Executions
They are a dirty business. They extinguish the life of an offender and dehumanize the people who carry them out per orders of the state.
Missouri just executed its 89th person since death penalty was actually resumed with the January 1977 firing squad execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah following a 10-year notional moratorium on the ultimate punishment.
The state of Missouri tried Walter Barton five times before it managed to secure the sixth conviction that allowed the state on May 19 to kill him with a lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital. Even that sixth conviction could only pass constitutional muster with a narrow 4-3 vote by the Missouri Supreme Court.
Barton maintained from the moment of his arrest until the last moment of his life that he did not murder 81-year-old Gladys Kuehler at the Riverview Trailer Park in Ozark, Missouri on October 9, 1991.
That’s all this nation needed in the middle worst pandemic in modern history—the execution of an innocent man by a state that had seen 671 deaths from the Covid virus at the time of Barton’s execution.
Because the support for innocence was so great in the Barton case (as evidenced by his five trials, two of which resulted in hung juries, and the narrow 4-3 vote by the state’s supreme court upholding the sixth conviction), Missouri officials should have followed Texas’ lead by putting a hold on executions during the pandemic crisis.
But official decency was not in the cards for Walter Barton. He was dealing with state officials who apparently believe that executing a potentially innocent man is one of the state’s “essential services.”
I understand there is probably little social empathy for the callousness of Walter Barton’s execution at a time when the number of Covid deaths in this nation will pass 100,000 before this holiday weekend passes.
But, hopefully, in the midst of so much death and the soul-crippling grief it produces, some will understand not only the callousness of Walter Barton’s execution but the pale beyond which it places all our humanity.
God forgive us all if executing people in the middle of a pandemic is considered an “essential service.”