The use of the death penalty in the United States will always be a divisive issue that provokes passionate debate. It is incomprehensible that executions can still occur in a country that professes to be a forward-thinking, tolerant ‘beacon of democracy’ and the controversies surrounding the execution methods are endless. How many innocent people have been wrongly executed? How many have faced the electric chair purely because of inadequate representation? How many sentences are influenced by the colour of a person’s skin? And now a botched execution in Oklahoma has raised new questions about this outdated form of punishment.

Convicted murderer Clayton Lockett, endured a slow and painful death after a lethal injection was administered last Tuesday. This is a procedure that usually takes around six minutes, but Lockett, despite being declared unconscious by the prison doctor, writhed around on the gurney for over forty minutes. The suffering only stopped when he finally had a massive heart attack. Witnesses claimed that Lockett was clearly conscious throughout the procedure and that it was akin to watching someone being tortured to death. Regardless of your opinion of capital punishment, death by what can only be described as ‘legitimate torture’ is surely entirely unacceptable in a country whose Bill of Rights protects its citizens against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’?

Nevertheless, death by injection is now standard procedure in the States, a fact that is becoming increasingly problematic. The root of the problem is actually the Europeans. No, they aren’t stealing American’s jobs, but what they are doing is creating a shortage of the drugs used in the lethal injections. We don’t agree on much in the European Union, but together, we are leading the fight against this cruel and out of date form of punishment. In an attempt to abolish capital punishment in the U.S, the EU has banned the export of all products used for execution and is proud to be the leading institutional actor in the fight against the death penalty.

However, whilst we sit smugly on our moral high ground, the ban has created a serious problem for correction centres in the States. The lack of imports has led to experimentation with new cocktails of drugs, despite the fact that they are causing slow and horrific deaths and violating the constitutional ban on cruel punishment. Clayton Lockett is just one of a long line of prisoners who have endured agonizing pain during this seemingly ‘humane’ procedure. There are numerous more occurrences from this year alone. Dennis McGuire, for instance, took 26 minutes to die, and Michael Lee Wilson’s last words were ‘my whole body is burning’. In fact, the whole concept of lethal injections is now so hotly disputed that many activists are calling for firing squads to be reintroduced as a more humane way of execution.

Of course, there are many supporters who would argue that the suffering of the inmates in no way equals the suffering they inflicted on their victims, and this is probably true. On the afternoon of Lockett’s death, two executions were meant to take place. Lockett had raped and murdered a teenage girl, and the second man, Charles Warner, whose execution has been delayed, raped and murdered an 11 month old baby. I am in no way disputing that these crimes were heinous and monstrous. These men have displayed the worst of humanity, and certainly deserved to be punished. I do however question the legitimacy of a state that plays with the life and death of its citizens, and in a manner that is becoming increasingly brutal.

Rape and murder still exist in the United States, and will continue to exist despite the existence of the death penalty. Support for capital punishment has mercifully been in decline over the past 20 years, however an estimated sixty percent of Americans still defend its existence. Over one thousand people have been executed in the U.S since 1976, but simply eliminating these people from society has not curbed high crime rates. Rather than attempting to reform a deterrence system that does not deter, the States needs to concentrate on the root causes of crime. If more time and funding went into tackling impoverishment, expanding mental health support systems, improving education and challenging racist and sexist values, there would be no need for this archaic form of legal murder.

Rebecca Gray