When Punishment Doesn't Fit the Crime, It's Probably a Lethal Injection

© David Hartman

     Jimmie Ray Slaughter was the babydaddy.

     But Jimmie didn't want to have to pay child support for his mistake, and when Melody Sue Wuertz -- the child's mother -- threatened to sue for child support, Slaughter visited Melody and baby Jessica Rae at their Edmond, Oklahoma residence.

     He shot Melody in the neck to incapacitate her. It was a trick he'd learned in the military. It would keep her alive and conscious, so she could watch. And know. Then he went to baby Jessica, just days short of her first birthday, and shot his daughter in the back of her head -- execution style -- while her paralyzed mother watched.

     Having dispensed of the main problem, he returned to Melody, still very much alive, and filleted her like a fish, cutting her open from the neck all the way down until finally she bled to death on the floor.

     Katherine Ann Busch was born with some mental challenges, and when the seven-year-old rode her bicycle past the Yukon, Oklahoma apartment where she and her mother used to live, the girl got off her bike and knocked on the door. Floyd Medlock was alone inside the apartment watching cartoons at the time.

     Medlock invited the girl inside the apartment and fed her some macaroni and cheese. Then he "snapped," he later told police. Or at least one of his personalities did. So Floyd choked Katherine, stabbed her in the back of the neck with a steak knife, and held her head underwater in the toilet until she was dead. Then he stripped her, raped her corpse and tossed it in a nearby dumpster.

     Michael Long had a love jones for single mother co-worker Sheryl Graber. She wasn't interested in him. Not that way. After several attempts to talk Graber into bed, Long decided to give her one more chance.

     So he went to the apartment where Graber lived with her five-year-old son, Andrew. When she refused to put out on her last chance, Long took a knife from his coat and stabbed Sheryl more than 30 times in the doorway of the apartment. Trying to help his mother, Andrew got between her and Long. He too was stabbed to death in what former Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson called the bloodiest crime scene he'd ever visited.

     For their crimes, Jimmie Ray Slaughter, Floyd Medlock and Michael Long were executed by the State of Oklahoma using lethal injection.

     I watched all three die. Their deaths were so quick and sterile that frankly, I have a hard time even remembering details, especially of Medlock and Long. Slaughter's execution was several years later, so it's a bit fresher in my mind.

     Before you witness an execution, either as a family member, an attorney or a reporter, prison officials tell you that people will handle the experience differently. Some will have nightmares or flashbacks that might even require counseling later. I never had either.

     One day I'll completely forget what Slaughter looked like strapped to the gurney in the death chamber, too. But in preparing to cover his execution, I reviewed the entire court file from his criminal trial, including dozens of crime scene photos. So far I haven't found a way to forget the photo of Melody Wuertz lying naked and bloody -- and very dead -- on her living room floor not far from her dead little girl.

     Given that background, maybe you can understand why I'm confused and sadly amused at the latest fuss over how inmates are executed by lethal injections.

     The first of the three drugs in the cocktail of death traditionally has been sodium thiopental, which puts the condemned to sleep painlessly before the drugs that paralyze the voluntary muscles and stop the heart are administered to complete the execution process.

     But sodium thiopental is only produced by one company, and that pharmaceutical company plans to stop making the drug, which now is in short supply.

     So states like Texas -- where executions are as common as days that end in "y" -- now have to find a new drug to put inmates to sleep. The drug of new choice seems to be pentobarbital, which I'm told is the drug used by vets to put down dogs and cats.

     Inmates already are suing over the new drug, questioning the process of how it was selected to replace sodium thiopental and whether it produces as painless a death as the old drug.

     This blog post isn't pro or anti death penalty. My own views on the issue tend to waffle, based largely on the testament I'm reading from at the time.

     I just find it odd that inmates are being allowed to get their state-issued knickers in a knot over which drug we use to kill them. Maybe they'd prefer a Louisville Slugger to the noggin instead.

     I wonder if Katherine Busch would have quibbled over going to sleep with sodium thiopental versus pentobarbital for her own death as opposed to say, being stabbed in the neck and drowned in toilet water? Would Melody Wuertz have preferred lethal injection to being shot in the neck and incised chin to pelvis?

     Sometimes it seems we just don't get it. Since when does the criminal get to choose his punishment? 

     As a society, we have to come to grips with why we execute killers. Is it to serve justice and act as a deterrent, or is it simply vengeance for the sake of vengeance?
     If we're going to claim the death penalty is a deterrent, then make it a deterrent. Don't make it sterile. And televise every execution. Make it mandatory viewing for every high schooler in America. Let them see that regardless of what Hollywood and their violent video games portray, human life really does matter. It's not a game. I'm not sure that's a message we send with the current method.

     Regardless, we don't need these frivolous lawsuits bogging down the legal system for other cases that actually are important. We don't need the tax bill of having to defend against them.

     If pentobarbital is good enough to kill a dog, it's good enough for Jimmie Ray Slaughter.