OHIO TRYING TO FIGURE OUT
HOW TO KILL A BIG PERSON

Ohio is trying to figure out how to kill Ronald Post.

Mr. Post killed the desk clerk at a motel during a robbery in 1983. He has been on death row at a state prison in Ohio since 1985 and is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on January 16. There is only one problem: executioners may not be able to find a vein into which to place the injection.

Mr. Post weighs 450 pounds and doctors who examined him say his arms, legs, and hands are too fat to find an accessible vein.

The state could use a backup procedure, Mr. Post’s lawyers say, but it would involve injecting the life-snuffing drugs directly into muscle, and that process could be neither easy nor rapid. It could, in fact, require several doses over several hours, or even days, Mr. Post’s lawyers say in court papers recently filed asking for a stay of execution. That could only result, they say, in a grueling and painful end to Mr. Post’s life—far surpassing the legal standards prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

In fact, they say, records show that it took Ohio executioners something like two hours to insert IVs into the veins of Christopher Newton in 2007, and that condemned man weighed only 265 pounds — 200 pounds less than Mr. Post.

Nevertheless, the State of Ohio says it feels certain that Mr. Post can be humanely executed, either using its regular procedure or the backup process, which has never been used before — meaning executioners do not know through experience how it will work.

Still, Ohio Assistant Attorney General Charles Wille said in court papers that Mr. Post has not presented the court “sufficient evidence demonstrating that his obesity or other physical conditions will present a substantial risk that his execution cannot be conducted in a humane and dignified manner.” A hearing will be held in Columbus later this month, at which a federal judge will decide whether Ohio should kill Mr. Post on January 16.

The United States is one of an ever-decreasing number of countries where the death penalty still exists. Most of the world’s civilized nations have decided that killing someone in order to send a signal to their society that it is not okay to kill someone is probably sending a reverse signal. Futhermore, it has been proven factually and statistically that the death penalty does not work to lower the capital crime rate. Removing guns from the streets by not making them so easily available does lower capital crime, but in a startling and striking contraction, U.S. voters don’t seem to care. So it is not reducing crimes involving death that American voters seem to be concerned with, it would appear to be revenge.

In the State of California just last month, citizens rejected a ballot measure to repeal the death penalty and replace it with a sentence of life without parole. A majority of voters indicated that spending life in prison was not sufficient punishment for a capital crime, and that they want people killed by the state for such crimes — whether those state-sponsored killings actually deter capital crime or not.

An impressive list of people from within the law enforcement community in that state supported repealing the death penalty, but that did not seem to matter to most voters, who apparently see simple revenge as an appropriate reason to kill someone.

Typical of the statements supporting repeal of the death penalty was this observation offered by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon, a former police chief: “Given my experience, I believe there are three compelling reasons why the death penalty should be replaced. (1) The criminal justice system makes mistakes and the possibility of executing innocent people is both inherently wrong and morally reprehensible; (2) My personal experience and crime data show the death penalty does not reduce crime; and (3) The death penalty wastes precious resources that could be best used to fight crime and solve thousands of unsolved homicides languishing in filing cabinets in understaffed police departments across the state.”

Meanwhile, Cathy Lynn Henderson — who at one point had been two days away from execution after being convicted of the murder of a baby — was granted a new trial on December 5 by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, based on recent scientific developments and the alteration of testimony presented at trial by the prosecution’s star witness, who has since change his initial diagnosis as to what might have caused the baby’s death.

Ms. Henderson insisted at her trial that the baby, who had been in her care, had squirmed and slipped from her arms, falling onto a concrete floor. But the star witness for the prosecution, former medical examiner Robert Bayardo, testified that the findings during an autopsy of the child indicated that death could not have been caused by such a fall.

Since that 1994 autopsy, however, advancements in the understanding of pediatric head injuries now indicate that relatively short falls onto a hard surface could produce injuries similar to those he discovered, Dr. Bayardo has said. This caused a district judge to rule earlier this year that no reasonable juror would have convicted Ms. Henderson if presented with this evidence. The Texas appeals court agreed, and days ago ordered a new trial for the woman, who has been in jail for over ten years and was once just 48 hours away from being killed by the State of Texas, all for a crime she may never have committed.

Yes, the district attorney of San Francisco is correct. Mistakes can be made by law enforcement that leads to the unwarranted and unjustified death of an innocent defendant. But American voters seem to be willing to take that risk, insisting that government should kill a person for killing a person — even if the government cannot be sure of the defendant’s guilt.

I believe that this is another reason, a strong case, for supporting the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, which seeks to end, at last, the oppression of our beliefs in a violent, angry, and vindictive God. For it is our belief in an “eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth” kind of God that we employ consistently and obstinately as our moral authority for our own “take that!” revenge mentality.

And your thoughts?

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The conversation about the Civil Rights Movement for the Soul continues on this newspaper’s front page in the space titled Interpreting Conversations with God. If you were following that conversation, please look for it there.)