When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
eyes on the U.S.

Time To Break Death Penalty's Twisted Grip On America

The recently botched execution in Oklahoma is the just the latest sign that this 'quaint and cruel' form of American justice is not worthy of a democracy.

The lethal injection room at San Quentin prison in California
The lethal injection room at San Quentin prison in California
Richard Herzinger

-OpEd-

BERLIN — The most recent case of a botched U.S. execution — when a condemned man in Oklahoma finally died of a heart attack after 40 minutes of agony — should be a sign for American society that enough is enough.

The death penalty is unworthy of a civilized nation and must simply be abolished.

After a number of other mishaps in applying capital punishment, this atrocious incident demonstrates yet again that the notion of a “humane” execution is a perverted myth. The introduction of lethal injections gives executions the appearance of non-violence by suggesting that it’s a kind of medical procedure being carried out with scientific precision and somehow not the killing of a human being.

The supposedly painless procedure ostensibly turns death into a kind of sterile, clinical abstraction that covers up what is really going on.

Nobody can know exactly the extent of suffering — even when things go according to plan — of a person who is knocked out and paralyzed before the lethal poison is administered. But it is crazy logic to want to spare a condemned criminal pain when the whole principle of capital punishment is based on the idea that murderers should face a similar grim fate as their victims.

But since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that punishment could not be “cruel and unusual,” the American justice system has had to develop execution methods that minimize the pain of the condemned even as the executioners proceed to kill them.

It is not just the act of execution, with all the risks of things going horribly wrong, that is questionable. What’s terrifying is the number of innocent people condemned to death. A recently published study concludes that 4% of capital cases involve innocent people.

The more the American justice system tries to avoid past mistakes — for example, by accommodating a number of appeals and postponement possibilities — the more absurd the entire endeavor. It is not unusual for criminals to sit for years, and in some cases decades, on death row until finally seeing death as a welcome release.

The notion that further perfected scientific methods of proof will eventually prevent the innocent from being wrongly condemned is Utopian. And even if only the guilty were condemned, capital punishment still could not be justified because what it does is put the state and general public on a similar moral plane as murderers: both snuff out human life.

In a higher moral and philosophical sense, it is also questionable whether death is a worse fate than life-long incarceration and a criminal having to face guilt on a constant basis.

Admittedly, eliminating the death penalty would require an enormous paradigm change in many cases. That’s especially true in horrific cases — and for political murders like the Nazi killings of millions in the last century. Yet it’s also true that if Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler had been sentenced by a court to pay with their lives for what they did, it would never be enough to avenge our outrage.

Quaint and cruel

Some people argue that the death penalty should be reserved for especially extreme cases. But limiting it like that makes no sense, particularly as there are no objective legal criteria for what would constitute extreme. Where the death penalty is concerned, there is a parallel with pregnancy. Just as you can’t be a little bit pregnant, you can’t be a little bit for or a little bit against capital punishment. There is only to condemn it or accept it.

The United States is the only Western democracy that still clings to this quaint and cruel notion of justice. And even if the percentage of those supporting capital punishment has decreased in recent years, it continues to be supported by a large majority of the American population — by so many people, in fact, that no leading politician dares to question it.

Some defenders of the U.S. point out that Americans have other, historically influenced notions of justice than Europeans do, and that therefore Europeans should cease the patronizing criticism.

But that argument is based in cultural relativism and is comparable to saying that human rights abuses in China should be viewed in the context of the particularities of Chinese civilization and we should therefore “understand” them. The truth of the matter is that universal values — the very values that the U.S. stands for in the world — are indivisible.

Those who feel sympathy for American democracy and charisma should therefore speak out, loudly, making no bones about the fact that the death penalty is a huge blot on the country. In that sense, the measures the EU has taken to forbid European companies from delivering drugs used in lethal injections are entirely justified.

It’s worth adding that any global demand for the U.S. to abolish the death penalty forthwith is not realistic. Under American law, the decision must be made by the individual states, not the federal government in Washington. And the political realities look very different from state to state.

In 18 of 50 states and in the District of Columbia, the death penalty has already been abolished or suspended. Since 2009, it has also been eliminated in three more states, though sentences handed down before the change are still due to be carried out. In the states that still have the death penalty, the number of those executed varies widely. Overall, though, a tendency to question the death penalty is making itself felt in American society.

It is thankfully not inscribed indelibly in the American mentality.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Geopolitics

Senegal's Democratic Unrest And The Ghosts Of French Colonialism

The violence that erupted following the sentencing of opposition politician Ousmane Sonko to two years in prison left 16 people dead and 500 arrested. This reveals deep fractures in Senegalese democracy that has traces to France's colonial past.

Image of Senegalese ​Protesters celebrating Sonko being set free by the court, March 2021

Protesters celebrate Sonko being set free by the court, March 2021

Pierre Haski

-Analysis-

PARIS — For a long time, Senegal had the glowing image of one of Africa's rare democracies. The reality was more complicated than that, even in the days of the poet-president Léopold Sedar Senghor, who also had his dark side.

But for years, the country has been moving down what Senegalese intellectual Felwine Sarr describes as the "gentle slope of... the weakening and corrosion of the gains of Senegalese democracy."

This has been demonstrated once again over the last few days, with a wave of violence that has left 16 people dead, 500 arrested, the internet censored, and a tense situation with troubling consequences. The trigger? The sentencing last Thursday of opposition politician Ousmane Sonko to two years in prison, which could exclude him from the 2024 presidential elections.

Young people took to the streets when the verdict was announced, accusing the justice system of having become a political tool. Ousmane Sonko had been accused of rape but was convicted of "corruption of youth," a change that rendered the decision incomprehensible.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest