Way to go, Tennessee:
On Thursday, Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Haslam, signed into law a bill that allows for electrocution if the drugs for lethal injection are not available. The governor has not elaborated on his reasoning. But his spokesman, David Smith, said in an email that the bill had passed overwhelmingly in the Tennessee General Assembly, with the legislature feeling strongly “that the state should have an alternative option if lethal injection was not available.”
Electricity, by contrast, is never in short supply.
Tennessee’s decision is breathtakingly regressive, according to Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and a national expert on capital punishment. States have historically gone to new methods of execution, she said, from hanging to electrocution, to lethal gas, to lethal injection.
“But they’re going backwards,” Ms. Denno said of Tennessee. “They’re going back to using a method of execution that was basically rejected because it was so problematic. That’s never happened before.”
“But they’re going backwards” pretty much describes every single Republican policy and social position. And why is killing people such a priority for Republicans?
It’s Almost As If It’s a Metaphor for the Entire GOPPost + Comments (88)