More than four months have passed since the infamous killing of United Healthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson. It was a crime that continues to split public opinion and give federal officials the chance to make headlines.
One of those headlines is that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the suspected killer, for first-degree murder and murder as a crime of terrorism.
The news has started a resurgence of discussion on the ethics and legalities of the death penalty itself — whether it was just for a government to kill its citizens as punishment for severe enough crimes. But the conversation has been gaining traction even before that, most notably with Donald Trump’s recent attempts to expand the categories of crime that could legally be punished by the death penalty.
The proposed new policies would include allowing such measures in the cases of espionage, treason, human trafficking, child sexual abuse, drug dealing, murder of an American citizen by a migrant and the murder of any law enforcement officer.
But important questions remain: Why, in our advanced and modern state — when many other successful countries have already outlawed capital punishment — is America shifting its sights back to such a controversial method of punishment? Why is the government choosing to advertise these measures on such a prolific case and will these new policies impact crime rates?
The presence of capital punishment can be traced back to as far as 1780 BC in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which charged for crimes like murder, incest, bigamy, sorcery, harboring fugitive slaves, bribery and others to be punishable by death — most often by drowning, beating, impalement, burning alive and crucifixion (most famously in the historical sense).
By around 900 AD, the British were starting to mostly abandon the more barbaric methods of drowning and burning in favor of hanging — a kinder-seeming execution method. When performed correctly, the victim’s neck would snap upon dropping, granting them a quick death. Although, more often than not, the killing was done in unideal scenarios and botched, leaving the victims to suffocate for up to 30 minutes.
Frequently, both in England and later countries, the offenders’ bodies would then be hung up for the public to see them slowly rot, setting an example so that no others stepped out of line.
The fashion of the noose continued through the late 1800s until the invention of the electric chair in 1889. The electric chair was pioneered to be a more “humane” way of execution, harnessing the new power of electricity to deliver a “merciful” end to death row inmates. The first execution by electric chair was performed on William Kemmler in 1890 and took two full minutes of Kemmler being cooked alive to kill him.
In later operations, the operations would last on average from 2 to 15 minutes of electrocution for the victims to die. Nonetheless, by 1949, the electric chair became the preferred method of execution for 26 states.
The most prominent next leap in the history of the death penalty was the invention of the lethal injection, first used in 1982 to execute Charles Brooks Jr. The most common chemicals used in a lethal injection are sodium thiopental to anesthetize the victim, pancuronium bromide to paralyze all the muscles of the body and potassium chloride to cause a lethal cardiac arrest.
Those drugs were not reviewed by any medical practitioners before being allowed by the government to be used in executions. In fact, they were rejected by the American Medical Association for being unethical. Decades after that drug combination was put in protocol, formal research was conducted for the first time. It found that in combination with the other two drugs, the potassium chloride was weakened and did not have the strength to cause a cardiac arrest.
Instead, the victims would die slowly of suffocation or even drown in their own lung fluids, while the paralytic (employed only to make the observers more comfortable with the procedure) would prevent them from even showing their pain to their executors. Those are simply the cases in which the operation was performed correctly — about a third of all lethal injection procedures are botched, leading to an even slower and more painful death for the inmate.
Today, lethal injection is an allowed method of execution in 31 states and is the preferred method by the federal government. Electrocution is an allowed method in seven states, lethal gas is an allowed method in four states, hanging is allowed in two states and death by firing squad is allowed in two states. Only 19 states outlaw capital punishment.
Mangione, if sentenced to death, would likely end up getting the lethal injection method.
Without the consideration of empathy and the lessening of human suffering, however, the actual death penalty is ineffective at best and harmful at worst. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the presence of the death penalty offers no deterrent to criminals and might actually increase the rate of violent crime. After all, from a certain perspective, slowly rotting in prison forever on a life sentence is a FAR more unpleasant fate compared to a single moment of pain followed by forever nothingness.
The use of the death penalty in cases of child sexual abuse and human trafficking might make it harder to convict criminals too, since the victim, who is already susceptible to the shame of speaking out, will have to actively choose to potentially convict their abuser to death — someone who may be a member of their family, a romantic partner or a close friend.
The death penalty also makes it easier for corruption and unjust practices to spread. Texas courts have already started to pose the idea of prosecuting supportive parents of transgender children as instigators of child abuse. If parents and other supportive figures start to be considered as child sexual abusers — especially since several conservative figures in the government already consider transgender people to be inherently sexual — the government could potentially gain the ability to start using capital punishment against them.
More so, the death penalty system is extremely inaccurate in its assessment of crime. Since 1972, 200 death row inmates have been exonerated of all charges — over 50% of them black, a disproportionate number compared to the number of Black people who actually commit capital crimes. Worse still, statistically, critics say one person for every eight people on death row in the U.S. is innocent.
So far, there is no doubt that Mangione’s arrest has galvanized public opinion. An unprecedented wave of sympathy toward the Robin Hood-esque alleged killer has shocked many.
Both Mangione and his supporters have called out the attempt to sentence him to the death penalty as a political stunt that threatens to make an example out of anyone who would attempt to undermine the current power structure.
Like the people hung on crosses in the BC era and the bodies left to rot out in the sun, the only practical purpose of the bodies of the people killed on death row in the modern era is not justice or the lessening of crime, but rather control and intimidation. And we as a society should not only reject the death penalty in individual cases, but do away with it entirely.
