We learned last week that four states were using the firing squad to revive the killing of death row inmates. Saturday, The Guardian published an article in which it is argued that Arizona would rather turn to the gas chamber.
You read that right, gas chamber. According to the documents obtained, Arizona is using the same gas that was used at the infamous Auschwitz camp. The State already had a gas chamber built in 1949. The refurbishment would be completed, all that was missing was the purchase of the Zyclon B. It would have been done recently.
Executions have been suspended in Arizona since the disastrous death of Joseph Wood in 2014. The mix of drugs used for lethal injection is at the heart of the controversy. Wood, who only died after two hours of a relentless struggle to breathe and after being given a dose fifteen times the protocol specified.
The same year, two other botched executions in Ohio and Oklahoma had helped revive discussions on the interpretation of the Eighth Amendment which reads: unusual. “
Arizona therefore wishes to resume executions by offering detainees the choice between two modes of execution: the gas chamber or lethal injection using a new formula. Opponents of the death penalty do not fail to point out that neither of the two options proposed guarantees better results than what was denounced in 2014. The recovery would be hasty and the risks of dramatic incidents high.
In all fifty US states, executions are on the decline and several states have imposed a moratorium when they have not simply abolished them. There are only fourteen states that have executed detainees recently.
Few democratic countries other than the United States still allow the death penalty, and in 2021, it seems unacceptable to me to resort to methods that have not been tested or to methods that were thought to have disappeared.
Not only does the gas chamber evoke for me the memory of accounts of witnesses who recounted the long agony of the condemned, but it also revives the memory of the Holocaust. When asked about the usefulness of history, my students often respond spontaneously: “To learn from mistakes or lessons of the past”. It looks like history teaching is lacking in Arizona.
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