BROWDERBOOKS
My historical novel Forbidden Brownstones, set in nineteenth-century New York, has many features, as the following tags indicate. (Don't know what a "tag" is? Now you do.)
- a young black man acquires power in a city of white prejudice
- an obsession that risks death by fire and murder
- the most exclusive brothel in the city
- a madam's fierce revenge
- the illusion of youth peddled to senescents and satyrs
- a sudden death in the parlor
Killing
When the State undertakes to execute certain convicted criminals, it gets messy, for every possible method has its drawbacks.
Hanging, the common practice in former times in the US and elsewhere, could fail to do the job. Dangling victims twitched and gasped in midair, before succumbing.
The electric chair was our bloodless, scientific solution in the US. But here too, victims sometimes twitched in agony, urinated or defecated, and the eyeballs could literally pop out. Messy.
(A side note: white attendants strapping in a black prisoner.
My only comment: no comment.)
So today states with the death penalty use lethal injections, administered to a strapped victim who is mercifully unconscious, having been injected with an anesthetic. But what if an inexperienced technician injects a muscle, instead of a vein, or if the needle becomes clogged, causing intense pain to the victim? Messy again.
Pharmaceutical companies have become squeamish about letting their products be used in executions, so if lethal injections are impossible, some states now allow prisoners to choose the firing squad. Which assumes good aim on the part of the squad. And yes, messy.
The French have a solution, introduced during their famous 1789 Revolution: the guillotine. It’s quick and ruthlessly efficient. But it’s bloody, and there are all those decapitated bodies to be disposed of. In executing people we Americans, like the medieval Church, have a horror of blood. (The Inquisition condemned people, but left executing them to the secular authorities, who did it with a vengeance.).
Conclusion: when it comes to executing people, whatever we try is messy. Which gives plenty of ammunition (oops, I mean arguments) to opponents of the death penalty. Yes, eliminating it makes for crowded prisons, and voters don’t like to see their taxes going to such institutions, which some people label “country clubs” — people who have never been in prison. Prison is no picnic. I know this from stories told me by a penpal inmate. But it lacks the terrible finality of execution, the irreversible judgment of death.
This debate will never end. Here in the US we have fifty states, each with its own laws and regulations. And public opinion swings between the alternatives: death penalty vs. no death penalty. When human life is involved, it’s not an easy problem to resolve.
© 2021 Clifford Browder
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