The death penalty “is state-sanctioned homicide, wholly ineffective, often botched, and a much more expensive punishment than life imprisonment. There is no ethical, scientifically supported, medically acceptable, or morally justifiable way to carry it out,” the editors of Scientific American write in their piece, https://tinyurl.com/4em7tmkm “Evidence Does Not Support the Use of the Death Penalty.” The fact that this “state-sanctioned homicide” is racist, puts innocents people to death, and is often botched, is proof that “There is no ethical, scientifically supported, medically acceptable. or morally justifiable way to carry it out,” the editors write. “Elected officials need to reform this aspect of our justice system at both the state and federal levels. Capital punishment does not stop crime and mocks both justice and humanity. The death penalty in the U.S. must come to an end.”
“The Bureau of Prisons will typically only consider the possibility of a compassionate release once someone has received an end-of-life prognosis, deemed to have only week or months to live,” Wayne Pray writes in his essay, “Graying in Prison” in Inquest.
Sentenced to life without parole plus 50 years(!) in prison in Florida in 1988 for nonviolent drug offenses, Pray writes that he has been shuffled to eight different federal prisons over the years, and there is one thing about all of them that is “disturbingly consistent. They are without exception housing a rapidly aging inmate population.” Pray writes of those who were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, imprisoned for decades, who were not “able to die in a hospice home, nor at home in the bosoms of their loving, caring families. Instead, in prisons and prison hospitals, they have died surrounded by strangers and behind barbed-wire fences and forbidding brick walls.”
In her New York Times story, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/us/an-atheist-chaplain-and-a-death-row-inmates-final-hours.html “An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours,” Emma Goldberg writes of the spiritual support Devin Moss, an atheist chaplain, provided Phillip Hancock, who had been on Oklahoma’s death row since 2004 for the murder of Robert Lee Jett Jr. and James Vincent Lynch in 2001.
Moss was also an atheist, and in the year before Hancock’s November 2023 execution, stood by him in the execution chamber when the state killed him. “It’s well known that people that really believe, that really have faith, die better,” Moss said. “How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?”
