The Nation: Cruel and Unusual Punishment

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Cruel and Unusual Punishment
By Billy Sothern

May 5, 2008




Several years ago at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Leslie Martin was strapped to a table and hooked up to an IV through which a series of chemicals--a sedative, a paralytic and finally a poison--flowed into his veins in order to draw the life out of his healthy, 35-year-old body. He remained very much himself even during his final moments, a sort of death row class clown, telling his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, "You're fired," just after he received the fatal dose.

Following the execution, Smith fielded confused questions about whether Leslie's remark had been in earnest. Smith explained that it was just a running joke between them, one thing that remained humorous to Leslie when everything else was being taken from him.

William Lynd faces a similar fate in Georgia Tuesday. Lynd has the distinction of being the first person executed in the United States in seven months--a period in which there was a de facto death penalty moratorium while the United State Supreme Court considered, and rejected, convicted murderer Ralph Baze's argument that his own execution by lethal injection in Kentucky would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. With several more executions lined up in death-penalty states across the country, it is important to once again focus the debate on the stark reality that the death penalty extinguishes the lives of breathing, joking, flawed and thoroughly human beings. Even if the means of taking those lives were as gentle as touching the forehead of the condemned, the ultimate challenge to our humanity would be just as vivid as a gallows, a guillotine or a firing squad.

When representing people facing the death penalty, I have filed motions challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection. I have also filed motions seeking to compel the state to provide a public execution for my clients or to mandate that the jurors who decide their cases be forced to witness the execution process themselves. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/sothern