American Savagery

Capital punishment is a moral stain. Every American should be humiliated and sickened by our country's use of it.

Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash

On Thursday January 25, the state of Alabama killed Kenneth Smith. Smith reportedly writhed and shook violently on the gurney for several minutes as he was executed via nitrogen gas, a new method; the Alabama attorney general called the execution “textbook.” And the attorney general told others, “Alabama has done it, and now so can you,” and “we stand ready to assist you in implementing this method in your states.”

If you feel ill, congratulations, you are still a human being.

Smith’s killing was the first American execution to use nitrogen hypoxia, depriving the body of oxygen by way of nitrogen gas, until a person dies. It’s a method that veterinarians have stopped using on animals, because they found that the animals seemed to be in too much distress.

This was not Kenneth Smith’s first time on the execution table. Alabama’s first attempt to execute him, in 2022, was botched; he was strapped to a gurney for four hours while Alabama officials injected him with lethal poison, but he didn’t die. He (unsurprisingly) had PTSD from the ordeal, and spent the week leading up to his second execution attempt vomiting. Concerned he would vomit into the nitrogen mask, Alabama officials denied him food for the 20 hours leading up to his execution.

The reported horrors of Smith’s execution are being denied by those who seem to enjoy executing people, and who want to see this method of execution spread further. I am struck, though, at where we are: Debating the relative brutality of different methods of executions (there is no “humane” way for the state to kill someone who does not want to die), rather than saying that the state killing its citizens as punishment for crime is barbaric beyond belief, and should have no place in the US or anywhere else.

The US is the only western nation that regularly employs the death penalty. We are one of only four advanced democracies that still execute people. More people are executed in the US than in 98% of other nations worldwide. The only countries that executed more people than us in 2022 are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

That is not company we should want to be in.

So why are we?