"I'm Ready Warden": A Judicial Lack of Mercy

The largest trick life plays on humanity is ending the journey of existence with death. Cold, dark, and stiff. And in life’s attempt to appease this irreversible fate, it allows death to be uncertain and unpredictable. That is, until a force intervenes with life, giving death, the most petrifying and daunting of all experiences, an appointment. A time, place, and date. That force, which deplorably interferes in the path of life, is the United States government. “I’m ready, Warden” have been the last words of over 1,000 people since the year 2000 in the United States as they face their killer and accept death (TDCJ and DPIC). All scheduled with a time, place, and date. This is the United States' Death Penalty. The first execution in the American colonies was the killing of Captain George Kendall, who was executed in Jamestown for espionage. By the nineteenth century, the electric chair was built in New York (Frost). By the early 20th century, the United States was averaging 167 annual executions. Now, in the 21st century, the death penalty is still used by 27 states, with Texas taking the lead as the state with the highest number of executions (DPIC). Capital punishment has been legal in the United States for over 400 years, surviving through the American Revolution, industrialization, wars, extraordinary technological advancement, space travel, artificial intelligence, and more. Yet, despite these exceptional efforts towards the modernization of society, the archaic practice of merciless, governmentally institutionalized execution remains. Although many argue that the death penalty is an adequate form of punishment for felons, due to the magnitude of their committed crime, capital punishment in its entirety should be abolished in the United States, as it is both unethical and systematically damaged.

Capital punishment is often jurisprudentially justified by the degree of abhorrence committed by certain felons, and the theory that it will deter future crime. Adherents of the death penalty frequently cite executed serial killers, such as Theodore “Ted” Bundy, as both justifiable and necessary uses of execution. Bundy, who violently raped and murdered 30 female victims, was executed on January 24th, 1989 (Piccotti). There is no doubt that the actions of Ted Bundy were both sickening and unforgivable; however, the use of Bundy and serial killers alike as bolsterers of capital punishment prioritizes a small percentage of death row prisoners while neglecting the reality of the majority. Therefore, it is unfair to condemn an entire group of death row prisoners, some of whom may be exonerated due to their innocence, to the extreme case of psychotic serial killers such as Bundy. Additionally, supporters of the death penalty argue that the use of capital punishment deters future crimes within the United States. By punishing crime with the looming force of execution, it is commonly believed that the threat of death must decrease the amount of crime. However, this is an untrue misconception regarding capital punishment, as “evidence from around the world has shown that the death penalty has no unique deterrent effect on crime.” In fact, the murder rate in capital punishment-using states is still higher than in states where capital punishment is illegal (Amnesty International). Despite the seemingly valid arguments in support of the death penalty, as the notions of bringing malefic murderers to justice and decreasing the US crime rate appear societally altruistic, these arguments fail to support the death penalty as they forsake the majority of prisoners and the reform-related inefficiency of execution.

To thoroughly justify the abolition of the death penalty, it is imperative that one primarily reflects on the US Constitution. The Eighth Amendment frankly states that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” (U.S. Const. amend. VIII). In the context of capital punishment, emphasis must be placed upon the two powerful, and somewhat unsettling words: “cruel” and “unusual.” There is a great correlation between these two words and capital punishment, as many death row convicts are unusually held for an average of two decades and cruelly executed after several long years of penitentiary reform (Snell). During this time, prisoners await their appointment for death, a grueling and psychologically damaging experience of prolonged waiting. This is known as the Death Row Phenomenon, a phenomenon criticized by the European Court of Human Rights, which recognized that “prolonged incarceration on death row constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (Reprieve). Despite these apparent cruelties regarding the death penalty, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that capital punishment is not in violation of the Eighth Amendment, thus disregarding the extreme psychological torment inflicted upon death row prisoners (Cornell Law School).  Therefore, instead of attempting rehabilitation or reform, the death row system inflicts even more pain and trauma upon convicts, contributing to their likely already damaged mental state.

The immorality of the death penalty does not, however, lie solely within its effect on prisoners, but within the system of capital punishment itself. In addition to the psychological torture inflicted upon convicts through the Death Row Phenomenon, which has no contribution whatsoever to their reform and rehabilitation, the death row system has an atrociously concerning error rate. To be exact, “For every eight people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated” (EJI). This means that for every nine death row sentences, one sentence was an error, an error both grave and substantial, as it irrevocably devastated the life of that innocent person. Therefore, truly, wholly innocent people are forced into imprisonment and are given an appointment with death. A time, place, and date. Cameron Todd Willingham, a resident of Corsicana, Texas, tragically lost his wife and three daughters to a fire in 1991. He was the only survivor, and, according to the state of Texas, an arsonist. Willingham, who was sleeping in his home at the time the fire began, was sentenced to death. After spending a long, emotionally torturous thirteen years on death row, Willingham was executed in 2004 via lethal injection. Five years after his execution, an arson expert working with the Texas Forensic Science Commission found that all forensic evidence of Willingham’s guilt was wrong. The commission itself delayed this investigation for over a year, and Texas’s governor at the time, Rick Perry, further delayed the testimony of the arson expert by firing and replacing vital members of the commission.  Seven years later, in 2011, Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated that the commission was prohibited from investigating any scientific evidence prior to the year 2005 (Innocence Staff). A tragic, accidental fire took the lives of Cameron Todd Willingham’s family, and the state of Texas mercilessly and wrongfully took the life of Willingham. With this detrimental margin for error within the death row system, it is absolutely imperative that capital punishment be abolished in the United States, as it poses a grave risk to innocent citizens of the country.

