Pain and Suffering
By Kevin Cooper
The history of the death penalty throughout the world as well as within this country shows that it was implemented in part to invoke as much pain and suffering as possible on the person or people that were going to be executed.
No matter what kind of execution there was at the time—and believe me, throughout the history of this world human beings have come up with every way possible to murder other human beings in the name of the justice or God, or religion—there has always been pain. Just use your imagination.
Things such as stoning or hanging, shooting or electrocuting, gassing and disemboweling were inflicted by so-called civilized people on people who they deemed uncivilized. Depending on what part of the world you are in, you can still experience some of this in 2006.
Some parts of the world have become more civil than others, and they have chosen to end the practice of capital punishment while other so-called civilized countries still have the need for it and refuse to end its use. But in order to keep the death penalty as we now have it, the people who insist on its use have had to change it. They have had to make it humane, though we all know that there is no humane way to murder another human being, even if it’s in the name of the law!!!
In understanding the death penalty and the people who put it to use, it must be understood that the very act of capital punishment is to cause pain and suffering. This was made clear when the state of California revived 75-year-old Clarence Ray Allen after he had a heart attack—so that he would be alive for them to kill in two months time. It’s not about removing a person, permanently, from society. It’s about making a person suffer. It’s about making a person suffer psychological and emotional pain on top of the physical pain and suffering that it is ensured to cause.
Nevertheless, the physical part of the process got to be so bad in the eyes of society—not the politicians or the death penalty supporters but society as a whole—that changes had to be made or the death penalty might have been forced to end.
People were tired of learning about people catching on fire while being electrocuted, or suffering inhumanly while being choked to death in the gas chamber, or any other of the botched executions that have taken place in this so-called civilized country of America. Instead of ending the death penalty and the pain and suffering that it causes, the pro-death penalty people had to come up with a way to at the very least hide the pain and suffering, so no one could complain.
So they came up with lethal injection, and its selling point was the first phase of it. Putting the person to sleep, rendering them unconscious. Masking or hiding the pain, that suffering, so that no one could see it or detect it. This was the most important thing because if you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t report it in the media which meant no one would know that there was pain and suffering.
The jury in Simi Valley, California, told us that we as a people didn’t see what we saw during the Rodney King police beating. And those cops were found not guilty at that trial. So if they can say and get away with saying that we didn’t see what we saw in that case, then the death penalty people who came up with lethal injection will most definitely say that we didn’t see anything when it comes to pain and suffering.
Yet this does not mean that there is no pain and suffering during a lethal injection execution. The people who claim that there is none aren’t to be believed because most of them are the same ones who said there was no pain and suffering during electrocutions, or gassing in those chambers. Even now they insist on using drugs that veterinarians have banned when it comes to ending the live of animals. If there were no pain and suffering, then most of the fun would be removed from this sick act for the people who support it.
Just look at their collective faces when we talk about ending it!!
In Struggle from Death Row
At San Quentin Prison
Kevin Cooper