A man named Frank Atwood will die in Arizona on Wednesday. The state will execute him for kidnapping, raping, and killing a Tuscon girl in 1984. He maintains that he did not commit the crime but was denied clemency last month.
In Arizona, inmates can choose how they want to be killed. Although Atwood is not using it, one of those options is a brutal method used by Nazis on Jews in Auschwitz during the Holocaust: hydrogen cyanide. You may know it by what the Nazis called it: Zyklon B. Although the state outlawed the gas in 1992, it can still be used to execute people sentenced before then.
Zyklon B is an awful way to kill someone and is one that the United States should never use. It’s a cyanide-based pesticide and an extremely inefficient way to kill people that is meant to maximize suffering.
It costs more than $2,000 for the state to purchase the ingredients necessary for hydrogen cyanide, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. The last time the state used it to kill someone was in 1999. In that case, the death row inmate reportedly suffered “agonizing choking and gagging,” according to an eyewitness account of the execution. It took 18 minutes for him to die.
The International Auschwitz Committee has condemned the practice, as has Austria, where the Nazis set up several concentration camps during the Holocaust.
The use of Zyklon B in executions, even if rare, also highlights the problems with capital punishment that show why state governments and the U.S. should abolish the practice.
The government executes some terrible people via the death penalty, but it also kills innocent people, and no way exists to correct that mistake. If the state wrongly incarcerates an innocent person for 20 years, as horrible as that is, at least they can leave prison and receive compensation for that wrongdoing. However, if evidence emerges that someone is innocent after the state executes them, they don’t get their earthly life back.
About 4.1% of death row inmates are innocent, according to a 2014 study from the National Academy of Sciences. Although that’s a small number, even taking one innocent life is too many. Back in 2019, there were 737 inmates on death row in California. Statistically, about 29 or 30 of them could be innocent. So what if a state uses a brutal killing method such as Zyklon B to execute an innocent person because the court system got it wrong?
Two pragmatic reasons exist to oppose capital punishment even if you don’t morally oppose it.
Spending is one problem. People have the right to a trial by jury in this country, and people are innocent until proven guilty. Capital punishment cases use more public resources than sending someone convicted of committing an evil act to life in prison. A 2014 study from the University of Seattle found that a death penalty case costs $1.15 million more per case. Capital punishment isn’t just a matter of buying a few bullets after all.
And capital punishment doesn’t deter crime. A 2012 report released by the National Research Council examining more than three decades of crime data found that there is “no useful evidence” that the death penalty deters crime. Do you know what might prevent crime? Locking rapists and pedophiles up for life so they can never get out and re-offend.
If Arizona won’t give up capital punishment, though, it should at least completely abolish its most brutal method.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
