Judge Tells Corrections Officers To ‘Suck It Up’ If They Can’t Handle An Endless Stream Of Executions

Legal Issues

from the inhumanity-is-what-I-want,-says-impartial-magistrate dept

We’ve long known no one cares what happens to people who are incarcerated.

The indifference flows through the so-called criminal justice system to the private sector to tons of voters who firmly believe the nation could be better served by stripping certain Americans of all their rights.

The fact that we jail more people than totalitarian nations is constantly ignored. We pretend prison is the best thing for errant people — something that offers them the chance to pay society for their misdeeds while giving them the bonus of bettering themselves through rehabilitation.

But nothing in the system lends itself to better outcomes. The criminal justice system ensures anyone merely charged with a crime — much less convicted of one — will carry that burden for years, if not the rest of their lives. People jailed for decades for non-violent crimes (mostly of the drug possession variety) can expect to return to society years behind the curve and saddled with a felony conviction that ensures only people willing to exploit others will have anything to do with them.

While behind bars, inmates are treated as less than human by the government at all levels. They’re also expected to routinely be victims of crimes that will never be prosecuted, ranging from theft to assault to rape. And that’s on top of whatever criminal acts are committed by those tasked with protecting them while they’re in the government’s custody.

They’re also at the mercy of entities both public and private. Sheriffs run most county jails with impunity, protected from accountability by layers of immunity and the election process itself. Sheriffs have shown themselves willing to starve inmates to enrich themselves when not just ignoring inmate-on-inmate crime or systemic abuse from jailers in their employ.

Private entities engage in further harm, subjecting an entirely captive audience to rapacious fees if prisoners desire outside contact. At first, it was just exorbitant per-minute fees for phone calls, a burden bore by loved ones who realized the importance of letting people in jail know someone on the outside cared about them.

Those fees — which are always shared with those housing inmates — made the most of the move to internet-based communications, adding even more extortionate fees to everything from texting to access to free streaming services. These fees further pad the payrolls of correctional facilities. But none of this windfall has ever been passed on to the people who actually pay these fees.

Decades of indifference — if not outright disdain — has accustomed us to the fact that the criminal justice system doesn’t care about anyone who can’t beat the rap and is forced to ride the ride.

But this is something else. This is a state judge declaring he doesn’t care about the people the state employs to staff jails and prisons. This a judge saying “fuck you” on top of “fuck those guys,” letting government employees in certain positions know they’re considered little better than the prisoners they watch over.

Here’s Austin Sarat with the details for Slate:

Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, and Steven Harpe, the director of the Department of Corrections, want to slow down the pace of their state’s upcoming executions, moving from a 60-day to a 90-day interval between each of them. They contend that doing so is necessary to deal with trauma to those who carry them out and to ensure that future executions will not be botched.

To reschedule the pending executions, the state needs permission from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, which, in 2021, had approved a plan to execute 25 death row inmates in less than three years. That plan would have cut the state’s death row population by more than half.

The state of Oklahoma would like inmates to shut up until it’s their time to be killed. The objections raised by the state AG had nothing to do with the fact that the state was killing inmates with alarming frequency. Instead, it was concerned the people who have to perform these killings might need a bit more time off between state-ordained killings.

The AG got the state’s Criminal Court of Appeals to give its executioners some more recovery time — an agreement that would have prevented executions from happening any more often than every 60 days.

However, it appeared the state’s hired killers needed more time off than this. The AG’s office asked for a 90-day recovery period between executions.

And that’s where the state ran head-on into one judge’s particular indifference towards everyone affected. That a former prosecutor-turned-judge wouldn’t be concerned that the state was executing people quickly is unsurprising. What’s alarming is that this judge made it clear he didn’t care about his fellow government employees — the ones tasked with all the killing.

During that hearing, Judge Gary Lumpkin, a former prosecutor who has been on the five-person court for more than 30 years, displayed a surprising callousness about the well-being of the correctional officials involved in the execution process. He said that they need to stop complaining, “suck it up,” and stick to the current execution schedule.

That’s the message being sent by Judge Lumpkin: if you don’t like the job of killing person after person at the behest of the state, you can pack your feelings up and GTFO.

[Judge Lumpkin] insisted that he would not buy into arguments about the traumatic effects of participating in executions, which he derisively labeled “sympathy stuff.”

He said that Drummond and Harpe needed to “man up.” “If you can’t do the job,” Lumpkin continued, “you should step aside and let somebody do it that can.”

Kill them or I’ll find somebody who will.

That’s pretty fucking harsh. And it shows Judge Lumpkin doesn’t think the people handling executions deserve any more empathy than those being executed. Sure, it’s harsh that people are getting killed because Oklahoma still believes firmly in the death penalty. Those performing the executions may not be dying, but they’ve got to live with what they’re doing. All they were asking for is just a little more downtime between killing in the name of. And this judge just told them to go fuck themselves.

Don’t kid yourselves, corrections officers. In Oklahoma, you’re little better than the misfits, outcasts, and abandoned property the government believes your inmates are. You’re as close to nobody as any government employee can get and if you can’t handle the job of government hatchet man, you’re of no use to Judge Lumpkin or the criminal justice system he represents.

Filed Under: executions, gary lumpkin, oklahoma, trauma