Lethal injection
As we approach the summer of 2010, the USA is in its 34th year of a legal death penalty, an institution which, to date, has killed 1,211 individuals since the US Supreme Court's decision on July 2, 1976 to end a 4-year moratorium on US executions. The US has more methods of killing people, 5, than any other country in the world: electrocution, firing squads, gassing, hanging, and lethal injections, which is the most common form of our national killing. William Wiseman, Jr., states that when he was a member of the Oklahoma Legislature in 1976, he drafted America's first lethal injection statute. Wiseman has noted that lethal injection seemed "more humane." But lethal injection, as a planned method of killing, was devised by Dr. Karl Brandt, the personal physician of Adolf Hitler, in October 1939. It was to be used to kill children (initially) as
well as adults and was incorporated into the 1939 "Fuhrer decree," a program of euthanasia designed to eliminate "life unworthy of life." The order specifically charged Dr. Brandt "with the authority for expanding the authority of physicians...to the end that patients...can be granted a mercy death." The entire project was to be "unconditionally kept secret," and Brandt and other physicians in the Reich "subjected themselves to the practical carrying through of the Fuhrer's orders." Brandt was ultimately captured, tried and convicted. He was specifically cited for his principal involvement in the "systematic and secret execution of...persons...by lethal injections...." Brandt was executed in 1948. In America today, the condemned are constantly dehumanized and labeled as "filth," "garbage," "scum," "monsters," "evil," and as "life unworthy of life"
whose extermination is deemed "necessary" and "deserved." The brutal and stark reality is that the usage of lethal injection in the United States is the continuation of a Nazi-like ideology in which individuals and members of groups can be declassified as human beings, labeled as something less-than-human, and exterminated with the full approval of the majority of citizens who have been socialized and numbed over decades of time to accept this preposterous notion without question. All people everywhere, who are working for an America and a world without executions, should use historical linkages to educate themselves; lethal injection is a shocking and moral abomination and is an unacceptable, cruel and inhumane method of human extermination. Its victims do not just "go to sleep." In the evolution of state killing, lethal injection has nothing
whatsoever to do with "an evolving standard of decency." Rather, it represents the continuance of a barbaric Nazi mentality devised solely to exterminate people, all in the name of medical "humanity" and the "betterment" of society.
The time has come to relegate the death penalty, anywhere in the world, to the trashcan on history where is so rightfully belongs.
well as adults and was incorporated into the 1939 "Fuhrer decree," a program of euthanasia designed to eliminate "life unworthy of life." The order specifically charged Dr. Brandt "with the authority for expanding the authority of physicians...to the end that patients...can be granted a mercy death." The entire project was to be "unconditionally kept secret," and Brandt and other physicians in the Reich "subjected themselves to the practical carrying through of the Fuhrer's orders." Brandt was ultimately captured, tried and convicted. He was specifically cited for his principal involvement in the "systematic and secret execution of...persons...by lethal injections...." Brandt was executed in 1948. In America today, the condemned are constantly dehumanized and labeled as "filth," "garbage," "scum," "monsters," "evil," and as "life unworthy of life"
whose extermination is deemed "necessary" and "deserved." The brutal and stark reality is that the usage of lethal injection in the United States is the continuation of a Nazi-like ideology in which individuals and members of groups can be declassified as human beings, labeled as something less-than-human, and exterminated with the full approval of the majority of citizens who have been socialized and numbed over decades of time to accept this preposterous notion without question. All people everywhere, who are working for an America and a world without executions, should use historical linkages to educate themselves; lethal injection is a shocking and moral abomination and is an unacceptable, cruel and inhumane method of human extermination. Its victims do not just "go to sleep." In the evolution of state killing, lethal injection has nothing
whatsoever to do with "an evolving standard of decency." Rather, it represents the continuance of a barbaric Nazi mentality devised solely to exterminate people, all in the name of medical "humanity" and the "betterment" of society.
The time has come to relegate the death penalty, anywhere in the world, to the trashcan on history where is so rightfully belongs.
