In “The firing squad returns to America” Barry Grey rails against the re-institutionalization of the firing squad for capital punishment in the state of Utah this week.

How is this systematized sadism and violence to be explained? Can we expect to see demands for the return of other practices? What about drawing and quartering, evisceration, garroting?

Gratuitous US government-sanctioned violence is ever escalating in all dimensions, points out Grey, not only re capital punishment.

Torture.

Extrajudicial drone assassination.

Police murders.

“The militarization of all facets of social life,” insists Grey.

Brutality and sadism reign! Correction. Reign ONLY against unlucky members of the non-elite classes.

Grey also cites “the destruction of pensions and health benefits,” and the withholding of basic elements of “civilized life” such as water, gas and electricity as part of the predatory and parasitic oppression of the lower and middle classes.

The haves are having more, the have nots are losing more and more. The sacredness of their quality of life or very lives is clearly beyond the moral ken of a ruthless and avaricious ruling class elite.

Regarding this escalating barbarism re capital punishment Grey writes:

Over 3,000 people languish on America’s death rows, part of the 2.4 million who comprise the world’s biggest national prison population. They are overwhelmingly working class and poor, and disproportionately African American and Latino.

Earlier this month, a female death row inmate in Georgia came within hours of death for the second time in a week before being sent back to her cell to await her next rendezvous with the executioner.

Support for state murder is by no means the exclusive province of the Republican Party. Last year, President Obama rushed to defend the death penalty following the “botched” execution of Clayton Lockett, articulating the overwhelming bipartisan consensus within the American ruling class in support of this barbaric practice.

Grey reveals that on Monday Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah signed a bill reinstating the firing squad for Utah death sentence inmates. If the Utah state government has trouble securing lethal injections for prisoners it now has the option of shooting them. This Republican Governor Herbert admitted that firing squads are “a little bit gruesome”, but he argued it was a “practical necessity” to help the death sentence process.

The state House of Wyoming earlier this year passed a bill to bring back the firing squad but it was rejected by the state Senate.

This month the state House of Representatives in Alabama voted to bring back the electric chair.

In the Oklahoma state legislature Grey discloses that the Republicans are now proposing to “put prisoners in sealed chambers and asphyxiate them with nitrogen.”

Grey explains that many states ban the use of nitrogen to euthanize animals, but this particular idea of using it for capital punishment is especially appealing to the Oklahoma Republican House members. One of them, Mike Christian excitedly exclaimed: “I believe the use of nitrogen hypoxia will be the thing of the future once it’s passed in Oklahoma.”

Mike Christian is the same politician who after death row inmate Clayton Lockett “writhed in agony for 45 minutes before finally dying” dismissed negative feedback with: “I really don’t care it it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions.”

WTF? Who the hell elects these MONSTERS????

Grey reminds us that two other capital felons endured inappropriate prolonged suffering last year. Joseph Wood in Arizona and Dennis McGuire in Ohio. They were killed with untested drug combinations from unregulated anonymous pharmacies.

There apparently is great difficulty right now with US state governments securing lethal drugs for capital punishment injections because of a European Union ban on European firms selling them to the US. The European Union officially opposes capital punishment. (Note to the US, might be a good time to pay attention to that institutionalized decision of conscience!)

Litigation-wary US firms are also holding back on their sale of the drugs these days. There are escalating legal challenges to executions that use lethal drugs. The Supreme Court, which upholds the death penalty, is due to hear a case in April brought by Oklahoma death row prisoners who maintain that the “lethal injection procedure” is a violation of the US Constitution’s protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

So what are reactionary state legislatures — a/k/a bipartisan pols pimped out to the corporate oligarchy — doing about this issue? Why doing all they can to protect the drug corporations and NOT HUMAN BEINGS, OF COURSE! They are hastening to legally protect the identities of US corporate suppliers of lethal injection drugs to maintain easily accessible usage for capital punishments despite the drugs’ potential for inducing torturous agony on human beings. Grey:

Last year, the Ohio House approved a bill to grant anonymity to such firms for 20 years, and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that this information could legally be kept secret.

Grey views the state government’s and the SCOTUS’s cold-hearted stances on capital punishment and this revival of the firing squad and other sadistic death-inducing measures as examples of an escalating and “unrelenting war” by the ruling class on the working class. He writes:

The seemingly gratuitous savagery of the corporate-financial elite and its political agencies reflects both the bankruptcy of their system—capitalism—and their fear of the growth of working-class opposition.

It is fitting that Utah should revive the firing squad on the centenary of the execution of revolutionary labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill. Born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Sweden, Hill immigrated to the US and became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. He was executed by a Utah firing squad on November 19, 1915, after a frame-up murder conviction.

Hill’s fate underscores the fact that capital punishment and all of the other forms of state coercion and repression are directed against the working class and its revolutionary potential.

Once again it is clear to any citizens of conscience left that human and civil rights in America continue to circle the proverbial bowl! More and more, fascism not democracy — not human decency — prevails in the national and state halls of power.

 

[cross-posted on correntewire — open salon RIP]

 

 

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