If Richard Glossip, convicted of arranging a murder in 1997, is executed in Oklahoma, I believe the United States will have handed an immense propaganda coup to its enemies—and this is so even if he were guilty of the crime of which he is accused, which he has always denied. The enemies will be able to say that the criminal justice system in America is an abomination, and the fact that the system of justice in the enemies’ own country is even worse would not be an adequate answer.
I have not myself studied the evidence against Mr. Glossip in detail, where the devil always resides, but some of those who have, and who are not ideologically driven, have done so and concluded that it is flawed and dubious. The attorney general of Oklahoma himself says that Mr. Glossip did not receive a fair trial, and while none of this is proof of his innocence, it would in the circumstances be an outrage to execute him.
It is already rather odd that the United States seems of late to be incapable of executing a man painlessly, expeditiously, and with certitude. Stories of condemned men waking up at their own executions by injection of supposedly lethal drugs are simultaneously absurd and horrifying, and they put me in mind of a ridiculous experience of my own.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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