In the BBC Horizon documentary How to Kill a Human Being former politician Michael Portillo investigates the current methods of execution used by countries that carry out capital punishment concentrating on those used in the United States
Prompted by the American Supreme Court’s examination of whether the lethal injection is causing prisoners to die in unnecessary pain Michael Portillo set out to find a solution which is fundamentally humane.
I was suspicious of his motives throughout this documentary as he started by explaining his changing views on the death penalty and how he had been in his political career initially in favour but then as more and more miscarriages of justice came to light in the UK he altered his stance and voted against it’s reintroduction in Britain. If it was the case that he was opposed now why is he investigating methods so as to find the most humane?
But as the programme went on and Portillo discovered that each and every method was deeply flawed I began to think that perhaps he was not in fact doing what he’d stated but had in fact set out with the purpose of failing so as to create a credible argument in opposition to capital punishment. Throughout he is exclaiming that “it’s the 21st century surely science can come up with the perfect way to kill a human being!” And of course he is correct and it’s hypoxia, the restriction of oxygen, and which is one of the primary methods used to humanely kill animals used in medical research.
He then visits a couple of facilities in Holland that have been designed to measure the effects of oxygen depletion through extreme G forces or through extreme altitude so that he can experience it for himself to the point shortly before loss of consciousness and death. Discovering that it is completely painless and far from being stressful is actually euphoric Michael Portillo now thinks he has the answer but needs a more practical method of administering it. He turns to Dr Mohan Raj of Bristol University who has been researching more humane methods for use in slaughterhouses and who has developed the very simple system of using inert gases such as Nitrogen, which are non-toxic and tasteless and the subject is completely unaware of the gases presence.
Now armed with his ‘perfect’ method of how to kill a human being Portillo returns to the United States to put his findings to the pro-death penalty side of the debate to gauge their reactions and he doesn’t get the reaction he was hoping for.
Oddly he only seems to have a discussion with a single person and that is Professor Robert Blecker of the New York School of Law who as a known retributivist advocate of the death penalty surely can not be representative of the views of most Americans who are in favour of capital punishment.
Robert Blecker is very much in favour of the method of executing criminals being horrific and painful (despite the US constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment) and is appalled by Michael Portillo’s perfect method.
I would think that the majority of those who are in favour would also respect the US constitution and believe if the state is to kill people that it should not come down to the level of those it is executing but do it in a humane manner. In a way I’ll be glad if Portillo’s perfect method doesn’t gain traction for the longer the debate rages in the US about their current methods being cruel and unusual the more likely it is that it will abandon the death penalty entirely.
Plus we have to return to the point that Michael Portillo made right at the start and that is with the dozens of miscarriages of justice coming to light and the investigations that have revealed a number of people have been wrongly convicted and subsequently executed in the US how can capital punishment be justified when it is likely to be used again on the wrongly convicted. I’m left confused as to what Portillo’s current position really is.