Another face of the horrid absurdity of murdering people to show that murdering people is wrong. I can no longer view capital punishment as even attempting to be a rational policy, it's nothing but a human sacrifice ritual meant to appease a twisted deity of justice.
The Death Row Torture Of Warren Hill | The Nation
It is not uncommon for prisoners on death row to face multiple execution dates and last-minute stays as attorneys try to keep them alive. Some might consider Hill lucky for surviving so many execution dates. But human rights experts believe that repeated trips to the death chamber, followed by last-minute reprieves, amount to psychological torture. Although the death penalty has long been upheld despite the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” Brian Evans, head of Amnesty International USA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign, compares the psychological impact of an eleventh-hour stay of execution to a mock execution, in which someone is falsely led to believe he or she is about to be killed. “Mock executions are a form of torture under international law,” Evans told The Nation. “A last-minute stay isn’t quite as deliberate, but for the person on the gurney it’s the same effect.”
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According to Kammer, Hill’s mental limitations make the uncertainty of his fate even more difficult to bear because “he has fewer coping skills to handle the stress of being taken out of [a] regular cell and put into a death watch cell.” Then there’s “the anticipation of being killed. That’s hard for anyone to handle. It’s even more cruel for someone who’s mentally disabled.”