Capital punishment cannot help but be monstrous
Published by marco on
This kind of thing happens with awful regularity in the U.S. the Florida executes man after US Supreme Court denies his intellectual disability claim by Kate Randall (WSWS) is about a guy who is very obviously intellectually disabled. He is not ready for the world as she is. He had the kind of life that no-one would want to have, not in a million years.
“Zack suffered a litany of horrors in his childhood. His lawyers wrote in a court filing that his mother drank heavily throughout her pregnancy. He was hospitalized at the age of three for drinking about 10 ounces of vodka. He endured extensive physical and sexual abuse from his stepfather, including forcing him to drink alcohol, injecting him with drugs, running over him with a car and creating devices to electrically shock him if he wet the bed. Zack’s older sister killed their mother with an ax.”
But it’s cool, because he’s apparently not considered to be intellectually disadvantaged enough to get protection under the law. An intelligence test invented by shysters in the 19th century that continues to be used today has decided that he’s 9 points too smart to be retarded enough to not be able to be killed. Score another big win for Florida, the state loved so hard by Republicans and Libertarians alike.
“The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes, “Unlike almost all other states, Florida rigidly required an IQ of 70 or below to demonstrate intellectual disability, with no allowance for the test’s margin of error.” Zack at one point scored 79 on an IQ (intelligence quotient) test. IQ tests have been demonstrated to be inaccurate in measuring intelligence.”
The average IQ is 100. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of discussing anything more complex than whether you want your receipt with someone with an IQ of 100, then you should really brace yourself for what a conversation with a person who scores 79 would be like. This isn’t to say that the IQ test is accurate necessarily, but that it will give you a ballpark idea of what that person is going to be capable of. Zack’s statement, quoted in the article, seems literate enough—eloquent even—but I imagine that he had quite a bit of help with it.
Ron DeSantis is happily signing death warrants for severely mentally challenged individuals. Bill Clinton also happily signed death warrants for the same, so maybe DeSantis is hoping to follow his example into the White House.
Read about Ricky Ray Rector (Wikipedia), who’d done terrible things, but who’d effectively lobotomized himself in a botched suicide attempt. There was no need to imprison the guy, to say nothing of executing him. He needed a different kind of care.
The man that Rector had become after his suicide attempt was on the mental level of a dumb child. Rector had no idea what was going on. He might as well have been Old Yeller. According to the Wikipedia link above,
“For his last meal, Rector requested and received a steak, fried chicken, cherry Kool-Aid, and pecan pie. As noted above, Rector left the pie on the side of the tray, telling the corrections officers who came to take him to the execution chamber that he was “saving it for later.””
Clinton took time off of the campaign trail to go watch him die.