Deborah Denno comments to the International Herald Tribune for its story on Vietnam’s commitment to swap firing squads for syringes in 2011. The move appeared to be part of a global trend to make the death penalty more humane, but death-by-drugging is not the “humane” method that officials in Vietnam — or elsewhere — hope for.
A law professor at Fordham University, Deborah Denno, who has studied capital punishment for decades, says that’s another reason lethal injection is less humane. At least firing squads enlist people who know what they’re doing, usually military or police officers who have been professionally trained to kill.
And it’s not just the condemned who suffer. In Vietnam, advocates for getting rid of death-by-shooting say that that method takes a psychological toll on officers who pull the trigger. But Denno says that firing squads are actually arranged to minimize individual remorse — meaning, several people pull the trigger, and one gun shoots blanks, so the shooters don’t know who among them fired the fatal shot. That distance separates executioner from executed.
Critics of lethal injection say that it makes killing more palatable to the masses because it removes the appearance of violence and suffering. This face-lift distracts from other troubling issues surrounding capital punishment, such as its failure to deter crime and its institutionalization of revenge. Lethal injection seems civilized, and that is deceptive.
“If we’re going to have the death penalty,” Denno says, “don’t pretend that we’re having a medical procedure.”
Read the entire International Herald Tribune story.