When does it become a charade?

A few days ago a death row inmate was executed in another state. Apparently the prisoner’s death by injection lingered as long as twenty minutes as the he struggled for his breath. A few months prior to this a court informed the State of Montana that it would need to change its methods of execution because the lethal injection process it was using was apparently prolonging death and was deemed to violate federal and state constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. In response, the State then changed its protocol of lethal injection to correct this. Now the Montana office of the ACLU is calling to question the new procedures selected by the state as being too similar to the execution of a few days ago and for being otherwise untested. Within the talk of all of this there is protracted debate regarding three drug versus two drug cocktail injections and the efficacy of each.

This entire conversation should seem fairly bizarre to anyone listening to it. We are talking here about methods of killing another human being with the presumption that we find this act of killing to be acceptable. And yet the one thing that comes across loud and clear to me is that there is no consensus about why we are killing this person in the first place. I use the term we because whenever the talk is about government policy it is a discussion about that which represents us. Whether you and I like it or not, we are killing prisoners. Should we be? That should be the question for discussion and not how we should be going about it.

We, as Christians, are seekers of justice. When we witness injustice, we have the right and the obligation, as a society, to correct, as best we can, the injustice. We therefore have laws, codes of conduct, that we enforce to guide and support just behavior and to correct and inhibit unjust behavior. When an individual is found to have breached our code of conduct we exert our authority and impose our will over him so that the injustice he has committed may be corrected and perhaps prevented from recurring.

Why, as Christians, do we do this? First of all because we are called to love ourselves, as we are made in the image and likeness of our Creator. We seek justice for ourselves as well as for our neighbors for the reason that our Lord calls us to treat all others as we, ourselves, would want to be treated; with love which informs justice. Therefore the justice that we seek must have as its source, love, and serve both the wronged and the wrongdoer.

It should seem absurd therefore to be discussing humane methods of killing someone who is our prisoner, out of love. In fact, love is absent from any discussion in which revenge has primacy. And this is finally what we need consider; is revenge ours to have?