Now that the state of South Carolina has three court-approved methods that a condemned convict can choose from to meet his maker, it’s curious lawmakers didn’t consider a tried-and-true method of execution so gruesome that it should be certain to have a deterrent effect: the guillotine.
South Carolina is scheduled to get back into the execution business Sept. 20 when a 46-year-old man, Freddie Eugene Owens, is set to die for the 1997 death and armed robbery of a Greenville store clerk. If there’s not some kind of delay in a state that hasn’t had an execution in 13 years, he’ll have a choice of dying by electrocution, lethal injection or firing squad, a new option approved by lawmakers in the last couple of years.
We’ve never been clear exactly why there needed to be three choices since the end result is the same – and it seems kind of counterintuitive to worry about pain in executions since many people want to see those put to death to suffer for their crimes.
South Carolina’s execution process faced a slowdown when lethal injection was questioned a while back for being cruel and unusual punishment that caused pain and undue suffering. And then companies that supplied the drugs said they were out of them, but that really meant they didn’t want people to know which company supplied the drug. So the legislature passed a law to keep their identities secret. And along the way, lawmakers decided to add another method for inmates to choose from for good measure – in case the lethal injection reboot didn’t work.
Of course, who’s to say electrocutions haven’t been botched or that firing squads are pain-free?
Which brings us back to the guillotine, last used officially in 1977 when the French executed a Tunisian for a particularly brutal death in Marseille in 1974. Used during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, death by guillotine has awed and terrified the public for generations. According to a paper questioning whether death by guillotine was “the most gentle of lethal methods,” researchers concluded decapitation caused “nearly instant” loss of consciousness in humans and rats but “it is possible that the truth will never be fully known.”
So, if you have reached this part of this commentary, you might be figuring out that discussing a return to the guillotine is a facetious suggestion to amplify the brutality of executing people.
State-directed executions should become a permanent thing of the past. They are brutal, discriminatory and political.
According to Amnesty International, almost 200 people sent to death row in the United States “have been later exonerated or released from death row on grounds of innocence. Others have been executed despite serious doubts about their guilt.”
The organization also claims execution as a deterrent “has been repeatedly discredited, and there is no evidence that the death penalty is any more effective in reducing crime than life imprisonment.”
Lock ‘em up and throw away the key, but let’s get rid of executions.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper.