Every US execution is just as shameful as Oklahoma's botched killing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/execution-oklahoma-death-penalty-shameful

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Each week in America in 2014, on average, we strap one man not unlike Clayton Lockett to a gurney and pump him full of drugs meant to kill him. Recently, we have also watched in horror as those drugs failed to bring the promised quiet end to lives we've judged unworthy of continuing – as we did with Lockett's painful death on Tuesday night – and marveled at the agony we put them through before they died.

And yet we continue to pump them full of drugs. We continue to kill these men.

The recently botched state-sanctioned deaths – at least six in the last four-and-a-half-years – are terrible. But they're also distraction from the truth that we refuse to confront as a nation: every execution is just as brutal, just as shameful, and just as much a blow to justice as what happened to that man on Tuesday night.

As with the recent, torturous execution of Dennis McGuire, after which the state of Ohio declared itself not culpable, most news reports around the Lockett execution focus on the results of the state's apparent medical errors. Unable to obtain the usual cocktail of execution chemicals from countries that have issued embargoes against their use here, Oklahoma improvised. The results? Instead of passing quickly, quietly and painlessly, Lockett survived the initial attempt to end his life, writhing, gasping and even calling out "oh man". After the initial attempt to quietly end his life failed, his executioners tried to revive him – for the purposes of appropriately executing him later. He died anyway, 43 minutes after the execution began.

But the most difficult truth is that no matter how perfect our system of justice, executing criminals is still a brutal practice that must come to an end immediately. Even if every death sentence was and could be carried out with perfect humanity and with zero pain, every execution would still be just as brutal as the most brutal ones.

In their efforts to change the minds of at least some of the majority of Americans who support the death penalty, opponents of capital punishment tend to focus on the obvious injustices inherent in the system. But we know that innocent people have been put to death, and are waiting to be put to death, and will be put to death. We know there are gross racial disparities in how the death penalty is pursued, sentenced and carried out. And we've known for a long time that, even if prior executions were quieter, they were almost certainly still painful.

Even if we could know with absolute certainty that every murderer we convict was guilty, even if we could apply the death penalty without racial bias, and even if we could guarantee that it would be quick and painless, executions would still be unjust. Clayton Lockett's crime – shooting a teenage girl and watching as his accomplices buried her alive – was truly horrific. But our horror doesn't justify ending his life.

Lockett was the 20th person put to death in the United States in 2014. That's 20 lives ended so far this year not by accident or illness or murder, but by our collective will, acting together to decide that we, as a society, have the right to declare that someone should die. It is a terrible stain on our humanity, and there are no studies, no reforms, no changes we can make to erase that stain. The death penalty cannot be improved or corrected. We can only stop killing people. And we must.