Can someone somewhere please tell me how the professional murderers, legal killers, state trained executioners who are taught the fine art of state sanctioned murder, can't seem to put the instruments of their craft, the razor sharp needles, into the veins of the human beings they are to kill without causing that person more undue pain?
I speak from experience when I tell you that a very real part of the pre-execution rituals that all inmates who are facing execution must go through is the repeated searching of their arms for usable veins.
This is so that when it is time for the murder to take place, the prison executioners will already know what veins to use, and which ones not too. Yet time after time in state after executing state, even here in California, these executioners can't seem to locate the veins in the arms of the person they are about to kill. Even though they searched their arms and found those veins many times before.
Is it a sick part of the ritual of death that these executioners are participating in without the knowledge or permission of anyone, other than themselves? Is this part of the pain and torture that certain parts of society demand be inflicted upon convicted and condemned people? Is this part of what executioners feel they need to do in order to let that person who is lying there on that gurney about to be murdered that they don't deserve to be treated with dignity? Maybe it's how they have their cake and eat it too. Maybe it's their way of getting the last word in, or maybe they just want to stick it to that inmate one last time before the poison takes its deadly effect.
No matter what it is though, it needs to stop! These men and sometimes women who are murdered by their government don't need or deserve that extra pain that is being inflicted upon them by society's legal murderers!
I guess this is one of the reasons there are public witnesses to such crimes against humanity, because without their reporting on this no one would ever know. Would they?
In Struggle
From Death Row,
Kevin Cooper
January, 2005