On the death penalty: Bring back the firing squad, the guillotine, and the gallows

If we're going to support a brutal policy, let's be honest about it

This week, the state of Oklahoma put a man named Clayton Lockett to death, after months of legal wrangling. As you may have heard, it did not go well. The fiasco may not change our fetish for state-sanctioned executions, but at the very least it should change our approach to capital punishment. No more injections that hide behind a screen of modern medicine — bring back the the firing squads, the gallows, and the guillotine.

Some background: European chemical manufacturers have stopped selling lethal injection drugs to the U.S., so Oklahoma came up with its own jerry-rigged cocktail. That sparked a long-running legal battle between Lockett and another prisoner and the state, which refused to disclose the source of its new drugs. It turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis last week, when the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a stay of execution so it could examine the legality of the state's secret injection law.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.