They say once you see an execution, you won’t support the death penalty. Maybe they’re right. But not for the reason they think.
I have witnessed an execution, and I oppose the death penalty. Not because it’s too severe. It is too light a punishment.
The parents and relatives of the 17 killed in a Parkland, Fla. high school do not agree. They are devastated and baffled that shooter Nikolas Cruz received life in prison instead of the death penalty. They want to see Cruz die. Perhaps they believe it will bring closure. Perhaps they’re right.
But that’s no reason to execute. If anything, the nature of America’s mass slayings mandates that society’s most venomous NOT be “punished” the same way we would put down a beloved pet with a terminal illness.
If the purpose of law enforcement is to punish, criminals should face the two inescapable burdens of taking life: time and memory. Putting a mass killer into an anesthetized sleep before death is about as kind as you can treat barbarity. I should go out so blissfully.
In 1987, Ronald Gene Simmons killed 16 relatives and co-workers in Arkansas. At the time, it was the largest mass slaying in U.S. history. During the trial, which I covered, Simmons offered no defense, punched the prosecutor in the face, and said he was fine with the death penalty handed down. He filed no appeals and was scheduled for execution faster than any murderer since Ted Bundy. The family members still living were pacified, and showed up for the lethal injection.
Ronald Gene Simmons and his murdered children.
I was one of two reporters assigned to witness the execution (the Associated Press was the other).
When they opened the curtains to the execution chamber, Simmons was already on the gurney, his arms strapped akimbo. A guard/attendant stood at Simmons’ side. The “executioner” stood hidden behind a secured door, where he would push a button that would deliver the anesthesia. That would put Simmons into a deep sleep. Then he would push another button, which would deliver the poison.
It took about five minutes for Simmons to die, and it looked exactly like my dog Teddy’s death. Steady breathing, then nothing. Exactly as Simmons wanted.
I know this because Simmons made his preferences clear. Back then, Arkansas’ death row inmates got two choices: What they’d like for a final meal and how they’d like to die. In its huckleberry wisdom, Arkansas let you choose your execution style: firing squad; electric chair; or lethal injection.
Simmons chose a swabbed, sterile injection. Kinda like outpatient surgery. The warden, who had been waiting for midnight to arrive, asked Simmons if he had any last words.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Simmons said. Nothing more.
The warden nodded his head. There was an audible click, like an electric generator had been turned on.
Simmons did not kick, did not writhe, did not indicate any suffering whatsoever. Steady breathing, then gone. Like Teddy.
During and after the execution, there were no gasps, no cries, no sighs of relief that the nightmare was over. No righteous indignation from survivors. No exclamations of ’That’s for my baby!’
If anything, capital punishment is as anti-climactic as a sit in a doctor’s waiting room. And about as righteous. No one claimed Simmons body, which was buried in a potter’s field behind the penitentiary.
A year later, we did a story on the aftermath of the killings. Not one relative I reached expressed satisfaction at the way he went out. One said she wished Simmons instead had to worry about bad dreams and prison showers for the rest of his natural life, a very different position than the one she held 12 months ago.
Which is about where I stand. To those who think death with anesthesia is the ultimate punishment for capital crimes, I ask: For whom? If you had a choice between spending your remaining days in a 15 x 15 cell or taking the painless exit door, which would you choose? And that doesn’t count conventional arguments against the death penalty, like cost and efficacy.
Nothing can repay what was taken on Valentine’s Day, 2018 at Parkland High. But giving monsters a hall pass from memory, consciousness and repercussion is an escape hatch they never gave their victims.
