The inhumanity of Charles Burton’s execution

A number of persuasive opinion pieces decrying Charles Burton’s impending execution March 12 in Alabama have already been published, including by a former juror in Burton’s case and even by the victim’s own daughter whose father was shot and killed during a robbery—not by Burton but by a co-defendant who despite being the triggerman ultimately received a sentence of life without parole; Burton was outside the robbed business when the shooting happened but was nonetheless convicted under Alabama’s felony murder statute and sentenced to death, a starkly unjust disparity in sentencing which led Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to issue a statement saying “Charles Burton’s Case Reveals Arbitrariness of Alabama’s Death Penalty.”

Numerous news outlets have reported that Burton, who is 75 years old, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and has to wear a protective helmet issued by Alabama’s Department of Corrections due to frequent falls; Burton ambulates primarily by wheelchair and is reported to be in chronic pain.

What I want to focus on in this brief essay is the utter inhumanity of what Alabama plans to do to Mr. Burton, and to do it, I will borrow from the searing prose of the famous marine biologist, activist, and influential nature writer, Rachel Carson, who died in 1964 at the age of fifty-six.

In her book “Silent Spring,” which has been hailed as “the classic that launched the environmental movement,” Carson imparted so much clearheaded logic with urgent and compelling power, her writings about mankind’s destruction of its habitat could not be ignored.

For example, at the beginning of “Silent Spring” Carson writes about pesticides that, “We urgently need an end to the false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts.” (Mariner Books observed that: “The outcry” after Silent Spring’s “publication in 1962 forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.”)

The same is true— that “We urgently need an end to the false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts”—when we talk about what’s in store for Mr. Burton when he is gassed to death. Because Alabama officials have, over a spree of 7 nitrogen-gassing-torture-executions beginning in 2024, falsely assured everyone that this is a humane way to execute a human being. They have sugar-coated the unpalatable facts of these executions as reported by eyewitnesses.

So let’s all be crystal-clear-eyed about what Alabama is going to do to Mr. Burton pretty soon.

Executioners will wheel an already suffering, dying man from a cell into an execution chamber.

After having at some point removed his “protective helmet,” they’ll hoist Burton’s withered body onto a gurney and strap a gas mask across his face. Then they’ll suffocate him, making him convulse and gasp and choke for breath. This barbaric torturing of a fellow flesh-and-blood human being could go on for minutes as Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s last opinion about Alabama’s “nitrogen hypoxia” experimentations tried to impress upon anyone who read it. (In pleading with her colleagues to stop Anthony Boyd’s physical and psychological torture—before it happened—Justice Sotomayor wrote: “Allowing the nitrogen hypoxia experiment to continue despite mounting and unbroken evidence that it violates the Constitution by inflicting unnecessary suffering fails to ‘protec[t] [the] dignity’ of ‘the Nation we have been, the Nation we are, and the Nation we aspire to be.’”)

Back to Carson, who, again, wrote with unparalleled passion about the terrible and terrifying harms of chemical toxins on our natural world. She zoned in in a passage on the “symptoms of a meadowlark found near death” after it had been poisoned by the use of pesticides: “Although it lacked muscular coordination and could not fly or stand, it continued to beat its wings and clutch with its toes while lying on its side. Its beak was held open and breathing was labored.”

Now, of course, Mr. Burton is not a meadowlark. He is a man. And that is exactly my point about the sheer inhumanity of what correctional officials in Alabama are planning to do to him.

Because what Carson wrote persuasively when it comes to mankind’s destruction of earth’s flora and fauna can equally serve as a warning to all of us—all of us who have a conscience—for what the consequences will be when Alabama torturously executes Charles Burton with nitrogen gas.

About the meadowlark’s torturous murder, Carson concluded: “By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being?”