Jeb's Justice

The paragon of civilisation, the champion of freedom, the arbiter of justice and World Cop by the grace of God has done justice at last upon Clarence Edward Hill, who killed a policeman in 1982 and subsequently spent a little more than half his life on death row.

Doubtless it was as improving and salutary an experience as befits a Christian nation, particularly given that the state in which Hill was terminally corrected is Florida, which basks in the gubernatorial benevolence of Barbara Bush's boy Jeb. "The sentence when it's the death penalty is not completed until the execution takes place and so it's justice denied," pronounced little Jeb on dismissing Hill's appeal. It is to be hoped that, if little Jeb should inherit the family home on Pennsylvania Avenue, this conflation of law with justice might make him a bit more mindful than his brother of such legal niceties as the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution of the United States.

Justice was administered to Clarence Hill by strapping him to a gurney and giving him three separate drugs. Hill received an exclusive preview of the procedure eight months ago, when he was strapped to the gurney with needles in his veins and kept that way for an hour and three quarters until the Supreme Court decided to deny justice a bit longer by granting a stay of execution.

In twenty-seven of the fifty states, it is illegal to administer the three drugs to animals. The first causes loss of consciousness; the second causes paralysis, so that the various functionaries in attendance don't have to defend themselves against an unconscious man; and the third causes cardiac arrest. Last year, a study based on autopsies of executed prisoners discovered "levels of anaesthetic insufficient to produce unconsciousness", and opponents of justice by lethal injection claim that the anaesthetic does not ensure that the beneficiary is unconscious when the heart is stopped. "If the anaesthetic wears off by the time the final drug is administered it is equivalent to being burned alive from the inside out, with no ability to cry out for help," said Mark Elliott of Amnesty International.