We're Heroes, Unless We're in the Way
First responders and healthcare workers are the backbone of America—until we inconvenience the machinery of death.
The recent reversal of a decades-long decline in capital punishment has apparently come with some consequences. Attorneys for the State of Oklahoma, long the leader in capital punishment per capita, recently requested the state court slow the issuance of execution dates to a rate of one per quarter—a pace still far beyond what death penalty experts consider an “active“ rate, and which would not seriously threaten its top-dog status—in order to cope with the psychological stress imposed on execution staff. The effect is very real: execution team members speak of recurring nightmares, PTSD and suicidal ideation about “the most painful moment of my life.“
Judge Greg Lumpkin wasn’t having it, though. Drawing on his time as a Marine Corps JAG, Judge Lumpkin told the state to cut the “sympathy stuff“ and offered that, “when [Marines] have tough duties, we just say, ‘man up’.“1 Lumpkin’s remarks continue two traditions, one long and one ancient:
The executioner was a pariah in most cultures that practiced capital punishment (which is to say, nearly all of them). The Japanese executioner being considered burakumin, or untouchable, and the Ottomans didn’t even allow them burial beside decent people; Western conventions spawned executioner “dynasties,“ as the profession was seen as unfit for marriage by the families of all but their colleagues. While the push to medicalize executions has meant trading headsmen and hangmen for whomever they can get, the state-sanctioned killer being beneath consideration apparently continues apace.
As for the latter-day tradition: to the extent that Lumpkin’s remarks about frontline workers are unusual, it’s in degree rather than type. Bill de Blasio was effluvious about FDNY’s EMTs and paramedics until they asked to be paid like peers of their fire and police colleagues, then “the work [was] different.“ Police are “the greatest people we have“ as mascots of Donald Trump’s immigration and criminal justice agenda but hostage-takers when they obstruct his whims. Fire and EMS make great neighbors on tacky “thin line“ flags like the one above until it’s time to throw us under the bus in service of a killer cop. “Frontline heroes“ are always expected to nod stoically when thanked for our service at the grocery store and then silently recede into the background. All Lumpkin did differently was explicitly state how little he cared what we had to say.
The System’s Well-Anticipated Brokenness On Display
I’ll also admit that, on first hearing, my sympathies were similarly limited. Every healthcare worker who participates in an execution ignores the warnings, if not threats, of their professional code of ethics in order to deal out death. If participants in lethal injection don’t want psychological trauma from taking a prisoner’s life, the answer for avoiding that seems pretty easy. Unlike the movement Lumpkin represents, however, I realize that no man is a creditor in grace; if executioners believe—as death penalty proponents bend over backward to tell them—that they’re carrying out society’s most evil necessity, those who insist from afar the wheel keep rolling should listen to those actually putting their shoulders to it.
Lumpkin’s remarks also call to mind something that used to be axiomatic in mainline Christianity. In research for this project and my book A Quiet Death: The Failure of Lethal Injection, I came across a mid-century position statement on capital punishment by the Presbyterian Church USA: “The use of the death penalty tends to brutalize the society that condones it.” The permission structure built by SCOTUS since the end of the Furman-imposed moratorium on capital punishment make it hard to see that speculation as anything but stone-cold fact. The courts don't care if the method of execution carries a high likelihood of torture; the states don’t care if legitimate medicine will suffer from their pursuit of sanctioned homicide2; it’s not even a settled question whether Oklahoma is required to care that a man condemned to die actually did it. The pursuit of capital punishment has seen the states break every promise they made in Gregg v. Georgia, counting ever-increasing blessings from the Supreme Court for doing it. Lumpkin joins his colleagues in adding the executioners’ sanity to the sacrifice.
So It Goes
Judge Lumpkin, citing the faster pace of prosecutors and prison staff that “did their duty“ (with no apparent concern for the state’s record of botched executions), told Oklahoma Attorney General and state execution overseer Gentner Drummond that 30 days would be “more than enough time“ between executions. The court’s ruling will come later this month.
Verdict’s Joseph Margulies points out that Lumpkin’s apparent hostility to even slowing Oklahoma’s pace of executions comes in the context of Drummond supporting Richard Glossip’s unfair-trial claim in his second round at the Supreme Court; Lumpkin’s real charge, Margulies speculates, may be that Drummond’s insufficient commitment to capital punishment amounts to dereliction of duty (a tack not unprecedented in Oklahoma). In a better story, this is where Drummond stops to reconsider the monster his office has helped create; here in the real world, the cynicism required to stay sane on the capital punishment beat remains undefeated.
Judge Lumpkin is apparently unaware that Marines also respond to “tough duties“ with the highest rate in the military suicide crisis.
The link talks about the end of thiopental in America; as anesthesiologist Alyssa Burkhart notes, you can add decreased donor organs here in America due to China’s pursuit of lethal injection.