Intertwined with the calamity of wrongfully convicted and executed death row prisoners, the system of capital punishment is deeply flawed with racial bias. While merely 31% of the United States’ population is African American and Hispanic, African American and Hispanic people make up a whopping 53% of death row prisoners (NACDL). This large racial disparity is not a result of the idea that certain races commit more crimes, as that is a prejudicial stereotype believed by certain supporters of capital punishment; rather, it is a result of an intrinsically racist system. In fact, a Louisiana study concluded that “the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than for those whose victim was black” (Pierce & Radelet, Louisiana Law Review, 2011). This difference in execution rates, which solely relies on the color of one’s skin, is a detrimentally evident injustice inflicted upon the American people; therefore, the death penalty must be abolished due to its underlying prejudice. Among the many victims of racist and unjust incarceration are the famous cases of George Stinney and Walter McMillian. George Stinney, a small, 14-year-old African American boy, was executed via electric chair in South Carolina, 1944. Stinney had been playing with his sister and two young white girls, Betty Binnicker and Mary Thames, and when the girls failed to return home, 14-year-old Stinney faced trial alone. Alone. His lawyer, who specialized in tax law, called no witnesses, and a single sheriff was the sole witness provided by the prosecution. The “all-white jury deliberated for 10 minutes before convicting George Stinney of murder, and the judge promptly sentenced the 14-year-old to death” (EJI). This blatant racial prejudice resulted in George Stinney, an innocent young boy, to be murdered by the state of South Carolina, becoming the youngest executed person in the 1900s. He was found innocent seventy years after his execution. Walter McMillian was wrongfully convicted and put on death row for the murder of a white, female dry-cleaning clerk, Ronda Morrison, in Monroeville, Alabama. McMillian, who not only had no criminal history but had also been with his entire family 11 miles from the dry-cleaning store at the time of the murder, spent six years on death row. The only testimony against him was the statement of Ralph Myers, who was addicted to drugs, mentally ill, owning of an extensive criminal record, in jail at the time of his testimony, and most importantly bribed with the promise of a lesser sentence for his statement against McMillian (DPIC). With the help of Bryan Stevenson, a commendable American lawyer, McMillian was exonerated and released in 1993. After his release, McMillian suffered from trauma-induced dementia (Sederstrom). There was no way, despite his exoneration, that the lasting, contorted years stripped from McMillian’s life would ever be redeemed. The death penalty has inflicted irrevocable pain on an innocent man, and it continues to do so to this present day.

As a continuation of the systemic errors possessed by capital punishment, great error lies within the method of execution itself. The current four methods of execution used by the United States are electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and, most prominently, lethal injection. Adherents of capital punishment believe that these methods of execution are quick, painless, and merciful for convicts; however, this idea has been sharply refuted by science. Lethal injection is the practice of injecting a prisoner with three substances for execution: a sedative, a paralyzing drug, and lastly, potassium chloride, which stops the heart (DPIC). 88% of executions in the United States are carried out by use of lethal injection (Denno). It was created with the intention of being rapidly painless, but the veracity within that statement is gravely lacking. Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at Emory University Hospital, analyzed the autopsy reports of several executed prisoners. Zivot found that the lungs of each executed person had been unusually heavy, leading him to conclude that 75% of the prisoners had suffered from pulmonary edema before death. This meant that the death row convicts were not successfully paralyzed and instead struggled monstrously to breathe as fluid filled their lungs post-injection. Thus, the sequence of drugs administered through lethal injection fail to perform correctly, causing immense and prolonged suffering. Zivot argued this evidence against the Supreme Court, classifying the form of capital punishment as “cruel and unusual” under the 8th amendment, yet, despite the colossal evidence provided, lethal injection is still the most widely used form of execution (Caldwell, Chang, Myers). Joseph Wood, who was executed in 2014, fell victim to the ineptitude of lethal injection. Wood, who had not died immediately upon his first injection, was “gasping and gulping” for air. The prison officers responded to his delayed death by injecting him 15 times with midazolam and hydromorphone, both fatal drugs. It took Joseph Wood two hours to die (Dart). He writhed and suffered under capital punishment, as the system failed to administer what was meant to be a rapid death, therefore killing him slowly and cruelly. In addition to the merciless and unjust form of execution that is lethal injection, the electric chair has also been criticized as a form of execution, as many executions via electrocution pose a risk of technological error. Specifically, in the state of Florida in 1990, Jesse Tafero endured a horrific electric chair malfunction. The chair shot three jolts of electric current through Tafero’s body, his head catching aflame, flames burning a foot high, as he burned alive for seven minutes before being pronounced dead (Latson). There is no point in teaching society’s children to apologize, to feel remorse, to make amends, if that glorified behavior of repentance is rewarded by the brutality of an electric chair or lethal injection.   

“I’m ready, Warden” have been the last, brief words uttered by hundreds of executed people in the United States as they stared death directly in the eye.  In the context of capital punishment, the commonly associated words “freedom” and “The United States” ironically juxtapose each other. The United States, a country built on its fervent passion for freedom, has continuously held death row prisoners for an unusually extensive measure of time, and exhausted a system of cruel, deeply flawed executions. The debate against the death penalty is not one that pardons guilty and violent criminals, it is one that seeks to end the cycle of everlasting violence inflicted upon society. The only outcome of murdering an already incarcerated murderer is the perpetuation of murder itself. What will it take to convince Congress to abolish the death penalty? How many more prejudicial convictions are needed? How many more posthumous rulings of innocence are required? How many prolonged and torturous deaths must ensue? How much greater does the margin for error need to be? How much more traumatizing does death row need to become? How many lives will it take for America to realize that the death penalty is, quite simply put, a judicial lack of mercy.

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