Report

Amnesty International

While the death penalty does not provide unique protection for a society's people or its values, it does constitute a unique punishment. It is pre-meditated killing and, like all killing, involves a violent assault on the human body. In common with torture, execution is an assault against a person already restrained by the state.

If hanging a woman by her arms until she experiences excruciating pain is rightly condemned as torture, how does a state justify hanging an individual by the neck until dead? If administering 100 volts of electricity to the most sensitive parts of a man's body evokes moral condemnation, how does a state condone the administration of 2,000 volts to a human body in order to cause death?

The physical pain caused by electrocution, gassing, hanging, poisoning, or shooting -- the five methods of execution used in the United States -- cannot be quantified. Prisoners undergo paralysis of organs and burning of the flesh during electrocution, asphyxiation during gassing, tearing of the spinal cord or asphyxiation during hanging, respiratory paralysis during poisoning, and destruction of vital organs or the central nervous system during shooting.

At a 1990 Florida execution, a malfunction of the electric chair equipment caused flames to leap six inches above the prisoner's head each time the current was turned on. In 1992, a prisoner in Oklahoma had a violent reaction to the drugs used in the lethal injection. While he gasped and gagged violently, the muscles in his jaw, neck and abdomen reacted spasmodically. Eleven minutes elapsed before the man died. In 1994 it took five minutes for David Lawson to die in North Carolina's gas chamber. During that time he screamed, "I'm human! I'm human!"

The psychological suffering caused by foreknowledge of death, an inherent aspect of execution, also defies quantitative description. During each stage of his or her appeals, a condemned prisoner faces an agonizing ordeal. Robert Johnson, a criminologist who conducted intensive studies on death row prisoners, concluded that condemned people often lose all individual personality traits during imprisonment. He described the phenomenon as "death of the personality" preceding physical death.

Straps and hoods spare witnesses the sight of a prisoner's contortions during execution.

The tradition of hooding a person prior to the killing process may arise from a need to spare the witnesses, including executioners, the sight of facial contortions induced by pain. The victim, therefore, can be more easily viewed as an object rather than as a human being undergoing the type of cruel punishment prohibited by international human rights treaties.

States wishing to condemn cruel and inhuman acts of killing do not serve their purpose by repeating the act of killing. "For there to be an equivalence" between criminal homicide and execution, Albert Camus wrote, "the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."