If you follow the news, you may have read about a capital punishment case which was the first of its kind. Since the death penalty is such a volatile topic, I will try to describe this plainly. Be prepared to react emotionally to what you’ll read, regardless of how you may feel about the subject.
On March 18, 1988, two men named Kenneth Smith and John Parker were hired by a man named Billy Williams to commit a murder, and they set out to do their job. A cleric named Charles Sennett Sr. was having an affair and was desperate to collect insurance money on a policy he had taken out to settle debts, and knew that the death of his wife, Elizabeth, could be an easy ticket to obtaining the funds. Smith and Parker went to the home and stabbed Elizabeth to death, inflicting wounds to her neck and torso, and she was beaten with a metal object.
When Sennett was questioned, he recognized one of the hitmen’s names and visibly turned red, giving himself away; shortly thereafter, he shot himself while seated in his vehicle, ending his life.
The original hired hitman, Williams, died in prison in 2020 while serving a life sentence for his role in the crime. Parker was executed by lethal injection in June 2010. Smith was convicted and originally sentenced to death by a jury, which was overturned by appeal, then sentenced to death by a judge during the second trial.
But the process of executing somebody has some drawbacks. Apparently physicians cannot be asked to perform the administration of intravenous lines for the purpose of execution by lethal injection (the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” figures here), so inexperienced personnel are asked to find veins to insert the entryway for the deadly concoction. The execution attempt was called off after lengthy and numerous tries for a vessel failed, and it was declared the third botched attempt at executing somebody in Alabama.
The concept of nitrogen hypoxia was then considered as a method of execution. Similar to the gas chamber, which utilized cyanide mixed in an enclosed space, nitrogen is part of the air we breathe, but in larger concentrations will result in death by asphyxiation. The method had never been used before, but the system was created, using a sealed face mask to deliver the higher concentration of the substance.
A cleric accompanied Smith into the death chamber, and Smith delivered a brief speech about humanity going backwards.
What was that? This is a man who may have plunged a knife multiple times into a woman’s body and struck her with an object to end her life, and we are expected to believe that humanity has gone backwards? It was he who had gone backwards; the pastor was primed to receive a large sum of insurance money, but for a fraction of that, Smith would take a human life (the payoff for the hitmen was estimated to be one thousand dollars each). The prison system fed and clothed him, gave him room and board and opportunities for schooling and other perks. Of course, prison necessitates some survival skills to avoid being a target or becoming, to put it politely, somebody’s intimate cellmate, but our penal system treats the guilty better than we treat our innocent general public.
There is the issue of military veterans who gave limbs, minds and eyesight for our country, who camp under bridges with far less than what inmates receive at taxpayer expense.
There is also Elizabeth Sennett, whose life ended in a lengthy and violent way. But what news articles have focused upon is how the new method of execution may be “cruel and unusual.” Folks, we crossed that bridge when we rewarded the evildoers and punished the law-abiders. The lean in many articles about the aftermath of the successful nitrogen execution has been that Smith moved about and appeared to be in distress as he died. Elizabeth’s distress, on the other hand, has been forgotten. The method worked, and Smith has gone to a place beyond our reckoning, though he had 26 years more of life than his victim had. That doesn’t seem right.
I don’t understand why firing squad is not considered a humane punishment. We have current, former and retired sharpshooters who can transport an inmate from living to dead in a second using one well-placed bullet. Even South Carolina has considered it as recently as 2022, because it is efficient and less likely to be botched as with other methods. No drugs are involved, no setting up IV lines, no pre-death struggles. The moment the word “Fire!” is uttered, it’s over, simply and completely.
When we’re arguing more about cruelty and uniqueness of executing convicted felons, and less about the bodies piling up in our murder rates and the atrocities leading to them, we are losing our focus on being humane towards our own. Our goal is removing a fraction of the population to prevent them putting the citizenry in harm’s way. If there is no punishment, isn’t prison a type of reward?
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