Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Turkey Pardon as Dark Parody

From the Stone series of the online edition of the New York Times, November 20, 2011.

In just a few days, we will once again endure the annual spectacle of the president of the United States  pardoning a turkey that would otherwise have been fated for the Thanksgiving table. This event is typically covered in the media as a light-hearted bit of fluff — and fluff is what it might well be, if there were not actual humans on death row awaiting similar intervention. In the current American context, however, the turkey pardon is a distasteful parody of the strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners. There is in it an implicit acknowledgment that the killing of these prisoners is a practice that bears real, non-jocular comparison to the ritual slaughter of birds for feasts.

I am not saying that this slaughter of birds for food is wrong ― not here anyway ― but only that the parallel the presidential ritual invites us to notice is revealing...

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Lethal Injection and Other Fashion Trends

By Justin E. H. Smith

Execution by lethal injection is these days commonly described in the media as 'putting to death' (e.g., an AP article of June 28, 2006 announces: "'Railroad Killer' Put to Death in Texas"). This phrase, along with the more overtly veterinary 'putting down', seems to suggest that the creature in question is only being relieved of its misery, that it is a being morally and biologically ready for death, and that the operation performed upon it is really just a facilitation of the inevitable. The moral acceptability, even the necessity, of the act is built into the term used to describe it. And the result of this semantic legerdemain is a passive assumption on the part of the public that lethal injection agrees with our sense of the sanctity of life and of the importance of compassionate death for all, while hangings, firing-squads, electric chairs, guillotines, and gas chambers are, in contrast, distant memories from our barbaric past.

Doctors and Lethal Injection

'Appropriate Medical Care' and the Paradox of Sanitized Execution

Justin E. H. Smith

 In a recent ruling, Judge Malcolm Howard of the Federal District Court in Greenville, North Carolina, determined that the execution by lethal injection of Willie Brown Jr. may not proceed unless appropriate medical supervision of the process can be ensured. This ruling followed upon the presentation of evidence that all too often executioners without medical training do a poor job of administering the cocktail of chemicals required, and that as a consequence the prisoner often suffers needlessly.

Schwarzenegger's Curious Power

Tookie Williams, Shame and Clemency

By Justin E. H. Smith

Stan 'Tookie' Williams is scheduled to be executed in California next month. Williams helped to found the well-known L.A. street gang, the Crips, in 1971. In 1981 he was convicted of murdering four people in two separate armed robberies, and sentenced to death row at San Quentin State Prison.

While in prison, Williams has written a number of children's books focusing on the perils of gang life; he has written an acclaimed memoir, Blue Rage, Black Redemption; has been nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize for both Peace and Literature; and has, by some irony that, we may hope, will come to the attention of government officials next month, won a Presidential Call to Service award from George W. Bush in 2005 for his volunteer efforts to help wayward youth.

Frances Newton and the Prospects for a New Abolitionism

As I write this, Frances Newton is waiting to be executed in a prison south of Huntsville, Texas, having seen her most recent request for clemency denied by the Supreme Court. If the sentence is carried out, she will be the third woman executed in the state since the Civil War, and the first black woman. By the time anyone has a chance to read this, any call I might make for letters to the relevant power-holders may very well be too late. If she is still alive, by all means, write to them. Overload their inboxes. Call them potential murderers. But if she is dead, perhaps her death might serve as an occasion for those of us who find the death penalty abhorrent and disgraceful to take stock of how miserably we are losing this battle, and to contemplate the efficacy of our strategy.