May 11, 2006

EDITORIAL

A torturous way to die

“It don’t work. It don’t work.”

That’s what condemned killer Joseph Clark said five times last week as he lay on a table waiting to die at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville. The problem was that the process that was supposed to take Mr. Clark’s life, lethal injection, wasn’t working, at least at first. This likely led to his torturous and unnecessarily cruel death.

Mr. Clark was a longtime intravenous drug user, and the one vein that prison officials could find to inject the lethal chemicals into his body collapsed during the execution. After Mr. Clark started saying that the process was not working, the curtain separating him from the area where witnesses watched the execution was closed. But from behind the curtain, Mr. Clark could be heard moaning and groaning. Forty minutes later, the curtain was reopened and the execution continued. Nearly 90 minutes after the process started, Mr. Clark was pronounced dead. Media reports said that Mr. Clark’s execution was the second longest lethal injection death on record in the U.S.

Mr. Clark, 57, who was from Toledo, was executed for the 1984 slaying of David Manning, a 23-year-old husband and father, during a robbery at a gas station where Mr. Manning worked. He also received a life sentence in prison for killing another clerk, Donald Harris, the night before Mr. Manning was murdered.

Proponents of the death penalty say that lethal injection is a humane and easy process to carry out executions. However, Joseph Clark’s execution was neither humane nor easy. Indeed, it was cruel and unusual. Last week’s botched execution provides more evidence that lethal injection and the death penalty itself are unconstitutional.

Lethal injection involves three chemicals that are administered to the body in sequence. First an anesthetic is injected to make the prisoner unconscious, followed by a drug that paralyzes the body’s muscles and stops breathing. The last chemical causes the heart to stop beating. If administered improperly, the chemicals can paralyze a prisoner but leave him awake and in horrendous pain as he is killed. Some might call that torture.

The use of lethal injection is gaining more attention, and, therefore, scrutiny around the country and in Ohio. Last week, a federal judge in Columbus suspended the scheduled execution of a prisoner who is part of a lawsuit by death-row inmates challenging the constitutionality of lethal injections. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a Florida case about prisoners’ rights to challenge the constitutionality of that state’s execution process. Also last month, Human Rights Watch released a report finding that “incompetence, negligence and irresponsibility by U.S. states put condemned prisoners at needless risk of excruciating pain during lethal injection executions.”

Ohio is one of 37 states, plus the federal government, that uses lethal injection to execute death-row inmates. Mr. Clark was the 21st prisoner executed by lethal injection since the state resumed the death penalty in 1999.

At the very least, the state of Ohio should place a moratorium on executions so that a review can take place to determine if the government’s lethal injection protocol is sufficient, and does not torture prisoners. That’s what California has done, while a federal judge considers the constitutionality of that state’s lethal injection process.

But ultimately, moratoriums and reviews will not go far enough. The only real solution is for Ohio, along with the federal government and the other states that practice capital punishment, to abolish the death penalty.

—Robert Mihalek