Why does execution take so long

Prior to , Texas counties were responsible for their own executions. The State of Texas executed the first inmate by electrocution on February 8, Charles Reynolds Red River County was executed. One of the most notorious inmates to be executed was Raymond Hamilton, a member of the "Bonnie and Clyde" gang. He was sentenced by Walker County and executed on May 10, , for murder.

Hamilton and another man had escaped from death row, only to be captured and returned to death row. When capital punishment was declared "cruel and unusual punishment" by the U.

This has resulted in lengthier appeals, as mandatory sentencing reviews have become the norm, and continual changes in laws and technology have necessitated reexamination of individual sentences. Death penalty proponents and opponents alike say such careful review is imperative when the stakes are life and death.

Yet without thorough appeals, mistakes or misconduct in death penalty cases would be missed or remain concealed. As of June , 33 of the men and women wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death since states resumed capital punishment in the s had waited 20 or more years to be exonerated. Seventeen who were exonerated between and June had waited 25 years or more for their exonerations and, for twelve, exoneration took 30 years or more.

That figure represents a growing senior death row population, which numbered just 39 in Some death row seniors committed crimes late in life, but many are there at such advanced age because of the inevitable slowness of the capital appeals process. Legal scholars have argued that executing people who have become so old is inconsistent with humanitarian values.

In , one year after executing year-old Thomas Arthur, Alabama executed year-old Walter Moody, the oldest person and only octogenarian put to death in the United States since executions resumed in That total was matched in the first six months of , with the executions of Billie Coble 70 , Donnie Johnson 68 , and Robert Long In 23 years of executions between and the close of the 20th century, only ten prisoners aged 60 or older were executed.

Forty-five prisoners aged 60 or older were executed between January and June , 23 since alone. With the aging of death row, states and courts are grappling with how issues of age-related physical and mental decline affect executions. In , a year-old man was put to death in Alabama for a murder he committed in Before his execution, J. Hubbard forgot who he was at times because of dementia. He suffered from colon and prostate cancer, and he was so weak that other inmates sometimes walked him to the shower and combed his hair.

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Profit from additional features by authenticating your Admin account. Then you will be able to mark statistics as favourites and use personal statistics alerts. Please log in to access our additional functions. Approximately two minutes later, we were told by a prison official that the execution was complete. District Court , S. The latest mode of inflicting the death penalty, enacted into law by more than 30 states, is lethal injection , first used in in Texas.

It is easy to overstate the humaneness and efficacy of this method; one cannot know whether lethal injection is really painless and there is evidence that it is not. As the U. Court of Appeals observed, there is "substantial and uncontroverted evidence… that execution by lethal injection poses a serious risk of cruel, protracted death….

Even a slight error in dosage or administration can leave a prisoner conscious but paralyzed while dying, a sentient witness of his or her own asphyxiation. Heckler , F. Its veneer of decency and subtle analogy with life-saving medical practice no doubt makes killing by lethal injection more acceptable to the public. Journalist Susan Blaustein, reacting to having witnessed an execution in Texas, comments:. Nor does execution by lethal injection always proceed smoothly as planned. In "the authorities repeatedly jabbed needles into … Stephen Morin, when they had trouble finding a usable vein because he had been a drug abuser.

Although the U. Supreme Court has held that the current method of lethal injection used is constitutional, several people have suffered because of this form of execution.

In Ohio, Rommel Broom was subjected to 18 attempts at finding a vein so that he could be killed by lethal injection. The process to try to execute him took over two hours. Finally, the governor had to stop the execution and grant the inmate a one week reprieve. Nor was he the only Ohio inmate so maltreated. The state had amended its injection protocol to use a single drug, propofol, which advocates say causes severe pain upon injection.

Although similar suits are pending in other states, [15] not all protocol-based challenges have succeeded; in Texas and Oklahoma, executions have continued despite questions about the potential cruelty of lethal injection and the type or number of chemicals used. Food and Drug Administration FDA —are now the subject of federal litigation that could impact the legitimacy of the American death penalty system. Most people who have observed an execution are horrified and disgusted.

In my face he could see the horror of his own death. Revulsion at the duty to supervise and witness executions is one reason why so many prison wardens — however unsentimental they are about crime and criminals — are opponents of capital punishment. Don Cabana, who supervised several executions in Missouri and Mississippi reflects on his mood just prior to witnessing an execution in the gas chamber:.

It has been said that men on death row are inhuman, cold-blooded killers. But as I stood and watched a grieving mother leave her son for the last time, I questioned how the sordid business of executions was supposed to be the great equalizer….

The 'last mile' seemed an eternity, every step a painful reminder of what waited at the end of the walk. Where was the cold-blooded murderer, I wondered, as we approached the door to the last-night cell. I had looked for that man before… and I still had not found him — I saw, in my grasp, only a frightened child. I don't want to do this anymore.

They do their best to perform the impossible and inhumane job with which the state has charged them. Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very much like posttraumatic stress. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. For some individuals, however, executions seem to appeal to strange, aberrant impulses and provide an outlet for sadistic urges. Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing Prison in New York wrote of the many requests he received to watch electrocutions, and told that when the job of executioner became vacant.

