Death Row show in Ohio

Being the only western democracy in the world gassing, electrocuting or lethally injecting convicted prisoners, the United States is facing an uphill struggle to maintain this form of justice. Partly this is due to growing revulsion by Americans themselves, but also because the various states that implement such a policy appear ever more cackhanded in carrying it out.

Ohio has just had the most horrendous experience in trying to put a prisoner to death. Two hours it took for doctors to try to find what is euphemistically called a healthy vein. Can you imagine it? The warden pacing up and down, the doctors beginning to sweat, and the prisoners's heart pumping blood for all it was worth. Now I know this sort of treatment pleases the neocons and the bible-bashing brigade. They love the old eye-for-an-eye stuff. Makes them feel better. They are the same tumbrille types that draw pictures of Obama with a Hitler moustache. They are not about to decry a death row inmate getting two hours of pre-death vein searching. No way.

It puzzles me. The Third Reich had no problems finding veins. Now they were the real Nazis. Yet the treatment meted out in Ohio to Romell Broom is not even what one would expect for stray dogs. Are we so desensitised to human life that some humans get to become less than human. How long did those peering through the glass window as witnesses stay? The full two hours? As this guy's lawyers say, it is inhumane. Who can claim to be able to label Obama a nazi?

Broom may be what Lindi St Clair calls "rubbish people". He is a convicted rapist and murderer. We are not told what sort of character he is now. He has been in jail on Death Row for 25 years! In Britain, assuming he had been reformed, he would at least be up for parole. I'm not in the business of namby-pamby sentencing, but neither am I a supporter of this kind of death sentencing. It has no merit as a deterrent and it is totally un-Christian in its administration. The Department of Corrections appear to correct very few.

As a Conservative I want to conserve that which is worth conserving for everyone's benefit. Only the ranters and ravers purporting to be conservatives seem totally at ease with this punishment.