Scott R. Hammond: Regressive firing squad move should shock us all
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Last month, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a retrogressive bill that would allow the state’s death-row prisoners to be executed by firing squad. The bill’s proponents believe that a firing squad is a humane method to end a person’s life.
Dr. Guillotine once said his procedure should be but a “slight sensation of coldness on the neck.” Meanwhile, 20 minutes past truncation, the cemetery-bound torso and limbs would still be trembling in their basket; and bone-fragmentizing blasts to the heart would, as experts attest, cause tormenting pain for at least 10 seconds.
During his presidential run, Joe Biden vowed to end capital punishment. But his ensuing silence as president typifies the offensive hollowness of campaign promises.
America’s laws were adopted from British common law, which in the early 1800s, when Britain’s collective criminal ordinances went by the gory endearment “The Bloody Code,” applied the death penalty to hundreds of offenses, including filching turnips, consorting with gypsies and forgery.
In Elizabethan England, capital punishment was a theatrical event attended by the masses. The year 1571 saw a gallows stage usher in its maiden performance at Tyburn Tree in London. Carted from surrounding jails on a day set aside as a public holiday, doomed prisoners were copiously hanged in a carnival atmosphere amid peddled pies and ale.
Often a former criminal just as drunk as those in the wassailing crowd, the hangman was prone to bungling the affair, resulting in prolonged strangulation instead of a swiftly snapped neck. As the show degenerated into besotted blows by showgoers, the dangling bodies’ garments were shredded and the nooses pared for hearth-displayed souvenirs.
Of course, hanging is only one of an assortment of execution methods exacted through the centuries. Burned alive, drawn and quartered, guillotined, gassed, electrocuted — exemplify the frightful procedures — all prone to ghastly blunders — humankind has mined from its psychic abattoir.
And although modern America has chosen to cloister a “refined” ritual behind prison walls, one need only access a YouTube video to be assured of an extant Tyburn-Tree excitability for capital punishment:
In 1989 — as a sparked plume of smoke stretched from behind Ted Bundy’s strapped leg — a chivaree-like atmosphere outside a northern Florida prison drowned out the avian heralds of dawn with clanging frying pan cymbals and full-blooded chants of “burn, Bundy, burn.”
With the Idaho bill’s overwhelming, veto-proof endorsement in the state legislature, it’s unavoidable not to superimpose this macabrely convivial 1989 — or 1571 — image onto its backers.
The Bloody Code spectrally swung above the heads of 18th-century pickpockets as they wove through public-hanging crowds to ply their trade. And a compellingly humble statistic from 1886 notes that of 167 hanged prisoners at England’s Bristol prison, 164 had witnessed at least one execution.
Thus, the death penalty, when it was a public spectacle, did not effectively dissuade capital crime; and now a sequestered event, it almost certainly has no intimidating power over future murder, which often is an impromptu act of impassioned or intoxicated circumstance. So, divested of its myth of deterrence, what is left but bare-boned vengeance?
Codified murder can be reduced to abject grade-school math: a life for a life. Across centuries, the remaining void moans as a graceless wind, through stake-charred lips and guillotined necks and self-righteously toothy Idaho state legislators.
Idaho’s regression into an ignoble past should shock our collective sensibility. The sacredness of life must be a steadfast principle, untouched by mercurial exception.
The will to nobility is not an aristocratic drive. It is the determination to be better humans, and renouncing capital punishment is the dawning step.
Pittsburgh resident Scott R. Hammond, unsettled by this unprogressive legislation, and, more broadly, by the death penalty’s enduring viability, he sees a nationally ominous harbinger in the Idaho law’s passage.