Imagine my surprise last spring when the last person to testify in the Boston Marathon bombing trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was someone I had portrayed in a high school play.
Sister Helen Prejean is a Roman Catholic nun and anti-capital punishment advocate who speaks to inmates on death row before their executions. If the name sounds familiar, you may have also seen the movie about her life and work, “Dead Man Walking,” starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn (Sarandon won an Oscar for her performance as Prejean). Tim Robbins, who directed the movie and adapted the screenplay from Prejean’s book, also wrote a theatrical version that students may put on as part of the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project.
I follow Prejean on Twitter (don’t be fooled by the fact that she’s a 76-year-old nun — she’s very with it), so I guess I’m more tuned in with the latest death penalty updates than your average person. Even just 48 hours ago, however, I was surprised when the number one thing on Prejean’s Twitter was just a side note in the news elsewhere on the Internet.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin gave a 30-day stay of execution to Richard Glossip on Sept. 30 because of questions raised about the drugs that would have been used in the execution. Just days later on Thursday, it was revealed that the state might have used the wrong drugs in an different execution performed in January. Oh, and did I mention that Glossip’s guilt is questionable, given that he was convicted on the word of a man who avoided the death penalty by testifying against him?
Let’s break that up a little. First of all, there is the matter of how in the world a state tasked with killing someone managed to use the “wrong” drugs. Apparently in the case of Charles Warner, the man executed in January, both state-approved potassium chloride and non-approved potassium acetate were delivered to the Medical Examiner’s office after the execution. When the authorities opened the sealed box of drugs to be used in the Glossip execution, they found potassium acetate.
Execution drugs are getting harder and harder for the states to find. Companies increasingly don’t want to sell their drugs to be used for death, so states have started mixing new drug cocktails, and each time that happens, the logistics of how to kill someone are hammered out in the courts. To avoid “cruel and unusual punishment,” the state has to be very exact.
The result you get is this shady instance of “finding” the wrong drug in a sealed box, as though it is a mystery as to who stuck the drug in there. It raises the question of how much good an internal investigation will do to an execution process already weakly covering up fumbled protocols and a process with very little public oversight.
Moving on to the specifics of the Glossip case: the man was convicted in 1998 for a hiring a coworker, Justin Sneed, to kill their boss. Since there was no physical evidence, Glossip was convicted largely on the testimony of Sneed — which he gave in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table — that changed several times. Additionally, Glossip’s defense in his first trial was so weak that a retrial was ordered because his lawyers failed to cross-examine witnesses effectively.
Maybe Glossip is guilty, maybe he is innocent or maybe there is more to the story. In any case, execution is the one punishment for which there are absolutely no take-backs, and the state is not exactly doing a great job of making sure all the loose ends are tied up.
There are a lot of anti-death penalty arguments I could fire at you. I could tell you it’s more expensive than keeping someone in prison for life. I could tell you it is frequently administered with racial bias. I could tell you it doesn’t deter crime, doesn’t always provide “closure” to victim’s families or that the only countries that execute more people than the United States are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
I have a full repertoire of arguments after my performance as Prejean, but I think the one that may actually drive this antiquated, grisly form of punishment out may be the simple fact that states are too inept to carry it out consistently. Attempting to skirt around drug requirements will take out capital punishment more quickly than any moral argument. Say what you will about that.
The Supreme Court is set to hear several cases on the death penalty this term, and we ought to pay attention. The discourse needs to spread beyond Prejean’s Twitter so we can hold our states accountable. When a state uses the “wrong drugs” to kill someone, there are questions that need to be answered.
