Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 16, 1993 TAG: 9303160349
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CRUEL? DEATH BY THE ELECTRIC CHAIR
NOT FOR now the issue of whether the death penalty is in itself a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments." The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty is so widely favored (or at least tolerated) by society, that it cannot be considered "unusual."Nor for now the question of whether capital punishment in fact deters violent crime. That's up for state legislatures, not courts, to debate.
For now, lawyers for Syvasky Poynter, scheduled to be killed Thursday, are left trying to find a court willing simply to consider this issue: Is Virginia's electric chair a cruel and unusual way to impose a death penalty?
The issue is grisly. It can take several minutes to fry people to death. Do they undergo intense pain, do they feel the charring of their skin, are they aware of the heated blood pouring out their bodies? Or does enough of the initial charge pass through the skull to their brains to render them unconscious within a microsecond?
Both sides of the argument can summon medical expertise to support their respective positions. Those who experience it are, of course, beyond conversation.
Shed no tears for Poynter. In 1984, he murdered five women in 11 days, which tends to forfeit any claim to sympathy.
Indeed, it is unfortunate that anti-capital-punishment crusaders try so often to make sympathetic victims and media celebrities of murderers - even trying to cast doubt at times on the guilt of plainly guilty killers.
Likewise, the merits and flaws of various ways to execute people constitute, ultimately, a side issue. (Would a sanitized, painless, quiet method that arouses little controversy be necessarily better?)
The central question about capital punishment is not what it does to those who are sentenced to die. The central question is what it does to those who do the sentencing - that is, the respectably law-abiding majority that, in its complacent complicity with life-taking, brutalizes itself.