A painful paradox

In agreeing to decide whether some executions by lethal injection are so painful as to violate the Constitution, the Supreme Court has given at least some death row inmates a reprieve. After deciding last week to hear a lethal-injection case from Kentucky, the court stayed a scheduled execution in Texas. Executions in California already were on hold pending a federal judge’s approval of new lethal-injection procedures.

Opponents of the death penalty -- including this page -- must welcome any legal development that leads to fewer executions, even in the short term. But it would be a mistake to regard the Supreme Court’s decision to review Kentucky’s lethal-injection procedures as the beginning of the end of the death penalty.

In the debate over capital punishment, lethal injection is a sideshow. To be sure, some death penalty opponents have sought to make it the main event. Last year, after a federal judge in San Jose postponed the execution of Michael Morales because of defects in the lethal-injection procedure, one lawyer observed that states were “hitting the wall in the futile search for a humane death penalty.”

We wish that were so. But if the definition of a “humane” execution is one in which there is no “unnecessary risk of pain and suffering” -- the standard being urged on the high court by lawyers for two Kentucky inmates -- it is clearly within the ken of science to provide such a procedure. If surgical patients can be reliably anesthetized, so can prisoners. Given that fact, it is shocking that with present protocols, an inmate may not be unconscious when he is injected with drugs that cause paralysis and then death.

By all means, the high court should require states to ensure that inmates facing the death penalty don’t suffer unnecessary pain. But that is a gesture of basic humanity, not the ultimate solution. It isn’t the “how” of capital punishment that has led other civilized societies to abolish the death penalty. It’s the “what” -- the taking of a human life by the state when there are other ways to both punish the perpetrator and protect society.

Paradoxically, then, if the Supreme Court authorizes more humane methods of execution, it may abet an increase in state-sanctioned killing -- and thus deepen this nation’s inhumanity and moral isolation.