OPINION: Cruel and unusual--and dishonest--arguments
by William Murchison
Volume 12, Issue 9
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With the stay of Heliberto Chi�s scheduled execution this week, the debate over capital punishment in Texas resumes.

Note, I didn�t say begins.

The argument around here concerning the state�s established right to take life in vindication of life never stops.

Technically, in the Chi case, the question at issue is the alleged cruelty and unusualness of the designated method of execution, viz., injection of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.

That�s the surface issue. Getting rid of capital punishment altogether is the goal that drives most if not all of Chi�s advocates.

In �progressive� circles, the conviction burns like fire that no one, never mind what he�s done, deserves to die at the hands of the people. The great Mark Twain had these folk in his sights. In Tom Sawyer, he noted dryly that �Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself, there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition, and rip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks.�

As with Injun Joe, so with Chi, a Honduran-born illegal alien who came to death row after using a 38-caliber handgun on March 24, 2001, to remove permanently from this world 56-year-old Armand Paliotta, the manager of a K&G Men�s Superstore in Arlington, who had admitted Chi, a former employee, to look supposedly for his wallet.

It turned out that Chi�s real mission was to stuff his wallet with whatever cash K&G had on hand. When an understandably rattled Paliotta tried to flee, Chi shot him three times in the back. Another employee fled in a different direction. Chi shot him, as well � unfortunately, from the gunman�s viewpoint, leaving the victim alive to recover and testify.

The state of Texas was ready to pay him back, so to speak, when the U. S. Supreme Court in September stayed the execution of Carlton Turner, another convicted Texas murderer. The issue: whether lethal injection qualifies as cruel and unusual, hence unconstitutional punishment. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided a few days later to hold up on Chi�s execution � �a sign,� noted the New York Times, �that judges in the nation�s leading death penalty state were taking guidance from the Supreme Court and putting off execution.�

Maybe Chi will eventually get what the Texas courts say is coming to him, and maybe � well, you have to wonder at least.

A couple of decades ago, it was all the rage in anti-death penalty circles to protest the cruelty and pain, etc., etc., of the then-standard execution technique of electrocution. Electrocution became current (so to speak) as a way of eliminating the accidents that sometimes resulted from hanging -- such as the rope�s failing to break the subject�s neck and choking him instead.

Injection, you�d think, while subject to the same human imperfections as everything else � including U.S. Supreme Court decisions � represented a considerable step up toward humane treatment of folk whose own claim to humanity could be judged disputable. The first drug knocks the murderer unconscious, the second prevents breathing, and the third stops the heart.

What else would the anti-death penalty coalition like? Nothing, is what they�d like. No proportionate response at all on the state�s part to the offense of taking a human life.

Cruelly and not a bit unusually clear is that death penalty foes worry less about execution methods than about the fact that executions take place at all. Their leaky waterworks are endlessly available to people who shoot others in the back, and worse. Not so to those who get shot, and worse. Foes of the death penalty won�t stand for executing anyone. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would have won sanctuary in their tender hearts � at least if they were being intellectually consistent.

There is a moral upside-downness to anti-capital punishment fervor, whose insistent theme is that victims matter far less than do their killers. How�s that for a social judgment - - the need, at all costs, to shield evil from confronting its due consequences?

Death penalty foes are fond of pointing to capital punishment�s imperfections, such as the possibility of an innocent person�s being sentenced to death.

No one in his right mind would suggest such things never have happened before and couldn�t now � though it�s less likely now than ever before, given scientific advances like DNA tests.

Society has a profound duty to the utmost care in securing convictions. And yet to say the very possibility of a mistake rules out the risk is to stop in its tracks the quest for justice.

Besides which, no one contends that Chi didn�t do what the state says. The argument is over injection. A backup argument concerns the imputed duty of the authorities, under international treaty, to have helped put him in touch with the Honduran consul at the time of arrest. We�re back to the case of a man who shot another man in cold blood � and wants the taxpayers to pay for his care and feeding in perpetuity. Baloney.