Dead End

Dominus vobiscum.

The Lord be with you.

And then, the blood dripping onto your shoes.

* * *

Hanging. People used to like hanging.

It worked pretty well. (See: Hussein, Saddam -- the hanging, not the chaos and hooting.) It asphyxiated, it snapped spinal cords. A big hit for centuries the world over. It clearly was less sadistic than disembowelment, the crucifix, the pyre, the garrote.

It didn't require much -- knotted rope, height -- and was rich in symbolism. Hangman. Gallows. Noose.

But hanging was so easy that lynch mobs used it, which led to nasty image problems, and it wasn't all that painless or quick, unless you knew how to calculate prisoner weight, length of fall, pressure required to break the neck. People tended to squirm up there on the rope, which made people squirm down there on the ground.

So, about 140 years ago, Americans turned to their new god of Science for even better ways to kill the condemned. Anesthesia was in its infancy, and this would have a profound change on human existence and its termination -- pain was no longer inevitable. It could be avoided and, in terms of executions, people came to feel it should be.

Now, according to the Associated Press, at least 19 of the country's 38 death-penalty states offer sedatives and anti-anxiety drugs to condemned inmates before execution, almost as if they're putting the family's golden retriever to sleep.

"A great deal of effort goes into preparing the condemned felon mentally for what he's about to face," says Edwin Voorhies, warden at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. "Our goal is to get them to walk peacefully into that chamber."

This anesthetic concept introduced the fundamental American paradox of execution that continues to this day: It is constitutional to execute condemned criminals. It is not constitutional to hurt them while you do it.