According to Kathy Walt of the Houston Chronicle, Karla Faye Tucker died "peacefully". We need to envisage exactly what this means. By the time the lethal chemicals stopped Karla's heart at 6.45 p.m. local time last Tuesday, she had been lying, arms akimbo, staring at the ceiling, for more than 30 minutes. Eight thick, leather straps bound her to the execution gurney. She could barely move a muscle. As she lay there, she had to listen while officials checked by telephone there were no unexpected stays of execution. Then she had to try to relax while a paramedic flicked the skin of her arms to bring the veins to the surface. Finally, he inserted two wide-gauge needles and hooked them up to plastic tubes.
Tucker did not weep or struggle. The 15 years she had spent on Texas's death row since being convicted of a double murder had brought her the solace of religious faith. She believed she was going to meet Jesus. But I do not find it easy to understand how the killing of human beings in this fashion can ever be described as "peaceful", even if, as Walt's report claimed, Tucker merely "gasped twice and let out a groan" as the poison entered her bloodstream.
Still, it could have been worse. In Louisiana last year, I interviewed the very shaken warden of the state penitentiary, Burl Cain. He had just killed another born-again Christian, Antonio James. Unlike Tucker, James was fat. After 20 minutes searching, the orderly had failed to find a vein. Finally, Cain had to ask his bound prisoner to make a fist, to facilitate his own demise. "What," Cain asked me, "would I have done if he'd refused?"
The replacement, in many American states, of the grisly barbarities of the electric chair by lethal injection helps to explain a curious paradox: that the self-appointed arbiter of world human rights is now executing more prisoners - 37 last year in Texas alone - than at any time since the early years of the century. The pseudo-medical rituals of lethal injections have sanitised killing, and made it seem acceptable.
In their wake, the politicians who capitalise on capital punishment use the language not of vengeance but of psycho-therapy: the death of a murderer, it is claimed, enables the relatives of his victim to achieve "closure". Meanwhile, according to Texas Governor George Bush, who rejected Karla Faye's appeal for clemency, her killing advanced the cause of gender equality, notwithstanding the attempted intercession of the Pope.
In every other advanced democracy, capital punishment has ceased. Every international code of human rights begins with the same article: the right to life. But in the United States, the pace of executions is increasing relentlessly. Intensely politicised, the American way of killing has institutionalised injustice. The execution of an innocent is not something which occurs occasionally by accident, but has become an inherent, inevitable part of the system. Recognisable standards of legal "due process" - a concept invented by the US constitution - have been cast aside.
It is not commonly realised how loaded the dice have become against people accused of capital crimes - murders with so-called "aggravated factors" such as a sexual element. (Karla Faye Tucker was sentenced to death because she claimed to have experienced an orgasm as she plunged an axe into one of her victim's chest.)
There is no legal aid in America. In most of the 38 states which allow the death penalty, the trial judge (who will be elected, and depend for office, on his record of being tough on crime) and the prosecuting district attorney (who will be elected too) get together to appoint a lawyer for the defence. Often, their choice turns out to be someone with little or no experience of dealing with criminal law.
Sometimes, a black man on trial for his life will find himself defended by a racist. The transcript of the trial of the late Wiley Dobbs, electrocuted in Georgia, reveals his lawyer described him to the jury as a "li'l' ol' nigger". In some states, there is a rigid ceiling on defence funding. In Alabama, for example, the defence attorney in a capital trial must cover all costs and expenses with $1,000.
International human rights lawyers have developed an important principle to assess the fairness of a criminal process: the "equality of arms" between prosecution and defence. I asked Georgia's attorney general, Michael Bowers, who fought death penalty appeals for the prosecution for 16 years, how the system he worked in could be said to permit equality of arms. He snorted derisively: "Listen, if we had equality of arms, half of these critters would never be convicted".
Death row appeals take a long time: the system has many layers, and thus the appearance of providing meticulous scrutiny. In case after case, Governor Bush of Texas has cited this "foolproof" process to justify refusing clemency. In practice, however, each successive courtroom tier tends merely to rubber-stamp the decision of the layer beneath. Little by little, state legislatures, the US Congress and the judges of the Supreme Court have been changing the law and shutting off previously fruitful avenues of appeal. For most death row prisoners, justice now resembles not so much a lottery as a closing steel trap.
In Texas, for example, the state legislature has passed an act stating that if a death row prisoner wishes to adduce new evidence to support a claim of innocence, this must be filed within 30 days of the end of the original trial. Otherwise, no matter how strong the evidence, it will be inadmissible. One victim of this law was David Spence, a harmless former hippy convicted of killing three teenagers, who was executed last year. In his case, the courts were deaf to the fact that the policeman who led the original investigation was now convinced of his innocence. There was a mass of overwhelming evidence which the judges refused to hear.
