ’80s. Many factors are behind the decline, including the reality that states are finding it harder to get their hands on lethal-injection drugs, with more than 50 major health-care companies now refusing to sell them for use in capital punishment.

“Two executions that were planned for a single day last month reveal the pitfalls of lethal injection, my colleague Liz Bruenig writes.

“On Thursday, April 21, two men—Oscar Franklin Smith, 72, in Tennessee; and Carl Wayne Buntion, 78, in Texas—were both slated to be executed. Smith had finished his last meal (a double bacon cheeseburger) when he learned that the state’s governor had granted him a temporary reprieve because of an ‘oversight’ in preparing the injection. Texas went ahead with its execution. But the state’s arsenal of drugs has dwindled, and Buntion’s lawyers still don’t know which vials it used—or if they were past their beyond-use dates.

“Bruenig has been chronicling what she has identified as the bureaucracy and injustice at the heart of capital punishment in America. Here are some of her conclusions so far.

Atypical executions are far too typical. Examining the cases of Smith and Buntion, Bruenig sees ‘carelessness, hastily imposed secrecy measures, and casual indifference to justice and suffering’ in the handling of executions, and worries that we are ‘living through lethal injection’s heyday, witnessing it the way capital states would always like to carry it out—no oversight, no accountability, no survivors.’

Attempts to make executions more humane may backfire. If lethal injection, which lawsuits have argued constitute cruel and unusual punishment, are restricted or banned, Bruenig writes, the result may be ‘the resurrection of bygone methods of last resort—the firing squad, electric chair, or gas chamber.’

Most people on death row are guilty. That doesn’t mean they deserve their fate. ‘Killing never reduces moral risk; there’s no cosmic ledger it can, by subtraction, set right, and no slate it can wash clean with the right amount of blood,’ Bruenig suggested in this 2021 essay. ‘In this way the lives of the innocent are no different from the lives of the guilty. The abolition of the death penalty will likely rest on whether we are willing to make that case.’”