Public executions were common in this country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the last ones occurred in in Kentucky, when 20, people gathered to watch the hanging of a young African American male. Delight in brutality, pain, violence and death may always be with us.

But surely we must conclude that it is best for the law not to encourage such impulses. When the government sanctions, commands, and ceremoniously carries out the execution of a prisoner, it lends support to this destructive side of human nature. More than two centuries ago the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, in his highly influential treatise On Crimes and Punishment , asserted: "The death penalty cannot be useful, because of the example of barbarity it gives men.

Such methods are inherently cruel and will always mock the attempt to cloak them in justice. Goldberg wrote, "The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality. Capital appeals are not only costly; they are also time-consuming. The average death row inmate waits 12 years between sentencing and execution, and some sit in anticipation of their executions on death row for up to 30 years.

In solitary confinement, inmates are often isolated for 23 hours each day without access to training or educational programs, recreational activities, or regular visits. Such conditions have been demonstrated to provoke agitation, psychosis, delusions, paranoia, and self-destructive behavior. When death row inmates successfully appeal their sentences, they are transferred into the general inmate population, and when death row inmates are exonerated, they are promptly released into the community.

Death Row Syndrome gained international recognition during the extradition proceedings of Jens Soering, a German citizen arrested in England and charged with committing murder on American soil. Justice, it is often insisted, requires the death penalty as the only suitable retribution for heinous crimes.

This claim does not bear scrutiny, however. By its nature, all punishment is retributive. Therefore, whatever legitimacy is to be found in punishment as just retribution can, in principle, be satisfied without recourse to executions.

Moreover, the death penalty could be defended on narrowly retributive grounds only for the crime of murder, and not for any of the many other crimes that have frequently been made subject to this mode of punishment rape, kidnapping, espionage, treason, drug trafficking.

Few defenders of the death penalty are willing to confine themselves consistently to the narrow scope afforded by retribution. In any case, execution is more than a punishment exacted in retribution for the taking of a life. As Nobel Laureate Albert Camus wrote, "For there to be equivalence, 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. It is also often argued that death is what murderers deserve, and that those who oppose the death penalty violate the fundamental principle that criminals should be punished according to their just desserts — "making the punishment fit the crime.

It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again — punishments that are, of course, impossible to inflict. Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murder.

If, however, the principle of just deserts means the severity of punishments must be proportional to the gravity of the crime — and since murder is the gravest crime, it deserves the severest punishment — then the principle is no doubt sound. Nevertheless, this premise does not compel support for the death penalty; what it does require is that other crimes be punished with terms of imprisonment or other deprivations less severe than those used in the punishment of murder.

Criminals no doubt deserve to be punished, and the severity of the punishment should be appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused the innocent. But severity of punishment has its limits — imposed by both justice and our common human dignity. Governments that respect these limits do not use premeditated, violent homicide as an instrument of social policy.

Some people who have lost a loved one to murder believe that they cannot rest until the murderer is executed. But this sentiment is by no means universal. Coretta Scott King has observed, "As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses.

An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder. It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder. I remember lying in bed and praying, 'Please, God. Please don't take his life too. And I knew, far too vividly, the anguish that would spread through another family — another set of parents, children, brothers, and sisters thrown into grief.

Across the nation, many who have survived the murder of a loved one have joined Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation or Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, in the effort to replace anger and hate toward the criminal with a restorative approach to both the offender and the bereaved survivors.

Groups of murder victims family members have supported campaigns for abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, Connecticut, Montana and Maryland most recently. But sparing them may help to spark a dialogue that one day will lead to the elimination of capital punishment. Lawrence Brewer, convicted of the notorious dragging death of James Byrd in Texas, was executed in Members of Mr.

I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want. It is sometimes suggested that abolishing capital punishment is unfair to the taxpayer, on the assumption that life imprisonment is more expensive than execution. If one takes into account all the relevant costs, however, just the reverse is true. Litigation costs — including the time of judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and court reporters, and the high costs of briefs — are mostly borne by the taxpayer.

The extra costs of separate death row housing and additional security in court and elsewhere also add to the cost. A study showed that were the death penalty to be reintroduced in New York, the cost of the capital trial alone would be more than double the cost of a life term in prison. State Defenders Assn. The death penalty was eventually reintroduced in New York and then found unconstitutional and not reintroduced again, in part because of cost.

In Maryland, a comparison of capital trial costs with and without the death penalty for the years concluded that a death penalty case costs "approximately 42 percent more than a case resulting in a non-death sentence.

The group includes over law enforcement leaders, in addition to crime-victim advocates and exonerated individuals. Among them is former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, whose office pursued dozens of capital cases during his 32 years as a prosecutor. He said, "My frustration is more about the fact that the death penalty does not serve any useful purpose and it's very expensive.

It was not my intent nor do I believe that of the voters who overwhelmingly enacted the death penalty law in We did not consider that horrific possibility.