UK bans export of lethal drugs; death penalty supporters call for firing squads



Does the firing squad have the eXecution-factor?





  As a British citizen, and one currently studying the death penalty in Higher RMPS, I know that not everyone in my country agrees with me about the death penalty: that we're better off without it in the UK, and that, as a nation which opposes the death penalty, we shouldn't be helping other countries carry out executions by exporting drugs for them to use in lethal injections. Many a debate in class boils down to someone getting angry and shouting that we should just shoot all our criminals and be done with it.

Death penalty supporters in the US apparently have the same opinion.

On Friday, the UK ban on the export of sodium thiopental and other lethal-injection drugs came into force. This, of course, is a set back for supporters of the death penalty in the US: how will they commit legalised murder now? Or is it a set back? Within hours of the ban coming into force, a leading death penalty advocate in California called for the reintroduction of the gas chamber, calling it the "obvious solution". To me, the obvious solution is, just off the top of my head, a nation-wide moratorium on executions, but that's just me.

It's not just one person though; in New York, a prominent law professor called for the widespread use of firing squads, saying that it is a form of capital punishment which "doesn't pretend to be something else." I agree that capital punishment shouldn't pretend to be something it isn't, but I believe that what it is is immoral and dangerous, putting innocent lives at risk without any hope of being able to rectify mistakes. And that applies to the firing squad too.

In the face of serious shortages of drugs used in lethal injections, some states have already adopted a new drug protocol and others are beginning the switch. But there's never going to be a perfect solution, whether we pump our criminals full of drugs, shoot 'em, gas 'em, or simply eliminate the technical stuff and throttle them ourselves on the courtroom floor. Surely this is evident in the century-spanning struggle to find a perfect method: the gas chamber replaced hanging, the electric chair replaced the gas chamber, lethal injection replaced the electric chair, and now we're trying to replace that is well. It just goes on and on and on, and we're never going to find that method which is just right because it's not the method that's the problem, it's the system as a whole. The death penalty is a flawed concept; it's not necessary.

So maybe instead of searching for the next big trend in prisoner-execution, we should be looking for alternatives to the death penalty itself, not the method by which it is carried out.