In Britain, the convictions in the Guilford Four, Birmingham Six and Judith Ward cases were all quashed after it emerged that the prosecution had concealed important evidence of their innocence at their trials. In November 1996, Wayne Felker, convicted of killing a waitress, died in Georgia's electric chair. Three months before his death, the prosecution admitted what his lawyers had long suspected: that there was a mass of evidence, filling six large crates, which his trial jury never heard. It included a confession from another suspect, and skin samples of the victim's attacker taken from beneath her finger-nails. They had never been tested for DNA. Felker was killed after failing to persuade the judges to stay his execution until this evidence had been properly tested and examined and put before a court. One of the most common successful grounds of appeal, which saw hundreds of death sentences quashed or commuted to life, used to be "ineffective assistance of counsel": that an inmate was deprived of a fair trial by the poor quality of his own representation. In 1993, the US Supreme Court closed this avenue down. Henceforth, it would not be enough to show the defence was inadequate. The prisoner had to achieve the impossibility of proving beyond doubt that if he had been well represented, the jury would have acquitted him.
One who fell foul of this decision is Calvin Burdine, now on death row in Texas. The appeal courts have accepted that his lawyer spent most of his trial asleep. Nevertheless, he will almost certainly be put to death this year.
However, if injustice has become institutionalised, America does not care.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that capital punishment is highly discriminatory: black killers, especially of white victims, are up to nine times more likely to be sentenced to death. In 1972, it was evidence of racial discrepancy which led the US Supreme Court to issue a four-year moratorium on executions, until the death penalty states had enacted new statutes designed to make the system equal and fair. The evidence of racism is now just as strong and the judges have accepted its validity. But in a dismal reversal of their predecessors' position, they have decided that "some element" of discrimination is inevitable in all human affairs, and that the killing may thus go on.
Yet it is somehow not enough to demonstrate how flagrantly the US violates the principles of human rights, and the notions of due process and "equal protection under the laws" which its constitution supposedly guarantees. We need to ask why this is so: what does the American death penalty mean. Why is it being embraced with such fervour and enthusiasm? What explains the paradox that Texas - where a huge majority supports the banning of abortions - is so keen on life for unborn children, but so keen on death for criminals?
At one level, the death penalty is the capstone, the pinnacle of a vast and burgeoning industry. Since 1980, the US prison population has roughly quintrupled, to the point where America incarcarates about six times as many people proportionate to its population, as its nearest western rival, Britain. This has created what criminologists have dubbed a "penal industrial complex", a privatised lobby group which wields immense political power, and its interest is the passing of ever-harsher laws and the building of ever more prisons. Punishment now has a macro-economic function: if the US returned to 1980 levels of imprisonment, its present, enviable 7 per cent unemployment rate would arise toabout 11 per cent. Prisons have become warehouses for the (mostly black) underclass, the coercive tangible means of social exclusion.
The death penalty's role in this is both symbolic and functional. On the one hand, the threat of execution makes life without parole seem not so bad. Its terror normalises America's carceral society. But at the same time, its availability to prosecutors induced defendants to bargain with their lives: to plead guilty to first or second degree murder in exchange for continued existence, even in cases where the evidence may be weak. Yet I suspect that American capital punishment is the manifestation of more profound forces as well. It was Max Weber who first had the insight that when the Normans threw Saxons from the battlements of their castles, this was a sign of weakness and fear, not of strength. Or as the French historian, Michel Foucault, put it in relation to the gruesome public tortures and punishments used by the fading monarchy of pre-revolutionary France: "We must regard the public execution as a political operation. It did not establish justice, it reactivated power." The vital thing, he added, was that in order for the execution to reassert the power of the state, it had to be witnessed: "Not only must the people know, they must see with their own eyes".
Executions aren't public in America, nor (yet) are they televised. But they are witnessed by reporters, with enormous coverage given to a killing such as that of Karla Faye Tucker. Through the media, the American people have become virtual witnesses of electrocution and lethal injection: and by affirming their validity, they reaffirm the power of their own society and state.
The US is at the very zenith of its global power. But here at its apogee it is rotting from within: one-seventh of its people live below the poverty line: racial divisions have never been so intense; and the legitimacy of the federal state is in jeopardy, with great swathes of the country sharing the opinions - if not approving the methods - of the Oklahoma bombers. It is a society, in other words, which appears to be losing its sense of purpose. Sovereign power is becoming dilute, disparate, challenged. The death penalty, frequently enacted, is an attempt to rekindle confidence, consent, belief. In The Hanging Tree, his study of capital punishment in Victorian England, the historian Victor Gatrell comments that in the late 19th century, the abolition of public hanging and the end made to the routine execution of petty thieves seemed preordained, part of the march of progress. But after Auschwitz and Bosnia, he goes on, "we know what a fragile construct civility is. Humane feelings prevail when their costs in terms of security or comfort are bearable; when they can be productively acted upon; when they bring emotional and status returns to the humane. Culturally dominant groups deplore brutality when the state's authority or their own is strong enough to obviate the need for its outward display".
In contemporary America the processes which "civilised" Victorian England have gone into reverse. Its elites believe they need state violence to survive. The state murder of Karla Faye Tucker is an event of wider significance.
David Rose is a freelance journalist, formerly with the Guardian and the Observer, who has conducted extensive research of the death penalty in the US. He is currently the reporter for the BBC 2 television series on the police in Britain called The Force.