Stand up for what's right: Abolishing the death penalty in Alabama and beyond
As Alabama readies for another lethal injection execution, the infamous hypothermia experiments in the Dachau concentration camp comes to mind. Prisoners were forced into ice water submersion under the guise of investigating the physiologic decline of the human body as it slowly froze to death. The scientific justification was that such information would be valuable to the German Luftwaffe pilots facing a possible ditch into the cold North Sea.
Modern research has at its core the principle that any human subject in a research project must freely volunteer. It was well known that all subjects in the hypothermia experiments were compelled, thereby nullifying any ethical approval. Despite this long-accepted moral baseline, each state execution gathers fragments of data under the guise of study and in pursuit of execution refinement.
After the end of World War II, the meaning of the hypothermia experiments plagued the medical and scientific community for the next 50 years. Could the lack of volunteerism eliminate any possible value that might have been found in this tortuous event? After decades of thought the answer was finally revealed, although it was really there all along. The so-called “study” was junk in the methodology. The purpose of this “study” was simply to torture people to death.
Medicine as an ethical endeavor is not constructed by the wearing of lab coats or scrubs, or of handling the instruments and the drugs of the medical trade. The problem of medical education then, and now, is the wrong idea that ethics stands apart from practice. In truth, every move a doctor makes is woven with bioethical duty. Anything short of this is just torture with a blade or a needle. In Alabama and other death penalty states, the impersonation of medical practice during executions is so good it fools the Department of Corrections, the courts, and the doctors, too. It fools the public perhaps less, but still the state shrouds the doctor behind a veil, a secrecy which is, in truth, a veil of shame.
The medical profession can never be an arm of punishment — or state power. Doctors of weak ethical character wanting to act as a higher power is where civilization and professionalism disappears. A prisoner lying on a table is not a patient, and a doctor has no right to make him such by dint of dressing the part. If any doctor role is to be imagined, it is to block killing with medicine, not enable it. Shame on any medical professional that sets aside their proper duty — and immerses a prisoner in ice, or subjects them to some other torture — while donning a shroud.
And concerning this shame which my co-author Dr. Zivot writes about (above), and which he places on the shoulders of Alabama’s anonymous executioners when they torture prisoners to death: It’s a shame shared by all Americans — especially Alabamians — who stand by and who do nothing, who say nothing — before, during, and after each of these atrocities take place.
The intentional killing of another human being can never be morally sound — no matter who does it. Because participating in a lethal injection, or any type of execution is, in fact, anathema to the ethical practice of medicine, people of conscience must demand it be stopped. Immediately.
When people are purposely frozen to death, as happened during the Holocaust, or, when nitrogen gas executions are planned, and mentally ill human beings put to death first — because they’re mentally ill — as is happening right now in Alabama, politicians, power-players, people of faith and influence, people who know the difference between right and wrong, these people must speak up.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.”
If the death penalty in Alabama — in America, and, all over — is to be abolished, the desire must be expressed from more than high offices, like pope and president. It must be acted upon. Otherwise statements in support of death penalty abolition will always remain fantastical platitudes — a wistful desire for our laws, our morals, our beliefs, to be better than they actually are. Words, in this instance, to have power, must be backed by tangible movement in the right direction.
“Of the universal mind each individual is one more incarnation,” Emerson insisted. And “Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises.” If capital punishment is to be eradicated, the recurring torture of predominately poor, often mentally ill, disproportionately Black, ineffectively represented, death row prisoners in Alabama — and elsewhere — must be a crisis in the lives of good, moral people.
But this is not what’s happening. Politicians, priests, modern-day patricians, the proletariat, and plain ol’ salt of the earth people — all of whom know better — are refusing to stand up against torture. Against murder. Against wrong.
In “Rediscovering Lost Values,” famous death penalty abolitionist — and Alabama’s most beloved reverend — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., implored: “The thing that we need in the world today is a group of men and women who will stand up for right and be opposed to wrong, wherever it is.”
After prison officials attempted — during Alabama’s most recent bungled execution attempt — to access one of Alan Eugene Miller’s veins for 90 minutes, poking Miller with a needle as many as 18 times before giving up, Dr. Zivot and I highlighted, in these pages, horrific, consistently cruel, unusual, torturous executions in Alabama. We are asking for men and women to stand up for right. We are asking them to be opposed to the death penalty — in words, and much more importantly, in action — wherever it is.
Joel Zivot is a practicing physician in anesthesiology and intensive care medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Zivot is a recognized expert against the use of lethal injection and the tools of medicine for use in the death penalty. Follow him on Twitter @joel_zivot
Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on Twitter at @SteveCooperEsq
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Stand up for what's right: Abolish death penalty in Alabama & beyond
