Where Was the Supreme Court’s
Compassion for Terri Schiavo?

Commentary by Cynthia Davis

We are now one U.S. Supreme Court Justice away from abolishing the death penalty in America.

On May 18, 2005, I went to the Eastern Reception and Diagnostic Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri as a State’s witness for the execution of Vernon Brown, a man who had been convicted of murdering two people and a suspect in a third murder among many other offenses. Just minutes before midnight we were surprised to learn that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had issued a temporary stay of execution.

As it turned out, the nine Supreme Court Justices had been in session debating whether or not it would cause Brown any pain to have a lethal injection. They were concerned over the possibility that the first injection may not really put him in a state of unconsciousness but rather just put him into a state where he could not communicate.  

The primary question centered around whether Brown would feel any pain in the seconds between when the sodium pentothal put him to sleep and when the other two drugs caused him to stop breathing and stopped his heart. What if he really did experience a sensation of pain but, because he was paralyzed, he was incapable of expressing it?  People who are in minimally conscious conditions can feel many sensations; they’re just unable to communicate.

The four justices who opposed the execution (known for their liberal, ‘progressive’ decisions) were Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter. In justifying their opposition they cited an opinion by Judge Kermit Bye of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in St. Louis. Bye, in his opinion, had relied on an article that had appeared last month in The Lancet Medical Journal which questioned the pain caused by the chemical combination generally used in lethal injections. “No one will be able to tell whether Brown is conscious and therefore experiencing gratuitous pain because his entire body will be paralyzed so that he cannot express himself in any way,” Bye stated.

For me, it was simply unfathomable that the U.S. Supreme Court was in session wrestling with the ideas of whether or not someone would feel pain while they were being executed and whether or not they would be able to let their executioners know they were feeling any pain!

My mind screamed out, “Where was their concern and compassion when Terri Schiavo was being starved and dehydrated to death? They refused to even hear her case while she consciously suffered a slow, agonizing, and excruciatingly painful death! Did they even bother to consider the anguish, pain and suffering Vernon Brown had put his victims through before they died?”

Vernon Brown was legally tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death for committing two heinous murders. Terri Schiavo was an innocent, incapacitated, consciously alive woman who did not deserve to be put to death. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, found it necessary to debate until 3:10 in the morning on May 19 whether or not death by lethal injection might be a cruel and unusual form of punishment, when just a few months prior they didn’t even blink an eye over whether or not it was cruel to starve and dehydrate Terri Schiavo to death! The fact of the matter is they refused to intervene in Terri’s case not once, not twice, but a total of six times!

In the end, Vernon Brown received his just reward for the crimes he committed.

The final Court decision was split 5 to 4.  Had one Justice voted differently, the U.S. Supreme Court would have ruled out lethal injection as a constitutional form of punishment on the grounds that it was cruel and unusual.

The concern over whether those who cannot communicate can feel pain will be debated for a long time to come. Regardless of what you think about the death penalty, the principle behind what we are doing to people and how we choose to make those decisions is at the core of our society. We deserve consistency in the judicial branch of our government and we’re not getting it.

Cynthia Davis is a Missouri State Representative representing District 19 and resides in O’Fallon, MO. She is also the owner of Back-to-Basics Christian Bookstore in O’Fallon.