I just got back from seeing our client, Brandyn Benjamin ("BJ") on death row in Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama.  It is always a chilling experience, seeing the hulking concrete buildings with the guard towers and concertina wire, dealing with the guards and the prison officials, listening to the stories about what goes on back on "The Row."

As I was driving to the prison I heard on the radio all the discussions about ISIS, and what needs to be done to deal with a group whose attitudes and behaviors can easily and accurately be described as barbaric.  The whole notion of beheading someone, and doing it on video to broadcast to the world, is stomach-turning to say the least.

But I got to wondering what the world would think of us if we publicized what we do in places like Holman.  Would it be better or worse-- more or less stomach-turning-- to see what ISIS does or to see someone strapped to a gurney who is injected with poison and left to struggle for his life for 20, 30 or 40 minutes before finally dying?  Both are unimaginably horrible but I wonder if the slow process we have recently used to achieve lethal injection isn't somehow even worse that what ISIS does.

I know we tell ourselves that we're different because we arrived at the sentance of death through a legal process, although I have little doubt that the ISIS folks say the same thing.  And I understand that there are people in this world who do horrible things-- and can be expected to continue to do horrible things-- and we have the right to protect ourselves from them. But no one has escaped from death row in Alabama and, having seen the prison and the security, I doubt that anyone ever will.  Here in this country we can't justify the death penalty as a necessary exercise in self-defense.

Try this thought experiment:  imagine that ISIS broadcast not a beheading but an American-style lethal injection, complete with the agonizing half-hour of suffering, and you had to watch it.  What level of revulsion would you feel, and what does that tell you about our current use of the death penalty?