Doug Thompson: The death penalty is dying

Europe, attitude changes having its way in U.S.

What little difference it makes who is in office. Arkansas just gave a glaring example of that.

With great difficulty and by serious haste, our deeply conservative state managed to carry out death sentences. Those executions should have taken years between them. This rush was imposed by state leaders -- driven largely by a European decision five years ago.

The European Union shut down the export of drugs used in executions. That 2012 decision was only the most direct example of sustained, worldwide and very effective public pressure. The intent is clear. If a company wants to do business in large, rich segments of the world, it must avoid supplying executions.

Meanwhile, a long legal fight had all of the state's death penalty cases connected. By the time that ended, one of the drugs the state still had on hand was about to reach its expiration date. Thanks to growing public pressure, getting more will be difficult.

Execution gets closer to impossible every day. Just how close to impossible it is already was on display here this week.

Now here is where a columnist in a small Southern newspaper is supposed to assert local control and support the will of the state's voters. I am supposed to rail against globalism and such. Sorry. Look elsewhere. The people of the European Union have as much right to play no part in our executions as the people of Arkansas have the right to carry them out.

No rational businessman on any continent would choose to alienate his company from a market worth billions for the sake of supplying drugs for a few dozen executions in America.

I support the death penalty, but am not passionate about it. Many more oppose it with great conviction.

Worldwide consensus matters. The very same thing that makes executions here rare and difficult stopped a bathroom bill in the Legislature: worldwide public pressure intermingled with business interests.

How roles have reversed. Government was once needed more by liberals, pushing their causes against social conservatism. Conservative groups like the "Moral Majority" still claimed to represent exactly that until recently. The majority did not need government to enforce social convention. Now conservatives look to government more and more to defend against rising social pressure. Explain the last election in any other way.

Then-Senate candidate Barack Obama did not support gay marriage in 2004. Only in 2012, running for a second term as president, did he declare "I've been going through an evolution on this issue." Government never led on that. It followed.

As for executions, they will only grow more difficult. As I have written before, I support keeping the death penalty as an option. I support the continued existence of the black rhino and the Bornean orangutan, too. I just recognize all those as critically endangered species.

There are family members of murder victims who believe no other sentence but death would be just. I sympathize, but they are very badly outnumbered.

Flippant arguments about using firing squads are bluffs. Death penalty proponents raise the prospect to show their commitment -- and frustration. Opponents raise the idea to cast a bad light on those who are determined to carry these sentences out.

Both sides know lethal injection was invented to lessen the great public pressure against death sentences. Rationally or not, pushing buttons on a device that releases poison to a sedated, condemned prisoner is considered more civilized than finding a half dozen men to draw a bead on a beating human heart.

I still remember watching the incognito interview of a member of Gary Gilmore's firing squad of 1977. "I heaved," was his answer on what he did after the execution.

Nevada had to order a "shooting machine" built to carry out its one and only firing squad execution because it could not find five volunteers -- in 1913, despite news accounts running as far away as Connecticut. An execution method that was nettlesome 104 years ago in Nevada and subject to worldwide indignation in 1977 is not a serious option today. Both sides know this.

So the question after this latest rush is not whether the death penalty is right or wrong. The question has become whether it is worth the pressures and risks involved. That answer may already be "no."

Commentary on 04/29/2017

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