Cruel and Unusual Death With Dignity

January 7, 2008

It is amazing how two different arguments can be made at the same time by some of the same people. Take the ACLU. It promotes assisted suicide as “death with dignity” and “choice,” as a painless method of dying. At the same time, it claims that execution by lethal injection is cruel and unusual because it can cause terrible agony.

This is odd: Assisted suicide, as practiced in Oregon, is completed using barbiturates alone, and we are told repeatedly, that it is an ideal death with no problems or difficulties. But execution uses a three drug regimen–akin to euthanasia in the Netherlands–that begins with a very heavy dose of barbiturates. And yet, it is cruel and unusual? From the story:

The U.S. Supreme Court today will consider whether the latter possibility is significant enough that 35 states and the federal government must change the lethal-injection method they use to execute people. Baze and Bowling say Kentucky’s three- drug combination, which states have used in almost 1,000 executions since 1982, violates the Constitution because it creates an unnecessary risk of suffering.

The disheartening thing I have learned in my nearly two decades of public advocacy is that increasingly, facts don’t matter. I don’t believe the anti-death penalty advocates are sincere about their arguments. They just want to stop the death penalty and will grab at any straw. And I don’t believe the assisted suicide folks really have a limited agenda of a very limited self-killing option. They just want the foot in the door that will lead to increasing liberalization.