Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 21, 1995 TAG: 9501240039
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This method is said to be a more "humane" way to kill killers.
Dana Ray Edmonds is, without doubt, a killer. He doesn't deny cracking the skull of a Danville grocery store operator and stabbing him mortally in the side of the neck. He does deny that the slaying was premeditated and that he took the $40 missing from the cash register. He claims the stabbing was the accidental result of a fight the two men got into after he innocently went to the store to buy a drink.
Edmonds' version of events raises no more reasonable doubt here than it did for his jury. Contemplating the murder he committed prompts no teary-eyed breast-beating about criminals made brutal by a brutal society.
But thinking about killing Edmonds, in a deliberate act by people vested with the authority of Virginians who live within the law, is disturbing.
It sickens, even though death by chemical poisoning is supposed to be less painful and messy than electrocution. Burning offenders in chairs is Virginia's other method of legal, premeditated killing which was, itself, supposed to be a humane way of taking life when it was introduced.
In the executioners' world, too, technology drives progress.
Lethal injections almost certainly provide a less physically hurtful way to die. Even those eager to exact the ultimate penalty for his crime might be relieved that Edmonds won't experience a grisly death in the electric chair. It would take an excess of vengeance to want him to suffer as much pain as possible as retribution for the pain he has caused others.
But a society relieved of facing the brutality of its own killing might feel absolved of the wrong it is doing. That would be wrong.
Earlier this month the state of Texas, with the strange concurrence of a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, went ahead and executed a man convicted on evidence that the prosecutor had later disavowed as false.
But no suspicion of innocence is necessary to lament the use of capital punishment, and no sanitizing of method is sufficient to slay the moral offense.
Mocking similarities to a doctor injecting medicine should not inure courts and public to the significance of taking deliberately, in the name of the commonwealth, the lives of prisoners.
by CNB