“It Was the Most Violent Thing I’ve Ever Seen”

And then he was scheduled for execution by lethal injection in 2022, and the lethal injection failed. It adds these layers of complication to his story.

He compared that botched execution to being under a sewing machine.

Because they were looking for a vein with a needle

They were looking for a vein and just consistently being poked and cut. Kenny’s story represents all of the things that are wrong with not just the death penalty but the criminal justice system in Alabama. Everybody called this execution an experiment, but in a lot of ways, the criminal justice system down there itself is an experiment. And it’s no mistake that Kenny embarrassed the state by surviving, and he was the first person executed by nitrogen hypoxia. They were going to figure out a way to kill him no matter what.

[I]t looks like someone, like you said, has a bag over their head, and they’re suffocating to death. But an even better comparison is it looks like someone puts their hands around your neck and chokes you out with their bare hands, because that’s what the resistance looks like. I’ve said that it looked like a fish out of water, just on a dock, suffocating to death. But now I’m beginning to think it’s even more violent than that. It feels like it’s someone putting their hands around someone’s neck and choking them out. That’s how he moved, as if someone was physically killing him with their bare hands.

[Y]ou can’t be a part of that and walk out clean. The greatest evil of the death penalty is that it makes us all murderers.

#Slate #Jurisdiction #Justice #DeathPenalty
#Literature #1920s #Dreiser