Tennessee removes the death penalty’s cloak of civility

Tennessee is bringing back the electric chair.

I hope that shocks you. I hope it repulses you. But before you give in to that revulsion or shock, ask yourself this: Why doesn’t the use of a drug cocktail bother you the way the electric chair does? What makes the medicalization of capital punishment by forcibly causing someone to overdose on drugs less barbaric than running thousands of volts of power through his body?

These are the operative questions as we move forward, as we try to deal with the aftermath of the nearly botched execution in Oklahoma (I say “nearly botched,” because the inmate ultimately died, which is the point). As Think Progress points out, “lethal injection is commonly viewed as a less barbaric way to kill inmates than more primitive methods such as the electric chair.” But this view is based solely on the notion that there is a nice way to take a life, that the entire business of state-sanctioned revenge killing (if we are honest with ourselves we would admit that the death penalty is about nothing more than revenge) is not, in and of itself, an act of barbarity.

Albert Camus, the French novelist and philosopher, raises this question in “Reflections on the Guillotine” calling the death penalty a form of premeditated murder that leaves the condemned man to face “the horror of his situation,” which “is served up to him at every moment for months on end. Torture by hope alternates only with the pangs of animal despair” To medicalize it with a drug cocktail does nothing to ameliorate this, to make it any less barbaric. It remains, as he says, a premeditated act of revenge perpetrated by the state, no matter how cleverly we attempt to cloak it in the garb of respectability.

Tennessee’s decision to bring back the electric chair may seem shocking, but all it does is lift the veil.

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Postscript: Here, again, is my most recent column on the issue in The Progressive Populist.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet