oo7

Cruel and Unusual

Clarence Hill, an inmate on death row in Florida, was scheduled to die last night. Apparently he received a reprieve of at least half a day while the US Supreme Court considers three appeals that Hill's attorneys had filed. According to CNN:

"In one of his appeals, Hill asked for a delay to give him time to contest the chemicals that will be used. ...
"Hill's lawyers argue that the three chemicals used in Florida's lethal injection method of execution cause pain, making his execution cruel and unusual punishment." (See the article here)

Now I'm not even going to go into the apparent assertion that Mr. Hill is mentally retarded. I'd simply like to address the idea that killing Mr. Hill by a certain method could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. I'm not sure there would be much debate about this, but the US Supreme Court seems to acknowledge that there are more cruel punishments than death. For example, if Mr. Hill's guards beat him while he was waiting to be executed, he would have a slam-dunk case for an 8th Amendment violation (cruel & unusual punishment). Hell, even if he was refused medical treatment he would have such a claim. That simple fact got me thinking about something else.

Now, I think that state-sanctioned murder is still murder and therefore wrong, but Mr. Hill's situation brought to mind another situation of people approaching death. The people of Oregon have passed assisted suicide laws. These laws allow terminally ill patients who are in extreme pain to have the assistance of a doctor to end their lives on their own terms. The federal government is fighting this in a big way and thanks to a recent court decision, it looks like they will probably be able to override Oregon's law and prosecute any doctors who help these terminally ill people end their lives. The people that this law concerns would gladly trade places with Mr. Hill in an instant just to try and escape the cruel and unusual lives that they must endure.

So my question is how do we square the two situations? Personally, I see no way to do it on moral grounds (I'm not going to start talking about constitutional law). We give death to criminals who don't want it and are even concerned with the manner in which we kill them. Yet when a righteous individual seeks to make the most personal of all decisions and end their own life to escape a cruel and unusual fate, we won't allow it. Why? My only guess is that people put down their own personal moral compass and pick up a Bible and misapply verse after verse. But maybe someone can give me a logical explanation for why this situation makes sense.