Alabama’s justice system: A depraved heart and no soul

Since June 11 when, without explanation, the Supreme Court let stand a decision from a lower court refusing to allow Alabama to gas convicted murderer Jeffery Lee with nitrogen, legal observers have issued a variety of opinions as to whether the Court’s decision was based on procedural or on substantive grounds—that gassing human beings to death with nitrogen is cruel and unusual punishment.

Some have posited Anthony Boyd was the last man to be tortured to death in Alabama—and in the United States—via “nitrogen hypoxia,” a crude and brutish method where an industrial mask is secured over a condemned prisoner’s face and nitrogen gas is pumped in prompting the prisoner to experience severe “air hunger” for minutes on end; as this severe air hunger occurs, prisoners have been seen thrashing around (despite being secured) on a gurney—convulsing, gasping, and contorting like fish out of water until eventually they are dead—deprived of the oxygen to support human life.

At this juncture, it is simply impossible to know whether a majority of the Supreme Court thinks that nitrogen-gassing is unconstitutional based on the record before it in Lee’s case—which included the first trial on whether nitrogen-gassing constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Here’s what we do know, however: Alabama’s justice system has a depraved heart and no soul.

Immediately on the heels of the Supreme Court shutting down Lee’s nitrogen-gassing, Alabama applied to try and execute Lee again by its other historically torturous execution method: lethal injection. Bungled lethal injections were the very reason why Alabama moved to nitrogen hypoxia which correctional officials hoped (and falsely attested) would be a less manifestly obvious torturous method—less capable of causing revulsion and thereby possible moral rejection by your average Alabama citizen. (Ironically, lethal injection was supposed to be a sanitizing replacement for Alabama’s other legally proscribed execution method, the electric chair, which literally cooks the prisoner’s internal organs, soft tissues, and brain like steaks on a barbecue.)

To be clear, when I write lethal injection has historically been a torturous execution method in Alabama, I mean: From its inception many years ago up until now, Alabama has been slicing and sticking condemned inmates—whose veins are often vulnerable and hard to access—with knives and needles, then pumping toxic chemicals of dubious origin and effectiveness into their bodies hoping it will kill quickly. But more often than not, it doesn’t.

Alabamians don’t have to live in the shadow of such a cruel, fascist and authoritarian system, one in which every few weeks or months Alabama finds itself under the world’s media scrutiny when it seeks to execute a prisoner—usually decades after the crime committed—a prisoner already serving hell on earth by the very fact of being incarcerated in an Alabama prison.

Educated Alabamians know capital punishment is no deterrent and it has racist roots and is racist in practice—especially in Alabama—where disproportionately far more Black men are executed; they know that poverty, mental illness, physical and mental abuse, and childhood neglect almost always play an outsized part in the lives of the condemned before the crimes they’ve committed.

Civilized Alabamians know life in prison should be the harshest punishment under the law. They know that shedding human blood—literally and/or figuratively—is an unrighteous quest for vengeance that is beneath our species.

Religious Alabamians know that Pope Leo and a cavalcade of other faith leaders from all walks of life—and from all over the world—have decreed capital punishment to be a despicable practice and a veritable insult to God, and therefore also to all who righteously worship Him.

Fiscally responsible Alabamians know way, way too much money is being poured down the drain to prop up the death penalty. Taxpayer money that could be going to schools and social programs that benefit Alabamians is instead lining the wallets of the architects and the defenders (the so-called “expert” witnesses) supporting Alabama’s ghoulish state-killing policy and protocols.

Alabamians with hearts and souls know that murder is a terrible thing—no matter who does it. And they know that an execution that occurs under the color of law is still the same: murder.

“Depraved-heart” murder has a specific meaning in criminal law and while that definition is not exactly what I have in mind as applied to Alabama’s justice system and its capital punishment regime, a “depraved-heart” murder does usually require “a total disregard for the value of human life” which I do think is applicable to Alabama’s death penalty today and historically.

Alabamians with souls—souls with regard for human life—will do something to change this status quo: Going forward they’ll only elect lawmakers who campaign to end the death penalty.