First of all, I should mention before I begin that I'm pro-death penalty. I used to work in the criminal justice system and have been personally involved in death penalty investigations.
But just to provide some balance to this debate, I'm going to explain what I believe the judge's side to be. Now, please keep in mind that I am playing devil's advocate here. I may or may not necessarily believe in or agree with what I'm about to write, I'm just presenting a different perspective for everyone to think about before they start hissing the judge and rah-rah-ing executions.
I know it's easy and emotionally satisfying to say that a guy who committed a brutal murder deserves to be treated the same way he treated his victim. But people have been committing murders since Cain killed Abel, or if you prefer, since the first caveman swung his tree-branch club into the head of another to steal his dinosaur meat. The issue is not what the killer deserves, because we all know he deserves something far more horrible than anything that will ever happen inside an execution chamber.
The issue from the judge's point of view is, how careless do we want our government to be? Remember, the government screw up a lot. This is the same goverment that people believe is filled with incompetent and uncaring bureaucrats who can't write social security checks correctly, can't be trusted to adminster a health care program, and buys toilet seats from defense contractors for $10,000 apiece. It's the government of IRS agents who audit you for no reason, the NSA spy program and Abu Ghirab prison.
And it's not so much better in criminal justice either. Because of advancements in DNA analysis, literally thousands of prisoners -- including more than a hundred who were on death row -- have been discovered to be innocent of the crime that our government charged them with, convicted them of, and held them in prison for decades for.
So, now that same government decides to put on an execution. And guess what? It screwed up again. It couldn't find a doctor to administer the medical procedure to kill the guy. So now the procedure won't work the way it's supposed to.
The point is not how much pain the guy deserves. In my opinion, he deserves a lot more than he'll ever feel. The point is that our democratically elected legislature established rules that the government is supposed to follow when it performs an execution. You may not like the rules (if you don't, then complain to your congressman who wrote the rules, not the judge who is only following them), but the rules say that lethal injection is supposed to be carried out in such a way that he'll feel no pain at all. And now those rules have been broken.
So, for those of you who think the judge is wrong, tell me, what's the judge supposed to do? It's his job to make sure the rules are followed. If those rules say (which they do) that lethal injection is supposed to be painless and that certain medical personnel are supposed to be present, then he's got no choice. He HAS to stop the execution. Because from his point of view, it's never OK for the government to break the law to kill a guy.
So anyway, I just thought that needed to be said before everyone gets carried away complaining about the judge and rooting for the guy to die in the most painful way posible. Some food for thought.
