Received today (edited for relevance) from Harriet McCulloch, Director of Casework at Reprieve.org …

I’ve spent ten years working at Reprieve and a career sitting across from people who know the exact date and time the state plans to kill them, reading their files and their last words. I know there is no such thing as a humane execution.

I’ve seen the system up close and it’s not justice.
It’s human experimentation.

Some of what follows might be difficult to read, but, with two more executions scheduled this week in the US, it’s important to tell the truth about the death penalty.

Every execution in the US today is an experiment. States buy drugs secretly from shady suppliers and use them in untested ways for which they were never intended, hoping they’ll work. [1]

When they don’t, the results are horrific. People have gasped for air, cried out in pain, or been silently paralysed while drowning in their own lungs. When used, the paralytic drug hides the suffering for the witnesses’ comfort – not the condemned person’s – in an attempt to uphold the lie that lethal injection executions are ‘humane’. [2]

Most people on death row are kept apart from meaningful human interaction, sometimes for decades, living with the slow, unbearable knowledge that they are awaiting execution.

I’ve met people who described this as being “buried alive”, condemned to a living death long before the state carries out its sentence. It erases humanity.

Instead of justice, it’s a system that inflicts suffering for suffering’s sake, hiding behind procedure and bureaucracy while enacting something profoundly inhumane. The death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent for crime or address the reasons why crimes are committed in the first place.

There’s something deeply sad and pointless about this futile system of punishment, which destroys the lives of those condemned, and degrades the humanity of everyone touched by the system that exists to kill them.

And yet, progress is possible. Due to the incredible resilience of the lawyers working these cases and the strength of our community, together, we’ve helped expose injustice and pushed back against this system.

In public debate, the death penalty is sometimes described in the language of ‘procedure,’ ‘protocol,’ and ‘justice served.’ But we know, that behind those words are real human beings – subjected to a terrifying process – whose deaths tell us nothing about justice, and everything about cruelty.

For 25 years, Reprieve has investigated cases, exposed injustice, and fought to stop executions across the US. Right now, as more states rush to carry out executions in the complete absence of transparency, our work has never been more critical.

[1] Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection.
[2] Lethal injection in the modern era: cruel, unusual and racist.